Ch. 8: Key People- Language and Thought

Proposed that children learn language through the established principles of learning.

Argues that human language ability is a species-specific trait resulting from natural selection

Won the Nobel Prize for his research on decision making and artificial intelligence.

Research showed that people often employ fast and frugal heuristics yielding effective results

Proposed children learn language through a biologically built-in language acquisition device

Advocate of linguistic relativity, one's language determines nature of one's thoughts.

Taught the chimp, Kanzi, to communicate that made use of all basic properties of language

People base probability estimates on heuristics that don't always yield estimates of success

Married couple that argues that the human mind has evolved to solve specific adaptive problems