Language and the Brain
First connections drawn:
Broca’s Aphasia
Paul Broca
Phrenology:
A failed attempt to localize cogntive functions in the brain.
But it is not simply a
production deficit:
"The boy ate the cookie"
"Who ate the cookie?" "The boy"
"The boy hit the girl"
"Who kicked whom?"
"?????"
Comprehension problems,
when syntax is needed!
Telegrammatic speech
Meaning, but
no syntax.
Meaning and syntax (lesion evidence)
Wernicke’s
Aphasia
comprehension
lost
Carl Wernicke
Patients with Wernicke's aphasia have problems with
understanding and producing meaningful sentences.
However, their speech is fluent and obeys grammatical
rules ("Jargon Aphasia").
Sometimes called “Jargon Aphasia”
Taken together, Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s
aphasia suggest a double dissociation of the
cognitive processes underlying:
- the production and comprehension of
language.
- syntax and semantics of language
Language & Thought: Outline
• General Effects of Language on Thought
• Language Specific Effects
– Appearance-Reality Distinction
– Color Terms
– Emotions
Language & Thought
• The way something is described can
influence how we think about it.
– Carmichael, Hogan & Walter (1932)
• The way an ambiguous figure is described
influences how it is later recalled.
Language & Thought
• The way something is described can
influence how we think about it.
– Carmichael, Hogan & Walter (1932)
• The way an ambiguous figure is described
influences how it is later recalled.
– Glucksberg & Weisberg (1962)
• The way a problem is described can influence the
salience of potential solutions.
Language & Thought
• The way something is described can
influence how we think about it.
– Carmichael, Hogan & Walter (1932)
• The way an ambiguous figure is described
influences how it is later recalled.
– Glucksberg & Weisberg (1962)
• The way a problem is described can influence the
salience of potential solutions.
– Gelman & Coley (1990)
• Children use labels to guide inductive inferences.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• Linguistic determinism: Language provides
speakers with habitual ways of expression.
These influence how speakers perceive the
world.
– Language determines thought.
• Linguistic relativity: If two languages differ
on how they express a concept, speakers of
the languages will different on how they
think about that concept.
– Language differences => thought differences.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• Languages carve up reality in different
ways.
• Language differences are tacit.
– Grammatical differences
• Language differences influence our world
view.
Language & Thought: Conclusions
• Linguistic Relativity
Weak
Strong
Linguistic Relativity: Evidence
• Hard to test. Need to
– Identify a grammatical difference between
languages
– Identify a cognitive difference that should
follow from the grammatical difference
– Determine whether the cognitive difference
actually occurs
• Direction of causality
– Language ==> Thought
– Thought ==> Language
Linguistic Relativity : Evidence
• Sera, Bales, & Del Castillo Pintado (1997)
• Appearance-Reality task
– Preschoolers fail to distinguish between
temporary and enduring properties
• English & Spanish-speaking children
– English: is
– Spanish: ser and estar
• Ser refers to permanent properties
• Estar refers to temporary properties
• Both given appearance-reality test
– When you look at this lamb now through this
filter, what color is (estar) it?
– What color is (ser) the lamb really and truly?
• Another study looked at bilingual children
performing the task in English and Spanish
English- and Spanish-speakers
What does it
look like?
What color is
it really?
Bilingual Children
Linguistic Relativity: Basic Color Terms
Linguistic Relativity: Color Terms
• Rosch: Linguistic Difference
– English: 11 basic color terms
• Black, White, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown,
Purple, Pink, Orange, Gray
– Dani of New Guinea: 2 basic color terms
• Milli, Mola
• Do lexical differences lead to conceptual or
perceptual differences?
• Named each of 160 color chips.
Linguistic Relativity: Focal Colors
Memory for Focal Colors
• Dani memorized one chip
– Focal (English)
– Non-Focal
• Whorfian Prediction?
Learning New Color Terms
• Dani taught new words for sets of colors
– Within Focal Color (English) Groups
– Across Focal Color (English) Groups
• Whorfian Prediction?
Psycholinguists’ Question:
What is relationship of generative
grammar to comprehension and
production?
Extremely controversial.
1. Early attempts to draw 1:1 mapping
with comprehension failed.
2. Generative grammar may have closer
relationship to sentence production
than to sentence comprehension.
Language and Thought
Q: Do we think in language?
Typical Layman’s response: “Yes”
or “Often”.
Philosophers: “No”. (e.g., Fodor)
The ambiguity of the speech stream
Additional, "context" information needs to
be used.
For example: Prosody.
Because the boy left the room seemed empty.
Because the boy left, the room seemed empty.
Prosody, the insertion of pauses or
modulations of amplitude, provide additional
information to segment the speech stream.
In written language, this function is carried
out by commas, question marks etc.
Language
Domain of the simple feature net with
detectors for phonemes, morphemes, and
words hierarchically arranged.
But there are some additional complexities...
Language
There is an infinite number of possible sentence structures and
meanings to convey. Language is generative! Thus, there is no way
there could be a "detector" for every possible sentence. Here we
have reached the limits of a simple feature-net. We need to find a
way of representing rules to generate and understand all possible
sentences (next session!).