LANGUAGE
INTRO TO PSYCH
3/11/2014
LANGUAGE
• Where the action is! (psychologically speaking)
• Battleground over different theories of human
nature
• Any one who has ever studied people for their job
has thought about language & how it works
• Psychologist
• Neuroscientist
• Philosopher
• Language is such a big deal it has its own field of
study
LANGUAGE
• What “language” means for us today:
• English, Spanish, Navajo, Portuguese, Creole, ASL, etc
• Languages used by people to communicate
• Very narrow sense to study language
• What we’ll discuss:
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Basic facts about language
What languages share
How language develops
Language & Communication in nonhumans
LANGUAGE
• TWO Important Facts About Language
• All languages share intricate universals
• They can all convey abstract thought
• They’re all SUPER DIFFERENT
• They sound/look different
• If you know one, do you automatically know another?
• NOPE
• Any theory of language must include allowances
for the similarities AND the differences
LANGUAGE
"Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see
in the babble of our young children, while no child
has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write."
Charles Darwin
What does this mean?
Language is SPECIAL. We have it built into us to speak
and to use language. Not everything comes natural
to us, but Darwin suggests maybe language does
LANGUAGE
• But should we believe this theory? Why or why not?
• Every human society has a language
• New languages can be created within 1 generation
LANGUAGE
• Example: The Slave Trade
• People were brought from all over the world to be slaves
• Many spoke different languages, so how did they speak to
each other?
• The created a “pidgin”: a language that has been created
through the attempts by the speakers of two different
languages to communicate and that is a simplified form of
one of the languages
• But what happens to the children raised “speaking”
pidgin?
LANGUAGE
• They develop their own language
• This language is called a “creole”
• DIFFERENT than how we think we know creole – a verb
• Creolized language: formerly a pidgin but now the
native language of a group of speakers, with
consequent enrichment of the vocabulary by
borrowing & creation
• The idea of pidgin and creolized language shows us
that human nature has the ability to use and
understand and create language
LANGUAGE
• All languages are creative
• Language use and language creation can’t just be a list
• We have the capacity to understand a sentence even if
we’ve never heard it before
• Our capacity for language is boundless!
• Come up with a sentence that no one has ever said
before (not obscene, be polite)
• Be creative!
• Go around the room and share your sentence
• I’ll start!
LANGUAGE
• How is it that we can all understand these
sentences, even though we’ve never heard them
before?
• You know what the words mean, but how do you put them
in a sentence to understand?
• Unconscious rules in your head
• These rules figure out the order, remember the meaning of the
words, and come up with understanding in nanoseconds
“My new roommate
has a cat who is very
talkative and
probably insane”
LANGUAGE
Handout!
Pair up and work together to
answer these two questions
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• Phonology: System of sounds used in language
• Morphology: how words are formed in language
• Syntax: rules & principles that put words & phrases
together to make meaningful sentences
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
Phonology
• The English language has a list of about 40 sound systems
(phenomes)
• Example: “Lip” and “Rip” – “L” phenome and “R” phenome
• Part of learning a new language means learning new
phenomes
• Love Actually - http://youtu.be/nKdSvhCg3VY
• Encino Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZA1DuB8NIE
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• You have to learn the sound signals to figure out the
boundaries between the words
• Example: French – sounds like one long word to people who
have never heard French
• “Je ne sais pas”: I do not know
• Hebrew – where are the pauses between words?
• “Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam”: Blessed are
You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• Phonology, continued
• Children have to learn the pauses in their language
• You can see their mistakes when they say things
already known to society, like song lyrics
• “There’s a bathroom on the right”
• “I’ll never be your pizza burnin’”
• "Our father with Bart in heaven; Harold be thy
name… Lead us not into Penn Station…"
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• Phonology, continued
• Remember, when you hear a sentence, your mind
makes the gaps between words
• This illustrates aspects of language processing and
consciousness
• The best examples of this are when you hear the
words wrong
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• “Super Freak”, by Rick James
• Listen for the line around :48 “The kinda girl you read
about…”
• What is the line after that?
• “In Newsweek magazine”?
• But why Newsweek? If she shouldn’t be brought home to
Mama, would that kind of lady be in Newsweek magazine?
• So what’s the line??????
• “In new wave magazines”
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• Top-down processing: when you hear something
the way you know it to be
• Useful for filling in sentences when you miss a word
or syllable
• But can also lead to problems…
• “Get Crunk”
• Even in the radio edit version, I can hear the explicit
word missing from the chorus
• I just can’t unhear it
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
Morphology
• “The arbitrariness of the sign”
• You can make a sign or sound for “dog”
• You can make a sign or sound for “drink”
• Language allows for this random naming, a map between a
word and any sort of thought we want to use to express it
• Morpheme: Smallest meaningful unit in a language (often the
same thing as a word)
• Two morphemes put together to make one word
• “Dog” and “s” = “dogs”
• The average speakers knows between 60,000 – 100,000
morphemes
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• Morphology, continued
• Averaged out, children learn about 9 new words a
day in their first year of life
• How many are fluent in another language?
• You may have 200,000 or 300,000 words in your
head that you can access at a moment’s notice!
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
Syntax
• The rules and principles that allow us to combine words into
phrases and phrases into sentences
• “The infinite use of finite media”
• Vocabulary is finite, but we can make an infinite
combination of sentences – HOW?
• Combinatorial System
• How to make a sentence: Noun, Verb, another Noun
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• 3 nouns: Fred, Barney, Wilma
• 2 verbs: thinks, likes
• Combinatorial System: “Fred likes Wilma”
• How many possible combinations are there of these
words?
• Harder! Add one more sentence to the end of the
1st sentence!
• “Fred thinks Barney likes Wilma”
STRUCTURES OF LANGUAGE
• The rules of syntax are complicated
• Different rules can sometimes cause us to create
the same sentence
• These sentences can be ambiguous, they can
mean one thing to one person and something else
to another
• Groucho Marx
• Funny headlines:
• "Complaints about NBA referees growing ugly“
• "Kids make nutritious snacks“
• "No one was injured in a blast which was attributed to the
buildup of gas by one town official"
LANGUAGE
• The time course of learning language
• Babies
• They don’t know words yet; they don’t know syntax
• They can only know the rhythm of language
• It’s how they can tell which language is “theirs” to learn
• Should we talk “baby talk” to our babies?
• Some say doing so helps the baby learn language
• Some say it helps calm the baby
• Either way, it doesn’t harm their language learning
LANGUAGE
• Babies
• Up until around 12 months, they are multilingual fools!
• Because they identify language by sound and rhythm, they
are able to determine the differences in languages
• As they grow older, their sensitivity to sound narrows to their
native language
• Around 7 months, babies start babbling
LANGUAGE
• Babies acquire sign language the same way they
acquire spoken language
• The developmental milestones of spoken language
are the same as those of sign language
• First words, first sentences, first complicated constructions
• A baby’s first words are usually for objects & actions
• Around 12 months
• Begin to learn words faster and make little
sentences around 18 months - “Want cookie”
LANGUAGE
• Age 7 years – puberty
• The ability to learn language begins to go away
• Immigrants who learn English
• What makes them successful?
• How old they are when they start learning
• If you start learning a language in the first few years
of life, you’ll learn great, become fluent
• Later in life you can still learn, but it’s much harder
• If you had an accent, you’ll always have your
accent
• Desi Arnaz
HOMEWORK DUE THURSDAY
• Turn in a rough draft of your Bibliography for the
project
• Make sure it is format correctly
• Use the handout from the beginning of the
semester (also on Weebly)
• Use the research you have now, you can add more
later
• Don’t have any research yet? BETTER GET STARTED