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Chapter Summary
This chapter focuses on the cognitive aspects of language. Psycholinguistics is the area of cognitive psychology that focuses on the study of how language is acquired, produced, comprehended, and represented in the mind. Language consists of components. The smallest component is a phoneme, which is combined with other phonemes to produce morphemes, which are then used to create words. Words and sentences are combined using rules known as syntax, and semantics refers to the meaning of words and sentences. Wundt was one of the first important contributors to this area of psychology and used tree diagrams to analyze experiences. Perhaps the most important figure in linguistics, Noam Chomsky, distinguished language from speech. Speech is only a subset of language and must be constructed according to rules, known as grammar. However, a grammatical utterance need not be meaningful, thus highlighting the distinction between grammar and semantics. In addition, Chomsky rejected the idea of finite state grammar, stating that it could not account for the intricacy of natural languages. Instead, he put forward a top-down process that uses phrase structure rules and grammatical transformations. Moreover, Chomsky elaborated on the differences between the notions of competence and performance, with the former being largely innate and having a structure that is referred to universal grammar. Chomsky stated that people need to make distinctions between deep and surface structures in order to understand phenomena like ambiguous sentences. He argued that language is innate (innateness hypothesis) because the language acquired from an adult is too incomplete and too full of errors for a child to learn from (“poverty of the stimulus” argument). Therefore, he concluded that children have a language acquisition device that contains principles of universal grammar that could be applied to any natural language.
Brown and Hanlon’s study supported his theory, which has now evolved to a concept called minimalism. This concept involves parameter setting, and speculates that the existence of many languages is due to historical society structures as well as revealing and concealing functions. The lack of evidence supporting the poverty of the stimulus argument has led to further research on the matter, in which parental reformulations, for instance, were observed. However, researchers have found that children’s syntactic development is perhaps influenced more by their teachers than by their parents.
The evolution of language has been fiercely debated. Chomsky and colleagues suggest that there are three parts to language. First, the sensory-motor system allows for both the perception and pro-duction of speech. Second, the conceptual-intentional system enables one to grasp the meaning of speech. Lastly, there is a uniquely human system that mediates between the two previously mentioned. An example of a unique human capability appears to be recursion, which, in language, refers to the ability to embed sentences within sentences, potentially to infinity. Other accounts of the evolution of language link gesturing capabilities of primates, mirror neurons, and gene mutation with speech as it is known today.
With language comes communication. When conversing, speakers and listeners enter what is called a given–new contract. Sperber and Wilson differed between two approaches to communication: the code model and the inferential model. In order to facilitate interaction, speakers usually follow the co-operative principle, as well as four conversational maxims: maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Despite such efforts to make communication as fluid as possible, speakers often experience speech disfluencies, such as hesitation pauses. A good way of studying communication can also come from observing figurative language, which includes metaphor and irony (use of pretense), for example.
Vygotsky, on the other hand, was interested in the relation between thought and speech. For instance, he reanalyzed Piaget’s concept of egocentric speech and argued that it does not disappear but rather evolves into inner speech, which people continue to use in order to regulate thought and behaviour. He also developed the idea of the zone of proximal development. Literacy is also an important factor when studying language. This concept goes beyond reading and writing, as it includes metalinguistic awareness.
A simple model of reading would involve finding a printed word in one’s lexicon (mental dictionary) and then being able to utter it, although, this model is challenged by studies of people with dyslexia. Surface dyslexia affects the ability to recognize words as units, while the ability to read letter-by-letter remains intact. Conversely, people with phonological dyslexia cannot read letter-by-letter. These opposing types of dyslexia have led to the formulation of the dual route theory of reading, which posits two separate pathways for reading: one for comparing words to a mental dictionary and another for converting sounds to letters.
The way people interpret words is also very important when studying language, because words, along with other speech-related categories, can determine how individuals experience the world (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). Two people who speak different languages may, in fact, experience the world quite differently, a concept called linguistic relativity. For instance, polysemy varies from language to language and can affect a listener’s understanding of a sentence or statement. This idea led to research on the words used for colour in different languages. It has been argued that there are 11 basic colour terms and that they appear in a specific order in any given language (Berlin–Kay order). This model was derived from Hering’s opponent process theory of colour vision. Furthermore, spatial frames of reference can be found in different languages. People can describe an object’s position by using either an intrinsic, or relative, or absolute frame of reference. These frames of reference have been found to influence thought and behaviour.
Chapter Objectives
- To explore the structure of language.
- To outline Chomsky’s approaches to language.
- To review evidence for the innateness hypothesis and identify the “poverty of the stimulus” argument.
- To examine the process of communication and comprehension.
- To evaluate evidence for linguistic relativity.