Learning Objectives<\/h2>\n<\/header>\n\n\nBy the end of this section, you will be able to:\n\n \t- Review the components and structure of language.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe the process by which people can share new information by using language.<\/li>\n \t
- Characterise the typical content of conversation and its social implications.<\/li>\n \t
- Characterise psychological consequences of language use and give an example.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe how children acquire language.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe theories of language development.<\/li>\n \t
- Explain the biological underpinnings of language.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe the use of language in non-human animals.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nHuman language is the most complex behaviour on the planet and, at least as far as we know, in the universe. Language involves both the ability to comprehend spoken and written words and to create communication in real time when we speak or write. Most languages are oral, generated through speaking. Speaking involves a variety of complex cognitive, social, and biological processes, including operation of the vocal cords and the coordination of breath with movements of the throat, mouth, and tongue.\n\nOther languages are sign languages, in which the communication is expressed by movements of the hands. The most common sign language is American Sign Language (ASL), commonly used in many countries across the world and adapted for use in varying countries. The other main sign language used in Canada is la Langue des Signes Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coise (LSQ); there is also a regional dialect, Maritime Sign Language (MSL).\n\nAlthough language is often used for the transmission of information (e.g., \u201cturn right at the next light and then go straight\u201d or \u201cplace tab A into slot B\u201d), this is only its most basic function. Language also allows us to access existing knowledge, to draw conclusions, to set and accomplish goals, and to understand and communicate complex social relationships. Language is fundamental to our ability to think; without it we would be much less intelligent than we are.\n\nLanguage can be conceptualised in terms of sounds, meaning, and the environmental factors that help us understand them. Phonemes are the elementary sounds of our language; morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language; syntax is the set of grammatical rules that control how words are put together; and contextual information consists of the elements of communication that are not part of the content of language but that help us understand its meaning.\n\nSpeech requires the use of the vocal tract. The vocal tract, as seen in Figure IL.10, is composed of the parts of the mouth and nose through which air flows. The larynx provides the voice or vibration to the sounds we produce. Moving the tongue, lips, and other parts of the vocal tract modifies the airflow and allows us to produce all the sounds found in human languages.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1536\"]
![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/03\/Parts-of-the-Vocal-Tract-1536x885-1.png\")
Figure IL.10. Human vocal tract.<\/strong>[\/caption]\n\n \nThe<\/span> Co<\/span>mponents<\/span> of Language<\/span><\/h1>\nThe complexity of language comes from the fact that it is made up of interconnected levels and units that interact with each other. Therefore, when you are studying language (or linguistics), you can study it at different levels depending on the context. The study of the sound patterns of language is known as phonology; the study of meaningful units is called morphology; the study of meaning is called semantics and the way language is used beyond these constraints in different contexts is known as pragmatics.\n\nPhonology is the field of linguistics dealing with phonemes. A phoneme <\/strong>is the smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful difference in a language. In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes. For example, the word \u201cbit\u201d has three phonemes: \/b\/, \/i\/, and \/t\/. The word \u201cpit\u201d also has three: \/p\/, \/i\/, and \/t\/. The only difference between \u2018pit\u2019 and \u2018bit\u2019 is the first sound. Such words that differ in only one sound are called minimal pairs and are useful in discovering all the phonemes that exist in a language. In spoken languages, phonemes are produced by the positions and movements of the vocal tract, including our lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, and throat, whereas in sign languages, phonemes are defined by the shapes and movement of the hands.\n\nPhonemes can be classified into vowels and consonants. Phonemes that are produced without any obstruction to the flow of air are called vowels. Phonemes that are produced with some kind of disruptions to the airflow are called consonants. Of course, nature is not as clear-cut as all that and we do make some sounds that are somewhere in between these two categories. These are called semivowels but are usually classified alongside consonants (e.g., initial phonemes in w<\/strong>ell and y<\/strong>awn).\n\nThere are hundreds of unique phonemes that can be made by human speakers, but most languages only use a small subset of the possibilities. English contains about 45 phonemes, whereas other languages have as few as 15 and others more than 60. The Hawaiian language contains only about a dozen phonemes, including five vowels \u2014 a, e, i, o, and u \u2014 and seven consonants \u2014 h, k, l, m, n, p, and w. Figure IL.11 and Figure IL.12 shows the vowels and consonants found in the English language. The outline in Figure IL.11 is called a tongue map. It shows the shape and positions of the tongue when we articulate each vowel. Each black circle is situated in the position of the tongue when that vowel is pronounced. You can check this yourself by saying \u2018ee\u2019 and \u2018aa\u2019 and feel how your tongue moves upwards for the former and downwards for the latter. Similarly try saying \u2018ee\u2019 and \u2018oo\u2019 repeatedly and feel how your tongue moved forwards for the former and backwards for the latter. Vowels are the most variable across different dialects in a language. Therefore, one of the main ways we differentiate between various dialects in a language (such as Standard Canadian, American Southern, British Received Pronunciation, or General America) is in the nature of their vowels when pronouncing the same words.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"832\"]![\"Vowel](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/Picture-1.jpg\" "\\"Vowel")
Figure IL.11. English Vowels. <\/strong>Blue o is the RP in British English.[\/caption]\n\nFigure IL.12 shows the consonants in English. Consonants tend to be quite stable across the various dialects of a language with some minor variations. The figure shows the consonants arranged according to their manner and place of articulation. Manner of articulation refers to how the airflow escapes through the vocal tract. For example, when you say \u2018pit\u2019 or \u2018kit\u2019 you briefly stop the airflow for the first sound in each word. Therefore, these sounds are called stops. Fricatives such as the first sounds in \u2018ship\u2019, \u2018sip\u2019, and \u2018fin\u2019 obstruct the flow of air but do not stop it. Affricates are the blend of one stop and one fricative sound. So \/t\/ and \/sh\/ together create \/ch\/. Nasal sounds such as \/m\/ and \/n\/ release the airflow through the nasal cavity as well as the mouth (oral cavity).\n\nPlace of articulation refers to what parts of the vocal tract come into contact when producing the consonant. Bilabial sounds such as \/p\/, \/b\/ and \/m\/ are produced with two (bi) lips (labia) coming into contact with each other. Dental sounds, as the name implies, are produced with the tongue touching the upper teeth. The alveolar ridge is a hard bit just behind the teeth. The tongue touching this region produces alveolar sounds such as \/n\/, \/t\/, \/s\/, and \/l\/. The going just behind the alveolar ridge (post-alveolar) produces sounds such as \/sh\/ as well as the \u2018s\u2019 in \u2018measure\u2019. The top of the tongue touching the top of the mouth or soft palate produces palatal sounds such as \/y\/ while the back of the tongue touching the velum or hard palate produces sounds such as \/k\/ and \/g\/.<\/a>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1034\"]![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/Picture-2.jpg\")
Figure IL.12. English consonants. <\/strong>Red ch is only found in some dialects in Scotland. [Image Description]<\/em><\/a>[\/caption]Because phonemes are actually a category of sounds that are treated alike within the language, speakers of different languages are able to hear the difference between only some phonemes but not others. This is known as the categorical perception of speech sounds<\/strong>. English speakers can differentiate the \/r\/ phoneme from the \/l\/ phoneme, and thus \u201crake\u201d and \u201clake\u201d are heard as different words. In Japanese, however, \/r\/ and \/l\/ are the same phoneme, and thus speakers of that language are not likely to tell the difference between the word \u201crake\u201d and the word \u201clake.\u201d Try saying the words \u201ccool\u201d and \u201ckeep\u201d out loud. Can you hear the difference between the two \/k\/ sounds? To monolingual English speakers they both sound the same, but to speakers of Arabic, these represent two different phonemes (Figure IL.13).\n\nInfants are born able to understand all phonemes, but they lose their ability to do so as they get older; by 10 months of age, a child\u2019s ability to recognise phonemes becomes very similar to that of the adult speakers of the native language of the child\u2019s culture. Phonemes that were initially differentiated come to be treated as equivalent (Werker & Tees, 2002).\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1536\"]![\"This](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/fdd630cf615e861c4cd1b9dd902cfc0f-1536x617-1.jpg\")
Figure IL.13. Phonemes.<\/strong> When adults hear speech sounds that gradually change from one phoneme to another, they do not hear the continuous change; rather, they hear one sound until they suddenly begin hearing the other. In this case, the change is from \/ba\/ to \/pa\/ (Wood, 1976).[\/caption]\n\nWhereas phonemes are the smallest units of sound in language, a morpheme <\/strong>is a string of one or more phonemes that makes up the smallest units of meaning in a language. Some morphemes, such as one-letter words like \u201cI\u201d and \u201ca,\u201d are also phonemes, but most morphemes are made up of combinations of phonemes. Some morphemes are prefixes and suffixes used to modify other words. For example, the syllable \u201cre-\u201d as in \u201crewrite\u201d or \u201crepay\u201d means \u201cto do again,\u201d and the suffix \u201c-est\u201d as in \u201chappiest\u201d or \u201ccoolest\u201d means \u201cto the maximum.\u201d\n\nLanguages differ in terms of how they combine units of meaning (morphemes) to create new words. Figure IL.14 shows four types of morphology. Isolating languages do not combine morphemes but keep them isolated. Therefore, the word for an American is not a combination of \u2018America\u2019 and \u2018-an\u2019 but \u2018beautiful\u2019 \u2018country\u2019 and \u2018person\u2019. Agglutinative languages such as Salish and most Indigenous languages of Canada glue<\/em> morphemes together but do not transform them. This means each morpheme is clearly observable even after combining to form a new word. On the other hand, when the fusing of morphemes leads to the resulting word changing the morpheme, this is a fusional or inflectional morphology (as seen in English or Spanish). There are some other interesting morphologies, such as Mohawk (spoken in the Eastern parts of Canada), which fuse lots of morphemes together to form extremely long words. Such polysynthetic morphologies are rare.<\/a>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1536\"]![\"Different](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/Figure-3_2-1536x837-1.png\" "\\"Different")
Figure IL.14. Different types of Morphology.<\/strong> [Image Description]<\/em><\/a>[\/caption]Syntax <\/strong>is the set of rules of a language by which we construct sentences. Each language has a different syntax. The syntax of the English language requires that each sentence have a noun and a verb, each of which may be modified by adjectives and adverbs. Figure IL.15 shows the syntax for a simple sentence in English with its syntactic categories: determiners (DET), nouns (N), verbs (V), noun phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP). Some syntaxes make use of the order in which words appear, while others do not. In English, \u201cThe man bites the dog\u201d is different from \u201cThe dog bites the man.\u201d In German, however, only the article endings before the noun matter. \u201cDer Hund beisst den Mann\u201d means \u201cThe dog bites the man\u201d but so does \u201cDen Mann beisst der Hund.\u201d<\/a>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"964\"]![\"The](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/Syntax-Eng-2.png\")
Figure IL.15. Sentence Structure in English.<\/strong> [Image Description]<\/em><\/a>[\/caption]Words do not possess fixed meanings, but change their interpretation as a function of the context in which they are spoken. We use contextual information <\/strong>\u2014 the information surrounding language \u2014 to help us interpret it. Examples of contextual information include the knowledge that we have and that we know other people have, and nonverbal expressions such as facial expressions, postures, gestures, and tone of voice. Misunderstandings can easily arise if people are not attentive to contextual information or if some of it is missing, such as it may be in newspaper headlines or in text messages.\n\nThe following are examples of headlines in which syntax is correct, but the interpretation can be ambiguous:\n\n \t- Grandmother of Eight Makes Hole in One\n
\n \t- \u201chole in one\u201d can refer to an achievement in golf or to literally making a hole in one of the children<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Milk Drinkers Turn to Powder\n
\n \t- People who drink milk choose powdered milk or they literally turned to powder<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Farmer Bill Dies in House\n
\n \t- A government bill for farmers is voted down in the US House of Representatives or a farmer named Bill dies in a house<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Old School Pillars Are Replaced by Alumni\n
\n \t- The \u201cpillars\u201d could refer to columns or a reference to esteemed people of the school<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Two Convicts Evade Noose, Jury Hung\n
\n \t- \u201cHung\u201d could refer to being hanged with a noose or being indecisive<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Include Your Children When Baking Cookies\n
\n \t- Include children in the activity of baking or literally include them as an ingredient when baking<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
How do we use language?<\/span><\/h1>\nIf language is so ubiquitous, how do we actually use it? To be sure, some of us use it to write diaries and poetry, but the primary form of language use is interpersonal. That\u2019s how we learn language, and that\u2019s how we use it. We exchange words and utterances to communicate with each other. Let\u2019s consider the simplest case of two people, Adam and Ben, talking with each other. Judging from their clothing, they are young businessmen, taking a break from work. They have this exchange:\n\n\nAdam: \u201cYou know, Gary bought a ring.\u201d\n\nBen: \u201cOh yeah? For Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\n\nAdam nods.\n\n<\/div>\nAccording to Herbert Clark (1996), in order for them to carry out a conversation, they must keep track of common ground. Common ground <\/strong>is a set of knowledge that the speaker and listener share and they think, assume, or otherwise take for granted that they share. So, when Adam says, \u201cGary bought a ring,\u201d he takes for granted that Ben knows the meaning of the words he is using, who Gary is, and what buying a ring means. When Ben says, \u201cFor Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he takes for granted that Adam knows the meaning of these words, who Mary is, and what buying a ring for someone means. All these are part of their common ground.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"]![\"Two](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/original-7.jpg\")
Figure IL.16. Common ground.<\/strong> Common ground in a conversation helps people coordinate their language use, and as conversations progress, common ground shifts and changes as the participants add new information and cooperate to help one another understand.[\/caption]\n\nNote that, when Adam presents the information about Gary\u2019s purchase of a ring, Ben responds by presenting his inference about who the recipient of the ring might be, namely, Mary. In conversational terms, Ben\u2019s utterance acts as evidence for his comprehension of Adam\u2019s utterance \u2014 \u201cYes, I understood that Gary bought a ring\u201d \u2014 and Adam\u2019s nod acts as evidence that he now has understood what Ben has said too \u2014 \u201cYes, I understood that you understood that Gary has bought a ring for Mary.\u201d This new information is now added to the initial common ground. Thus, the pair of utterances by Adam and Ben, called an adjacency pair, together with Adam\u2019s affirmative nod jointly completes one proposition, \u201cGary bought a ring for Mary,\u201d and adds this information to their common ground. This way, common ground changes as we talk, gathering new information that we agree on and have evidence that we share. It evolves as people take turns to assume the roles of speaker and listener and actively engage in the exchange of meaning.\n\nCommon ground helps people coordinate their language use. For instance, when a speaker says something to a listener, they take into account their common ground, that is, what the speaker thinks the listener knows. Adam said what he did because he knew Ben would know who Gary was. He\u2019d have said, \u201cA friend of mine is getting married,\u201d to another colleague who wouldn\u2019t know Gary. This is called audience design <\/strong>(Fussell & Krauss, 1992); speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audience's knowledge. If their audience is seen to be knowledgeable about an object, such as Ben about Gary, they tend to use a brief label of the object (i.e., Gary); for a less knowledgeable audience, they use more descriptive words (e.g., \u201ca friend of mine\u201d) to help the audience understand their utterances.\n\nIn systematic research on audience design, Susan Fussell and Robert Krauss (1992) found that, when communicating about public figures, speakers included more descriptive information (e.g., physical appearances and occupation) about lesser known and less identifiable people (e.g., Kevin Kline or Carl Icahn) than better known ones (e.g., Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood), so that their listeners could identify them. Likewise, Ellen Isaacs and Herbert Clark (1987) showed that people who were familiar with New York City (NYC) could gauge their audience\u2019s familiarity with NYC soon after they began conversation and adjusted their descriptions of NYC landmarks to help the audience identify such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge and Yankee Stadium more easily. More generally, Paul Grice (1975) suggested that speakers often follow certain rules, called conversational maxims, by trying to be informative (e.g., maxim of quantity), truthful (e.g., maxim of quality), relevant (e.g., maxim of relation), and clear and unambiguous (e.g., maxim of manner).\n\nSo, language use is a cooperative activity, but how do we coordinate our language use in a conversational setting? To be sure, we have a conversation in small groups. The number of people engaging in a conversation at a time is rarely more than four. By some counts (e.g., Dunbar, Duncan, & Nettle, 1995; James, 1953), more than 90% of conversations happen in a group of four or fewer individuals. Certainly, coordinating conversation among four is not as difficult as coordinating conversation among 10, but even among only four people, if you think about it, everyday conversation is an almost miraculous achievement. We typically have a conversation by rapidly exchanging words and utterances in real time in a noisy environment. Think about your conversation at home in the morning, at a bus stop, in a shopping mall. How can we keep track of our common ground under such circumstances?\n\nMartin Pickering and Simon Garrod (2004) argue that we achieve our conversational coordination by virtue of our ability to interactively align each other\u2019s actions at different levels of language use: lexicon <\/strong>(i.e., words and expressions), syntax <\/strong>(i.e., grammatical rules for arranging words and expressions together), as well as speech rate and accent. For instance, when one person uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression (e.g., Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). Furthermore, if someone says \u201cthe cowboy offered a banana to the robber,\u201d rather than \u201cthe cowboy offered the robber a banana,\u201d others are more likely to use the same syntactic structure (e.g., \u201cthe girl gave a book to the boy\u201d rather than \u201cthe girl gave the boy a book\u201d) even if different words are involved (Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000). Finally, people in conversation tend to exhibit similar accents and rates of speech, and they are often associated with people\u2019s social identity (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991). So, if you have lived in different places where people have somewhat different accents (e.g., the United States and the United Kingdom), you might have noticed that when you speak with Americans you use an American accent but when you speak with Britons you use a British accent.\n\nPickering and Garrod (2004) suggest that these interpersonal alignments at different levels of language use can activate similar situation models <\/strong>in the minds of those who are engaged in a conversation. Situation models are representations about the topic of a conversation. So, if you are talking about Gary and Mary with your friends, you might have in your mind a situation model of Gary giving Mary a ring. Pickering and Garrod\u2019s theory suggests that as you describe a situation using language, others in the conversation begin to use similar words and grammar, and many other aspects of language use converge. As you all do so, similar situation models begin to be built in everyone\u2019s mind through the mechanism known as priming. Priming <\/strong>occurs when your thinking about one concept (e.g., ring) reminds you about other related concepts (e.g., marriage or wedding ceremony). So, if everyone in the conversation knows about Gary, Mary, and the usual course of events associated with a ring \u2014 involving engagement, wedding, marriage, and so on \u2014 everyone is likely to construct a shared situation model about Gary and Mary. Thus, making use of our highly developed interpersonal ability to imitate (i.e., executing the same action as another person) and cognitive ability to infer (i.e., one idea leading to other ideas), we humans coordinate our common ground, share situation models, and communicate with each other.\nWhat Do We Talk About?<\/span><\/h1>\nWhat are humans doing when they are talking? Surely, we can communicate about ordinary things such as what to have for dinner, but also more complex and abstract things such as the meaning of life and death, liberty, equality, fraternity, and many other philosophical thoughts. When naturally occurring conversations were actually observed (Dunbar, Marriott, & Duncan, 1997), a staggering 60\u201370% of everyday conversation, for both men and women, turned out to be gossip \u2014 people talk about themselves and others whom they know (Figure IL.17). Just like Adam and Ben, more often than not, people use language to communicate about their social world.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"]![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/original-1-1.jpg\")
Figure IL.17. <\/em><\/strong>Gossip<\/strong>. <\/em>Studies show that people love to gossip. By gossiping, humans can communicate and share their representations about their social world \u2014 who their friends and enemies are, what the right thing to do is under what circumstances, and so on.[\/caption]\n\nGossip may sound trivial and seem to belittle our noble ability for language, surely one of the most remarkable human abilities of all that distinguish us from other animals. On the contrary, some have argued that gossip \u2014 activities used to think and communicate about our social world \u2014 is one of the most critical uses to which language has been put. Robin Dunbar speculated that gossiping is the human equivalent of grooming, that is, when monkeys and primates attend to each other by cleaning each other\u2019s fur. Dunbar (1996) argued that it is an act of socialising, signaling the importance of one\u2019s partner. Furthermore, by gossiping, humans can communicate and share their representations about their social world: who their friends and enemies are, what the right thing to do is under what circumstances, and so on. By doing that, they can regulate their social world, making more friends and enlarging their own group \u2014 often called the ingroup<\/strong>, the group to which one belongs \u2014 against other groups \u2014 known as outgroups <\/strong>\u2014 that are more likely to be one\u2019s enemies. Dunbar has argued that it is these social effects that have given humans an evolutionary advantage and larger brains, which, in turn, help humans to think more complex and abstract thoughts and, more importantly, maintain larger ingroups. Dunbar (1993) estimated an equation that predicts average group size of nonhuman primate genera from the size of their average neocortex, which is the part of the brain that supports higher order cognition. In line with his social brain hypothesis<\/strong>, Dunbar showed that those primate genera that have larger brains tend to live in larger groups. Furthermore, using the same equation, Dunbar was able to estimate the group size that human brains can support, which turned out to be about 150 \u2014 approximately the size of modern hunter-gatherer communities. Dunbar\u2019s argument is that language, brain, and human group living have co-evolved; language and human sociality are inseparable.\n\nDunbar\u2019s hypothesis is controversial. Nonetheless, our everyday language use often ends up maintaining the existing structure of intergroup relationships. Language use can have implications for the ways in which we construe our social world. For one thing, there are subtle cues that people use to convey the extent to which someone\u2019s action is just a special case in a particular context or a pattern that occurs across many contexts, like a character trait. According to G\u00fcn Semin and Klaus Fiedler (1988), someone\u2019s action can be described by an action verb that describes a concrete action (e.g., she runs), a state verb that describes the actor\u2019s psychological state (e.g., she likes running), an adjective that describes the actor\u2019s personality (e.g., she is athletic), or a noun that describes the actor\u2019s role (e.g., she is an athlete). Depending on whether a verb, an adjective, or a noun is used, speakers can convey the permanency and stability of an actor\u2019s tendency to act in a certain way \u2014 verbs convey particularity, whereas adjectives convey permanency. Intriguingly, people tend to describe positive actions of their ingroup members using adjectives (e.g., she is generous) rather than verbs (e.g., she gave a tall man some change), and negative actions of outgroup members using adjectives (e.g., she is cruel) rather than verbs (e.g., she kicked a dog). Anne Maass, Daniela Salvi, Luciano Arcuri, and G\u00fcn Semin (1989) called this a linguistic intergroup bias<\/strong>, which can produce and reproduce the representation of intergroup relationships by painting a picture favouring the ingroup. That is, ingroup members are typically good, and if they do anything bad, that\u2019s more an exception in special circumstances; in contrast, outgroup members are typically bad, and if they do anything good, that\u2019s more an exception.\n\nPeople tend to tell stories that evoke strong emotions (Rim\u00e9, Mesquita, Boca, & Philoppot, 1991). Such emotive stories can then spread far and wide through people\u2019s social networks. When a group of 33 psychology students visited a city morgue \u2014 no doubt an emotive experience for many \u2014 they each told their experience to about six people on average; each of the people who heard about it told one person, who in turn told another person on average. By the third retelling of the morgue visit, 881 people had heard about this in their community within 10 days. If everyone in society is connected with one another by six degrees of separation (Travers & Milgram, 1969) and if a chain letter can travel hundreds of steps via the Internet (Liben-Nowell & Kleinberg, 2008), the possibility of emotive gossip traveling through a vast social network is not a fantasy. Indeed, urban legends that evoke strong feelings of disgust tend to spread in cyberspace and become more prevalent on the Internet (Heath, Bell, & Sternberg, 2001).\n\nIn addition, when people exchange their gossip, it can spread through broader social networks<\/strong>. If gossip is transmitted from one person to another, the second person can transmit it to a third person, who then transmits it to a fourth, and so on through a chain of communication. This often happens for emotive stories. If gossip is repeatedly transmitted and spread, it can reach a large number of people. When stories travel through communication chains, they tend to become conventionalised (Bartlett, 1932). A Native American tale (the cultural origin of the tale is not specified) of the \u201cWar of the Ghosts\u201d recounts a warrior\u2019s encounter with ghosts traveling in canoes and his involvement with their ghostly battle. He is shot by an arrow but doesn\u2019t die, returning home to tell the tale. After his narration, however, he becomes still, a black thing comes out of his mouth, and he eventually dies. When it was told to a student in England in the 1920s and retold from memory to another person, who, in turn, retold it to another and so on in a communication chain, the mythic tale became a story of a young warrior going to a battlefield, in which canoes became boats, and the black thing that came out of his mouth became simply his spirit (Bartlett, 1932). In other words, information transmitted multiple times was transformed to something that was easily understood by many; information was assimilated into the common ground shared by most people in the linguistic community. More recently, Yoshihisa Kashima (2000) conducted a similar experiment using a story that contained a sequence of events that described a young couple\u2019s interaction that included both stereotypical and counter-stereotypical actions (e.g., a man watching sports on TV on Sunday as opposed to a man vacuuming the house). After the retelling of this story, much of the counter-stereotypical information was dropped, and stereotypical information was more likely to be retained. Because stereotypes are part of the common ground shared by the community, this finding too suggests that conversational retellings are likely to reproduce conventional content.\nPsychological Consequences of Language Use<\/span><\/h1>\nWhat are the psychological consequences of language use? When people use language to describe an experience, their thoughts and feelings are profoundly shaped by the linguistic representation that they have produced rather than the original experience (Holtgraves & Kashima, 2008). For example, Jamin Halberstadt (2003) showed a picture of a person displaying an ambiguous emotion and examined how people evaluated the displayed emotion. When people verbally explained why the target person was expressing a particular emotion, they tended to remember the person as feeling that emotion more intensely than when they simply labelled the emotion.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"]![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/original-2-1.jpg\")
Figure IL.18. <\/strong>Verbalising emotions. <\/strong>By verbalising our own emotional experiences, such as in a conversation with a close friend, we can improve our psychological well-being.[\/caption]\n\nThus, constructing a linguistic representation of another person\u2019s emotion apparently biased the speaker\u2019s memory of that person\u2019s emotion. Furthermore, linguistically labelling one\u2019s own emotional experience appears to alter the speaker\u2019s neural processes. When people linguistically labelled negative images, the amygdala \u2014 a brain structure that is critically involved in the processing of negative emotions such as fear \u2014 was activated less than when they were not given a chance to label them (Lieberman et al., 2007). Potentially because of these effects of verbalising emotional experiences, linguistic reconstructions of negative life events can have some therapeutic effects on those who suffer from the traumatic experiences (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). Sonja Lyubomirsky, Lorie Sousa, and Rene Dickerhoof (2006) found that writing and talking about negative past life events improved people\u2019s psychological well-being, but just thinking about them worsened it. Furthermore, if a certain type of language use (i.e., linguistic practice) is repeated by a large number of people in a community, it can potentially have a significant effect on their thoughts and actions (Holtgraves & Kashima, 2008). This notion is often called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis <\/strong>(Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956). For instance, if you are given a description of a man, Steven, as having greater than average experience of the world (e.g., well-traveled, varied job experience), a strong family orientation, and well-developed social skills, how do you describe Steven? Do you think you can remember Steven\u2019s personality five days later? It will probably be difficult, but if you know Chinese and are reading about Steven in Chinese (the original paper does not specify whether this is Mandarin or Cantonese), as Curt Hoffman, Ivy Lau, and David Johnson (1986) showed, the chances are that you can remember him well. This is because English does not have a word to describe this kind of personality, whereas Chinese does: sh\u00ec g\u00f9<\/em>. This way, the language you use can influence your cognition. In its strong form, it has been argued that language determines thought, but this is probably wrong. Language does not completely determine our thoughts \u2014 our thoughts are far too flexible for that \u2014 but habitual uses of language can influence our habit of thought and action. For instance, some linguistic practice seems to be associated even with cultural values and social institutions, like dropping pronouns. Pronouns such as \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d are used to represent the speaker and listener of a speech in English. In an English sentence, these pronouns cannot be dropped if they are used as the subject of a sentence. So, for instance, \u201cI went to the movie last night\u201d is fine, but \u201cWent to the movie last night\u201d is not in standard English. However, in other languages such as Japanese, pronouns can be, and in fact often are, dropped from sentences. It turns out that people living in those countries where pronoun drop languages are spoken tend to have more collectivistic values (e.g., employees having greater loyalty toward their employers) than those who use non\u2013pronoun drop languages such as English (Kashima & Kashima, 1998). It was argued that the explicit reference to \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cI\u201d may remind speakers of the distinction between the self and other, and it may remind speakers of the differentiation between individuals. Such a linguistic practice may act as a constant reminder of the cultural value, which, in turn, may encourage people to perform the linguistic practice.\n\nAn example of evidence for Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes from a comparison between English and Mandarin speakers (Boroditsky, 2000). In English, time is often metaphorically described in horizontal terms. For instance, good times are ahead of us, or hardship can be left behind us. We can move a meeting forward or backward. Mandarin speakers use similar horizontal metaphors too, but vertical metaphors are also used. So, for instance, the last month is called sh\u00e0ng g\u00e8 yu\u00e8 <\/em>or \u201cabove month,\u201d and the next month, xi\u00e0 g\u00e8 yu\u00e8 <\/em>or \u201cbelow month.\u201d To put it differently, the arrow of time flies horizontally in English, but it can fly both horizontally and vertically in Chinese. Does this difference in language use affect English and Chinese speakers\u2019 comprehension of language?\n\nThis is what Boroditsky (2000) found. First, English and Mandarin speakers\u2019 understanding of sentences that use a horizontal positioning (e.g., June comes before August) did not differ much. When they were first presented with a picture that implies a horizontal positioning (e.g., the black worm is ahead of the white worm), they could read and understand them faster than when they were presented with a picture that implies a vertical positioning (e.g., the black ball is above the white ball). This implies that thinking about the horizontal positioning, when described as ahead or behind, equally primed (i.e., reminded) both English and Chinese speakers of the horizontal metaphor used in the sentence about time. However, English and Chinese speakers\u2019 comprehension differed for statements that do not use a spatial metaphor (e.g., August is later than June). When primed with the vertical spatial positioning, Chinese speakers comprehended these statements faster, but English speakers more slowly, than when they were primed with the horizontal spatial positioning. Apparently, English speakers were not used to thinking about months in terms of the vertical line, when described as above or below. Indeed, when they were trained to do so, their comprehension was similar to Chinese speakers (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2010).\n\nThe idea that language and its structures influence and limit human thought is called linguistic relativity<\/strong>. The most frequently cited example of this possibility was proposed by Benjamin Whorf (1897\u20131941), a linguist who was particularly interested in Aboriginal languages. Whorf argued that the Inuit people of Canada had many words for snow, whereas English speakers have only one, and that this difference influenced how the different cultures perceived snow. Whorf argued that the Inuit perceived and categorised snow in finer details than English speakers possibly because the English language constrained perception. Although the idea of linguistic relativism seemed reasonable, research has suggested that language has less influence on thinking than might be expected. For one, in terms of perceptions of snow, although it is true that the Inuit do make more distinctions among types of snow than English speakers do, the latter also make some distinctions (e.g., think of words like powder, slush, whiteout, and so forth). It is also possible that thinking about snow may influence language, rather than the other way around.\n\nIn a more direct test of the possibility that language influences thinking, Eleanor Rosch (1973) compared people from the Dani culture of New Guinea, who have only two terms for colour, dark and bright, with English speakers who use many more terms. Rosch hypothesised that if language constrains perception and categorisation, then the Dani should have a harder time distinguishing colours than English speakers would. However, Rosch\u2019s research found that when the Dani were asked to categorise colours using new categories, they did so in almost the same way that English speakers did. Similar results were found by Michael Frank, Daniel Everett, Evelina Fedorenko, and Edward Gibson (2008), who showed that the Amazonian tribe known as the Pirah\u00e3, who have no linguistic method for expressing exact quantities, not even the number one, were nevertheless able to perform matches with large numbers without problem.\n\nAlthough these data led researchers to conclude that the language we use to describe colour and number does not influence our understanding of the underlying sensation, another more recent study has questioned this assumption. Debi Roberson, Ian Davies, and Jules Davidoff (2000) conducted another study with Dani participants and found that, at least for some colours, the names that they used to describe colours did influence their perceptions of the colours. Other researchers continue to test the possibility that our language influences our perceptions, and perhaps even our thoughts (Levinson, 1998), and yet the evidence for this possibility is, as of now, mixed.\nDevelopment of Language<\/span><\/h1>\n\nPsychology in Everyday Life: The Case of Genie<\/h2>\n<\/header>\n\n\nIn the fall of 1970, a social worker in the Los Angeles area found a 13-year-old girl who was being raised in extremely neglectful and abusive conditions. The girl, who came to be known as Genie, had lived most of her life tied to a potty chair or confined to a crib in a small room that was kept closed with the curtains drawn. For a little over a decade, Genie had virtually no social interaction and no access to the outside world. As a result of these conditions, Genie was unable to stand up, chew solid food, or speak (Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler, & Rigler, 1974; Rymer, 1993). The police took Genie into protective custody.\n\nGenie\u2019s abilities improved dramatically following her removal from her abusive environment, and early on, it appeared she was acquiring language \u2014 much later than would be predicted by critical period hypotheses that had been posited at the time (Fromkin et al., 1974). Genie managed to amass an impressive vocabulary in a relatively short amount of time. However, she never mastered the grammatical aspects of language (Curtiss, 1981). Perhaps being deprived of the opportunity to learn language during a critical period impeded Genie\u2019s ability to fully acquire and use language. Genie\u2019s case, while not conclusive, suggests that early language input is needed for language learning. This is also why it is important to determine quickly if a child is deaf and to begin immediately to communicate in sign language in order to maximise the chances of fluency (Mayberry, Lock, & Kazmi, 2002).\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nAll children with typical brains who are exposed to language will develop it seemingly effortlessly. They do not need to be taught explicitly how to conjugate verbs, they do not need to memorise vocabulary lists, and they will easily pick up any accent or dialect that they are exposed to. Indeed, children seem to learn to use language much more easily than adults do. You may recall that each language has its own set of phonemes that are used to generate morphemes, words, and so on. Babies can discriminate among the sounds that make up a language (e.g., they can tell the difference between the \u201cs\u201d in vision and the \u201css\u201d in fission), and they can differentiate between the sounds of all human languages, even those that do not occur in the languages that are used in their environments. However, by the time that they are about one year old, they can only discriminate among those phonemes that are used in the language or languages in their environments (Jensen, 2011; Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 2002).\nLearning Language<\/span><\/h1>\nLanguage learning begins even before birth because the fetus can hear muffled versions of speaking from outside the womb. Christine Moon, Robin Cooper, and William Fifer (1993) found that infants only two days old sucked harder on a pacifier when they heard their mothers\u2019 native language being spoken \u2014 even when strangers were speaking the languages \u2014 than when they heard a foreign language. Babies are also aware of the patterns of their native language, showing surprise when they hear speech that has different patterns of phonemes than those they are used to (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 2004).\n\nDuring the first year or so after birth, long before they speak their first words, infants are already learning language. One aspect of this learning is practice in producing speech. By the time they are six to eight weeks old, babies start making vowel sounds (e.g., ooohh, aaahh, goo) as well as a variety of cries and squeals to help them practice.\n\nAt about seven months, infants begin babbling<\/strong>, which is to say they are engaging in intentional vocalisations that lack specific meaning. Children babble as practice in creating specific sounds, and by the time they are one year old, the babbling uses primarily the sounds of the language that they are learning (de Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand, 1984). These vocalisations have a conversational tone that sounds meaningful even though it is not. Babbling also helps children understand the social, communicative function of language (Figure IL.19). Children who are exposed to sign language babble in sign by making hand movements that represent real language (Petitto & Marentette, 1991).\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"]![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/Figure-10-12.jpg\")
Figure IL.19. Baby vocal exchanges<\/strong>. <\/em>Babies often engage in vocal exchanges to help them practice language.[\/caption]\n\nAt the same time that infants are practicing their speaking skills by babbling, they are also learning to better understand sounds and eventually the words of language. One of the first words that children understand is their own name, usually by about six months, followed by commonly used words like \u201cbottle,\u201d \u201cmama,\u201d and \u201cdoggie\u201d by 10 to 12 months (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995).\n\nThe infant usually produces their first words at about one year of age. It is at this point that the child first understands that words are more than sounds \u2014 they refer to particular objects and ideas. By the time children are two years old, they have a vocabulary of several hundred words, and by kindergarten their vocabularies have increased to several thousand words. By Grade 5, most children know about 50,000 words; by the time they are in university, most know about 200,000. This may vary for people who don\u2019t attend university or complete higher education.\n\nThe early utterances of children contain many errors, for instance, confusing \/b\/ and \/d\/, or \/c\/ and \/z\/, and the words that children create are often simplified, in part because they are not yet able to make the more complex sounds of the real language (Dobrich & Scarborough, 1992). Children may say \u201ckeekee\u201d for kitty, \u201cnana\u201d for banana, and \u201cvesketti\u201d for spaghetti in part because it is easier. Often these early words are accompanied by gestures that may also be easier to produce than the words themselves. Children\u2019s pronunciations become increasingly accurate between one and three years, but some problems may persist until school age.\n\nMost of a child\u2019s first words are nouns, and early sentences may include only the noun. \u201cMa\u201d may mean \u201cmore milk please,\u201d and \u201cda\u201d may mean \u201clook, there\u2019s Fido.\u201d Eventually the length of the utterances increases to two words (e.g., \u201cmo ma\u201d or \u201cda bark\u201d), and these primitive sentences begin to follow the appropriate syntax of the native language.\n\nBecause language involves the active categorisation of sounds and words into higher level units, children make some mistakes in interpreting what words mean and how to use them. In particular, they often make overextensions <\/strong>of concepts, which means they use a given word in a broader context than appropriate. For example, a child might at first call all adult men \u201cdaddy\u201d or all animals \u201cdoggie.\u201d\n\nChildren also use contextual information, particularly the cues that parents provide, to help them learn language. Infants are frequently more attuned to the tone of voice of the person speaking than to the content of the words themselves and are aware of the target of speech. Janet Werker, Judith Pegg, and Peter McLeod (1994) found that infants listened longer to a woman who was speaking to a baby than to a woman who was speaking to another adult.\n\nChildren learn that people are usually referring to things that they are looking at when they are speaking (Baldwin, 1993) and that the speaker\u2019s emotional expressions are related to the content of their speech. Children also use their knowledge of syntax to help them figure out what words mean. If a child sees an adult point to a strange object and hears them say, \u201cthis is a dirb,\u201d they will infer that a \u201cdirb\u201d is a thing, but if they hear them say, \u201cthis is a one of those dirb things,\u201d they will infer that it refers to the colour or another characteristic of the object. Additionally, if they hear the word \u201cdirbing,\u201d they will infer that \u201cdirbing\u201d is something that we do (Waxman, 1990).\nHow Children Learn Language: Theories of Language Acquisition<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\nPsychological theories of language learning differ in terms of the importance they place on nature versus nurture, yet it is clear that both matter. Children are not born knowing language; they learn to speak by hearing what happens around them. Human brains, unlike those of any other animal, are wired in a way that leads them, almost effortlessly, to learn language.\n\nPerhaps the most straightforward explanation of language development is that it occurs through principles of learning, including association, reinforcement, and the observation of others (Skinner, 1965). There must be at least some truth to the idea that language is learned because children learn the language that they hear spoken around them rather than some other language. Also supporting this idea is the gradual improvement of language skills with time. It seems that children modify their language through imitation, reinforcement and shaping, as would be predicted by learning theories.\n\nHowever, language cannot be entirely learned. For one, children learn words too fast for them to be learned through reinforcement. Between the ages of 18 months and five years, children learn up to 10 new words every day (Anglin, 1993). More importantly, language is more generative than it is imitative. Generativity <\/strong>refers to the fact that speakers of a language can compose sentences to represent new ideas that they have never before been exposed to. Language is not a predefined set of ideas and sentences that we choose when we need them, but rather a system of rules and procedures that allows us to create an infinite number of statements, thoughts, and ideas, including those that have never previously occurred. When a child says that they \u201cswimmed\u201d in the pool, for instance, they are showing generativity. No native speaker of English would ever say \u201cswimmed,\u201d yet it is easily generated from the normal system of producing language.\n\nOther evidence that refutes the idea that all language is learned through experience comes from the observation that children may learn languages better than they ever hear them. Deaf children whose parents do not use sign language very well nevertheless are able to learn it perfectly on their own, and they may even make up their own language if they need to (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1998). A group of deaf children in a school in Nicaragua, whose teachers could not sign, invented a way to communicate through made-up signs (Senghas, Senghas, & Pyers, 2005). The development of this new Nicaraguan Sign Language has continued and changed as new generations of students have come to the school and started using the language. Although the original system was not a real language (i.e., it was created from scratch and did not descend from our ancestral past), it is becoming closer and closer every year, showing the development of a new language in modern times.\n\nThe linguist Noam Chomsky is a believer in the nature approach to language, arguing that human brains contain a language acquisition device that includes a universal grammar <\/strong>that underlies all human language (Chomsky, 1965, 1972). According to this approach, each of the many languages spoken around the world \u2014 there are between 6,000 and 8,000 \u2014 is an individual example of the same underlying set of procedures that are hardwired into human brains. Chomsky\u2019s account proposes that children are born with a knowledge of general rules of syntax that determine how sentences are constructed and then coordinate with the language the child is exposed to.\n\n<\/div>\nChomsky differentiates between the deep structure of an idea <\/strong>\u2014 how the idea is represented in the fundamental universal grammar that is common to all languages \u2014 and the surface structure of the idea <\/strong>\u2014 how it is expressed in any one language. Once we hear or express a thought in surface structure, we generally forget exactly how it happened. At the end of a lecture, you will remember a lot of the deep structure (i.e., the ideas expressed by the instructor), but you cannot reproduce the surface structure (i.e., the exact words that the instructor used to communicate the ideas).\n\nAlthough there is general agreement among psychologists that babies are genetically programmed to learn language, there is still debate about Chomsky\u2019s idea that there is a universal grammar that can account for all language learning. Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson (2009) surveyed the world\u2019s languages and found that none of the presumed underlying features of the language acquisition device were entirely universal. In their search, they found languages that did not have noun or verb phrases, that did not have tenses (e.g., past, present, future), and even some that did not have nouns or verbs at all, even though a basic assumption of a universal grammar is that all languages should share these features.\nBilingualism and Cognitive Development<\/span><\/h2>\nBilingualism<\/strong>, which is the ability to speak two languages, is becoming more and more frequent in the modern world. Nearly one-half of the world\u2019s population, including 17% of Canadian citizens, grows up bilingual.\n\nIn Canada, education is under provincial jurisdiction; however, the federal government has been a strong supporter of establishing Canada as a bilingual country and has helped pioneer the French immersion programs in the public education systems throughout the country. In contrast, many US states have passed laws outlawing bilingual education in schools based on the idea that students will have a stronger identity with the school, the culture, and the government if they speak only English. This is, in part, based on the idea that speaking two languages may interfere with cognitive development. There appears to be little evidence for such an assertion. In fact, throughout most of human history, human beings have lived in multilingual societies. In literate societies, it was common for people to use one language for everyday use and another for official or literary purposes (Sanskrit in Ancient India and Southeast Asia, Greek in the Roman empire, Latin in Western Europe, Persian in the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and Classical Arabic in the Islamic World were all used as academic language while other languages were used in day-to-day interactions).\n\nA variety of minority language immersion programs are now offered across the country depending on need and interest. In British Columbia, for instance, the city of Vancouver established a new bilingual Mandarin Chinese-English immersion program in 2002 at the elementary school level in order to accommodate Vancouver\u2019s both historic and present strong ties to the Mandarin-speaking world. Similar programs have been developed for both Hindi and Punjabi to serve the large South Asian cultural community in the city of Surrey. By default, most schools in British Columbia teach in English, with French immersion options available. In both English and French schools, one can study and take government exams in Japanese, Punjabi, Mandarin, French, Spanish, and German at the secondary level.\n\nSome early psychological research showed that, when compared with monolingual children, bilingual children performed more slowly when processing language, and their verbal scores were lower. However, these tests were frequently given in English, even when this was not the child\u2019s first language, and the children tested were often of lower socioeconomic status than the monolingual children (Andrews, 1982).\n\nMore current research that has controlled for these factors has found that, although bilingual children may, in some cases, learn language somewhat more slowly than do monolingual children (Oller & Pearson, 2002), bilingual and monolingual children do not significantly differ in the final depth of language learning, nor do they generally confuse the two languages (Nicoladis & Genesee, 1997). In fact, participants who speak two languages have been found to have better cognitive functioning, cognitive flexibility, and analytic skills in comparison to monolinguals (Bialystok, 2009). Research has also found that learning a second language produces changes in the area of the brain in the left hemisphere that is involved in language (Figure IL.20), such that this area is denser and contains more neurons (Mechelli et al., 2004). Furthermore, the increased density is stronger in those individuals who are most proficient in their second language and who learned the second language earlier. Thus, rather than slowing language development, learning a second language seems to increase cognitive abilities.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"]![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/35c08232d2ab70983f428dfaf1ca950f-1024x1536-1A.jpg\" "\\"A")
Figure IL.20A. Bilingual children and gray matter.<\/strong> Andrea Mechelli and colleagues (Mechelli et al., 2004) found that children who were bilingual had increased gray matter density (i.e., more neurons) in cortical areas related to language in comparison to monolinguals (panel a).[\/caption]\n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"]![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/35c08232d2ab70983f428dfaf1ca950f-1024x1536-1B.jpg\" "\\"A")
Figure IL.20B. Bilingual children and gray matter.<\/strong> They found that gray matter density correlated positively with second language proficiency (panel b).[\/caption]\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"]![\"A](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/35c08232d2ab70983f428dfaf1ca950f-1024x1536-1C.jpg\" "\\"A")
Figure IL.20C. Bilingual children and gray matter.<\/strong> They found that gray matter density correlated negatively with the age at which the second language was learned (panel c).[\/caption]\nBiology of Language<\/h1>\nFor the 90% of people who are right-handed, language is stored and controlled by the left cerebral cortex, while for some left-handers this pattern is reversed. These differences can easily be seen in the results of neuroimaging studies that show that listening to and producing language creates greater activity in the left hemisphere than in the right. Broca\u2019s area<\/strong>, an area in front of the left hemisphere near the motor cortex, is responsible for language production (Figure IL.21). This area was first localized in the 1860s by the French physician Paul Broca, who studied patients with lesions to various parts of the brain. Wernicke\u2019s area<\/strong>, an area of the brain next to the auditory cortex, is responsible for language comprehension.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"]![\"This](\"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/psychologymtdi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/470\/2024\/08\/9691b512af9ba507db9435759198dee4-1024x676-1.jpg\" "\\"This")
Figure IL.21. <\/strong>Broca\u2019s Area and Wernicke\u2019s Area<\/strong>. Drawing of the human brain showing Broca\u2019s area and Wernicke\u2019s area.[\/caption]\n\nEvidence for the importance of Broca\u2019s area and Wernicke\u2019s area in language is seen in patients who experience aphasia<\/strong>, a condition in which language functions are severely impaired. People with Broca\u2019s aphasia have difficulty producing speech, whereas people with damage to Wernicke\u2019s area can produce speech, but what they say makes no sense, and they have trouble understanding language.\nCan Animals Learn Language?<\/span><\/h1>\nNonhuman animals have a wide variety of systems of communication. Some species communicate using scents; others use visual displays, such as baring the teeth, puffing up the fur, or flapping the wings; and still others use vocal sounds. Male songbirds, such as canaries and finches, sing songs to attract mates and to protect territory, and chimpanzees use a combination of facial expressions, sounds, and actions, such as slapping the ground, to convey aggression (de Waal, 1989). Honeybees use a waggle dance to direct other bees to the location of food sources (von Frisch, 1956). The language of vervet monkeys is relatively advanced in the sense that they use specific sounds to communicate specific meanings. Vervets make different calls to signify that they have seen either a leopard, a snake, or a hawk (Seyfarth & Cheney, 1997). Despite their wide abilities to communicate, efforts to teach animals to use language have had only limited success. One of the early efforts was made by Catherine and Keith Hayes (1952), who raised a chimpanzee named Viki in their home along with their own children, but Viki learned little and could never speak. Researchers speculated that Viki\u2019s difficulties might have been, in part, because she could not create the words in her vocal cords. Subsequent attempts were made to teach primates to speak using sign language or boards on which they could point to symbols.\n\nIn another famous case, an African grey parrot called Alex was able to identify and name certain objects, and even categorise them in terms of shape or colour (Pepperberg, 2010). Alex used the words he had been taught and eventually began to use other words that he had not been trained for; this was evidence that he was picking up words and using them correctly merely by being exposed to them. Alex was also able to make rudimentary phrases without being taught them specifically.\n\nAllen and Beatrix Gardner worked for many years to teach a chimpanzee named Washoe to sign using ASL. Washoe, who lived to be 42 years old, could label up to 250 different objects and make simple requests and comments, such as \u201cplease tickle\u201d and \u201cme sorry\u201d (Fouts, 1997). Washoe\u2019s adopted daughter Loulis, who was never exposed to human signers, learned more than 70 signs simply by watching her mother sign.\n\nThe most proficient nonhuman language user is Kanzi, a bonobo who lives at the Language Learning Center at Georgia State University (Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994; Raffaele, 2006). The following YouTube link shows that Kanzi has a propensity for language that is in many ways similar to humans.\n\nWatch this video: Kanzi and Novel Sentences (2 minutes)<\/a>\n\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2Dhc2zePJFE\n\n\u201cKanzi and Novel Sentences\u201d video by IowaPrimate .LearningSanctuary is licensed under the Standard YouTube licence.\n\nKanzi learned faster when he was younger than when he got older. He learns by observation, and he can use symbols to comment on social interactions rather than simply for food treats. Kanzi can also create elementary syntax and understand relatively complex commands. Kanzi can make tools and can even play the video game Pac-Man.\n\nYet even Kanzi does not have a true language in the same way that humans do. Human babies learn words faster and faster as they get older, but Kanzi does not. Each new word he learns is almost as difficult as the one before. Kanzi usually requires many trials to learn a new sign, whereas human babies can speak words after only one exposure. Kanzi\u2019s language is focused primarily on food and pleasure and only rarely on social relationships. Although he can combine words, he generates few new phrases and cannot master syntactic rules beyond the level of about a two-year-old human child (Greenfield & Savage-Rumbaugh, 1991).\n\nIn summary, although many animals communicate, none of them has a true language. With some exceptions, the information that can be communicated in nonhuman species is limited primarily to displays of liking or disliking and related to basic motivations of aggression and mating. Humans also use this more primitive type of communication \u2014 in the form of nonverbal behaviours <\/strong>such as eye contact, touch, hand signs, and interpersonal distance \u2014 to communicate their like or dislike for others, but they, unlike animals, also supplant this more primitive communication with language. Although other animal brains share similarities to ours, only the human brain is complex enough to create language. What is perhaps most remarkable is that although language never appears in nonhumans, language is universal in humans. All humans, unless they have a profound brain abnormality or are completely isolated from other humans, learn language.\n\nSource: Adapted from Kashima (2020).\nImage Descriptions<\/h1>\n<\/a>Figure IL.12. English Consonants image description:<\/strong> The consonants are between two brackets ().\n
- \n \t
- Review the components and structure of language.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe the process by which people can share new information by using language.<\/li>\n \t
- Characterise the typical content of conversation and its social implications.<\/li>\n \t
- Characterise psychological consequences of language use and give an example.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe how children acquire language.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe theories of language development.<\/li>\n \t
- Explain the biological underpinnings of language.<\/li>\n \t
- Describe the use of language in non-human animals.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nHuman language is the most complex behaviour on the planet and, at least as far as we know, in the universe. Language involves both the ability to comprehend spoken and written words and to create communication in real time when we speak or write. Most languages are oral, generated through speaking. Speaking involves a variety of complex cognitive, social, and biological processes, including operation of the vocal cords and the coordination of breath with movements of the throat, mouth, and tongue.\n\nOther languages are sign languages, in which the communication is expressed by movements of the hands. The most common sign language is American Sign Language (ASL), commonly used in many countries across the world and adapted for use in varying countries. The other main sign language used in Canada is la Langue des Signes Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coise (LSQ); there is also a regional dialect, Maritime Sign Language (MSL).\n\nAlthough language is often used for the transmission of information (e.g., \u201cturn right at the next light and then go straight\u201d or \u201cplace tab A into slot B\u201d), this is only its most basic function. Language also allows us to access existing knowledge, to draw conclusions, to set and accomplish goals, and to understand and communicate complex social relationships. Language is fundamental to our ability to think; without it we would be much less intelligent than we are.\n\nLanguage can be conceptualised in terms of sounds, meaning, and the environmental factors that help us understand them. Phonemes are the elementary sounds of our language; morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language; syntax is the set of grammatical rules that control how words are put together; and contextual information consists of the elements of communication that are not part of the content of language but that help us understand its meaning.\n\nSpeech requires the use of the vocal tract. The vocal tract, as seen in Figure IL.10, is composed of the parts of the mouth and nose through which air flows. The larynx provides the voice or vibration to the sounds we produce. Moving the tongue, lips, and other parts of the vocal tract modifies the airflow and allows us to produce all the sounds found in human languages.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1536\"] Figure IL.10. Human vocal tract.<\/strong>[\/caption]\n\n \n
The<\/span> Co<\/span>mponents<\/span> of Language<\/span><\/h1>\nThe complexity of language comes from the fact that it is made up of interconnected levels and units that interact with each other. Therefore, when you are studying language (or linguistics), you can study it at different levels depending on the context. The study of the sound patterns of language is known as phonology; the study of meaningful units is called morphology; the study of meaning is called semantics and the way language is used beyond these constraints in different contexts is known as pragmatics.\n\nPhonology is the field of linguistics dealing with phonemes. A phoneme <\/strong>is the smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful difference in a language. In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes. For example, the word \u201cbit\u201d has three phonemes: \/b\/, \/i\/, and \/t\/. The word \u201cpit\u201d also has three: \/p\/, \/i\/, and \/t\/. The only difference between \u2018pit\u2019 and \u2018bit\u2019 is the first sound. Such words that differ in only one sound are called minimal pairs and are useful in discovering all the phonemes that exist in a language. In spoken languages, phonemes are produced by the positions and movements of the vocal tract, including our lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, and throat, whereas in sign languages, phonemes are defined by the shapes and movement of the hands.\n\nPhonemes can be classified into vowels and consonants. Phonemes that are produced without any obstruction to the flow of air are called vowels. Phonemes that are produced with some kind of disruptions to the airflow are called consonants. Of course, nature is not as clear-cut as all that and we do make some sounds that are somewhere in between these two categories. These are called semivowels but are usually classified alongside consonants (e.g., initial phonemes in w<\/strong>ell and y<\/strong>awn).\n\nThere are hundreds of unique phonemes that can be made by human speakers, but most languages only use a small subset of the possibilities. English contains about 45 phonemes, whereas other languages have as few as 15 and others more than 60. The Hawaiian language contains only about a dozen phonemes, including five vowels \u2014 a, e, i, o, and u \u2014 and seven consonants \u2014 h, k, l, m, n, p, and w. Figure IL.11 and Figure IL.12 shows the vowels and consonants found in the English language. The outline in Figure IL.11 is called a tongue map. It shows the shape and positions of the tongue when we articulate each vowel. Each black circle is situated in the position of the tongue when that vowel is pronounced. You can check this yourself by saying \u2018ee\u2019 and \u2018aa\u2019 and feel how your tongue moves upwards for the former and downwards for the latter. Similarly try saying \u2018ee\u2019 and \u2018oo\u2019 repeatedly and feel how your tongue moved forwards for the former and backwards for the latter. Vowels are the most variable across different dialects in a language. Therefore, one of the main ways we differentiate between various dialects in a language (such as Standard Canadian, American Southern, British Received Pronunciation, or General America) is in the nature of their vowels when pronouncing the same words.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"832\"]
Figure IL.11. English Vowels. <\/strong>Blue o is the RP in British English.[\/caption]\n\nFigure IL.12 shows the consonants in English. Consonants tend to be quite stable across the various dialects of a language with some minor variations. The figure shows the consonants arranged according to their manner and place of articulation. Manner of articulation refers to how the airflow escapes through the vocal tract. For example, when you say \u2018pit\u2019 or \u2018kit\u2019 you briefly stop the airflow for the first sound in each word. Therefore, these sounds are called stops. Fricatives such as the first sounds in \u2018ship\u2019, \u2018sip\u2019, and \u2018fin\u2019 obstruct the flow of air but do not stop it. Affricates are the blend of one stop and one fricative sound. So \/t\/ and \/sh\/ together create \/ch\/. Nasal sounds such as \/m\/ and \/n\/ release the airflow through the nasal cavity as well as the mouth (oral cavity).\n\nPlace of articulation refers to what parts of the vocal tract come into contact when producing the consonant. Bilabial sounds such as \/p\/, \/b\/ and \/m\/ are produced with two (bi) lips (labia) coming into contact with each other. Dental sounds, as the name implies, are produced with the tongue touching the upper teeth. The alveolar ridge is a hard bit just behind the teeth. The tongue touching this region produces alveolar sounds such as \/n\/, \/t\/, \/s\/, and \/l\/. The going just behind the alveolar ridge (post-alveolar) produces sounds such as \/sh\/ as well as the \u2018s\u2019 in \u2018measure\u2019. The top of the tongue touching the top of the mouth or soft palate produces palatal sounds such as \/y\/ while the back of the tongue touching the velum or hard palate produces sounds such as \/k\/ and \/g\/.<\/a>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1034\"] Figure IL.12. English consonants. <\/strong>Red ch is only found in some dialects in Scotland. [Image Description]<\/em><\/a>[\/caption]Because phonemes are actually a category of sounds that are treated alike within the language, speakers of different languages are able to hear the difference between only some phonemes but not others. This is known as the categorical perception of speech sounds<\/strong>. English speakers can differentiate the \/r\/ phoneme from the \/l\/ phoneme, and thus \u201crake\u201d and \u201clake\u201d are heard as different words. In Japanese, however, \/r\/ and \/l\/ are the same phoneme, and thus speakers of that language are not likely to tell the difference between the word \u201crake\u201d and the word \u201clake.\u201d Try saying the words \u201ccool\u201d and \u201ckeep\u201d out loud. Can you hear the difference between the two \/k\/ sounds? To monolingual English speakers they both sound the same, but to speakers of Arabic, these represent two different phonemes (Figure IL.13).\n\nInfants are born able to understand all phonemes, but they lose their ability to do so as they get older; by 10 months of age, a child\u2019s ability to recognise phonemes becomes very similar to that of the adult speakers of the native language of the child\u2019s culture. Phonemes that were initially differentiated come to be treated as equivalent (Werker & Tees, 2002).\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1536\"] Figure IL.13. Phonemes.<\/strong> When adults hear speech sounds that gradually change from one phoneme to another, they do not hear the continuous change; rather, they hear one sound until they suddenly begin hearing the other. In this case, the change is from \/ba\/ to \/pa\/ (Wood, 1976).[\/caption]\n\nWhereas phonemes are the smallest units of sound in language, a morpheme <\/strong>is a string of one or more phonemes that makes up the smallest units of meaning in a language. Some morphemes, such as one-letter words like \u201cI\u201d and \u201ca,\u201d are also phonemes, but most morphemes are made up of combinations of phonemes. Some morphemes are prefixes and suffixes used to modify other words. For example, the syllable \u201cre-\u201d as in \u201crewrite\u201d or \u201crepay\u201d means \u201cto do again,\u201d and the suffix \u201c-est\u201d as in \u201chappiest\u201d or \u201ccoolest\u201d means \u201cto the maximum.\u201d\n\nLanguages differ in terms of how they combine units of meaning (morphemes) to create new words. Figure IL.14 shows four types of morphology. Isolating languages do not combine morphemes but keep them isolated. Therefore, the word for an American is not a combination of \u2018America\u2019 and \u2018-an\u2019 but \u2018beautiful\u2019 \u2018country\u2019 and \u2018person\u2019. Agglutinative languages such as Salish and most Indigenous languages of Canada glue<\/em> morphemes together but do not transform them. This means each morpheme is clearly observable even after combining to form a new word. On the other hand, when the fusing of morphemes leads to the resulting word changing the morpheme, this is a fusional or inflectional morphology (as seen in English or Spanish). There are some other interesting morphologies, such as Mohawk (spoken in the Eastern parts of Canada), which fuse lots of morphemes together to form extremely long words. Such polysynthetic morphologies are rare.<\/a>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1536\"] Figure IL.14. Different types of Morphology.<\/strong> [Image Description]<\/em><\/a>[\/caption]Syntax <\/strong>is the set of rules of a language by which we construct sentences. Each language has a different syntax. The syntax of the English language requires that each sentence have a noun and a verb, each of which may be modified by adjectives and adverbs. Figure IL.15 shows the syntax for a simple sentence in English with its syntactic categories: determiners (DET), nouns (N), verbs (V), noun phrases (NP) and verb phrases (VP). Some syntaxes make use of the order in which words appear, while others do not. In English, \u201cThe man bites the dog\u201d is different from \u201cThe dog bites the man.\u201d In German, however, only the article endings before the noun matter. \u201cDer Hund beisst den Mann\u201d means \u201cThe dog bites the man\u201d but so does \u201cDen Mann beisst der Hund.\u201d<\/a>\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"964\"] Figure IL.15. Sentence Structure in English.<\/strong> [Image Description]<\/em><\/a>[\/caption]Words do not possess fixed meanings, but change their interpretation as a function of the context in which they are spoken. We use contextual information <\/strong>\u2014 the information surrounding language \u2014 to help us interpret it. Examples of contextual information include the knowledge that we have and that we know other people have, and nonverbal expressions such as facial expressions, postures, gestures, and tone of voice. Misunderstandings can easily arise if people are not attentive to contextual information or if some of it is missing, such as it may be in newspaper headlines or in text messages.\n\nThe following are examples of headlines in which syntax is correct, but the interpretation can be ambiguous:\n- \n \t
- Grandmother of Eight Makes Hole in One\n
- \n \t
- \u201chole in one\u201d can refer to an achievement in golf or to literally making a hole in one of the children<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Milk Drinkers Turn to Powder\n
- \n \t
- People who drink milk choose powdered milk or they literally turned to powder<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Farmer Bill Dies in House\n
- \n \t
- A government bill for farmers is voted down in the US House of Representatives or a farmer named Bill dies in a house<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Old School Pillars Are Replaced by Alumni\n
- \n \t
- The \u201cpillars\u201d could refer to columns or a reference to esteemed people of the school<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Two Convicts Evade Noose, Jury Hung\n
- \n \t
- \u201cHung\u201d could refer to being hanged with a noose or being indecisive<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n \t
- Include Your Children When Baking Cookies\n
- \n \t
- Include children in the activity of baking or literally include them as an ingredient when baking<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
How do we use language?<\/span><\/h1>\nIf language is so ubiquitous, how do we actually use it? To be sure, some of us use it to write diaries and poetry, but the primary form of language use is interpersonal. That\u2019s how we learn language, and that\u2019s how we use it. We exchange words and utterances to communicate with each other. Let\u2019s consider the simplest case of two people, Adam and Ben, talking with each other. Judging from their clothing, they are young businessmen, taking a break from work. They have this exchange:\n
\n\nAdam: \u201cYou know, Gary bought a ring.\u201d\n\nBen: \u201cOh yeah? For Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\n\nAdam nods.\n\n<\/div>\nAccording to Herbert Clark (1996), in order for them to carry out a conversation, they must keep track of common ground. Common ground <\/strong>is a set of knowledge that the speaker and listener share and they think, assume, or otherwise take for granted that they share. So, when Adam says, \u201cGary bought a ring,\u201d he takes for granted that Ben knows the meaning of the words he is using, who Gary is, and what buying a ring means. When Ben says, \u201cFor Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he takes for granted that Adam knows the meaning of these words, who Mary is, and what buying a ring for someone means. All these are part of their common ground.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"] Figure IL.16. Common ground.<\/strong> Common ground in a conversation helps people coordinate their language use, and as conversations progress, common ground shifts and changes as the participants add new information and cooperate to help one another understand.[\/caption]\n\nNote that, when Adam presents the information about Gary\u2019s purchase of a ring, Ben responds by presenting his inference about who the recipient of the ring might be, namely, Mary. In conversational terms, Ben\u2019s utterance acts as evidence for his comprehension of Adam\u2019s utterance \u2014 \u201cYes, I understood that Gary bought a ring\u201d \u2014 and Adam\u2019s nod acts as evidence that he now has understood what Ben has said too \u2014 \u201cYes, I understood that you understood that Gary has bought a ring for Mary.\u201d This new information is now added to the initial common ground. Thus, the pair of utterances by Adam and Ben, called an adjacency pair, together with Adam\u2019s affirmative nod jointly completes one proposition, \u201cGary bought a ring for Mary,\u201d and adds this information to their common ground. This way, common ground changes as we talk, gathering new information that we agree on and have evidence that we share. It evolves as people take turns to assume the roles of speaker and listener and actively engage in the exchange of meaning.\n\nCommon ground helps people coordinate their language use. For instance, when a speaker says something to a listener, they take into account their common ground, that is, what the speaker thinks the listener knows. Adam said what he did because he knew Ben would know who Gary was. He\u2019d have said, \u201cA friend of mine is getting married,\u201d to another colleague who wouldn\u2019t know Gary. This is called audience design <\/strong>(Fussell & Krauss, 1992); speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audience's knowledge. If their audience is seen to be knowledgeable about an object, such as Ben about Gary, they tend to use a brief label of the object (i.e., Gary); for a less knowledgeable audience, they use more descriptive words (e.g., \u201ca friend of mine\u201d) to help the audience understand their utterances.\n\nIn systematic research on audience design, Susan Fussell and Robert Krauss (1992) found that, when communicating about public figures, speakers included more descriptive information (e.g., physical appearances and occupation) about lesser known and less identifiable people (e.g., Kevin Kline or Carl Icahn) than better known ones (e.g., Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood), so that their listeners could identify them. Likewise, Ellen Isaacs and Herbert Clark (1987) showed that people who were familiar with New York City (NYC) could gauge their audience\u2019s familiarity with NYC soon after they began conversation and adjusted their descriptions of NYC landmarks to help the audience identify such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge and Yankee Stadium more easily. More generally, Paul Grice (1975) suggested that speakers often follow certain rules, called conversational maxims, by trying to be informative (e.g., maxim of quantity), truthful (e.g., maxim of quality), relevant (e.g., maxim of relation), and clear and unambiguous (e.g., maxim of manner).\n\nSo, language use is a cooperative activity, but how do we coordinate our language use in a conversational setting? To be sure, we have a conversation in small groups. The number of people engaging in a conversation at a time is rarely more than four. By some counts (e.g., Dunbar, Duncan, & Nettle, 1995; James, 1953), more than 90% of conversations happen in a group of four or fewer individuals. Certainly, coordinating conversation among four is not as difficult as coordinating conversation among 10, but even among only four people, if you think about it, everyday conversation is an almost miraculous achievement. We typically have a conversation by rapidly exchanging words and utterances in real time in a noisy environment. Think about your conversation at home in the morning, at a bus stop, in a shopping mall. How can we keep track of our common ground under such circumstances?\n\nMartin Pickering and Simon Garrod (2004) argue that we achieve our conversational coordination by virtue of our ability to interactively align each other\u2019s actions at different levels of language use: lexicon <\/strong>(i.e., words and expressions), syntax <\/strong>(i.e., grammatical rules for arranging words and expressions together), as well as speech rate and accent. For instance, when one person uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression (e.g., Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). Furthermore, if someone says \u201cthe cowboy offered a banana to the robber,\u201d rather than \u201cthe cowboy offered the robber a banana,\u201d others are more likely to use the same syntactic structure (e.g., \u201cthe girl gave a book to the boy\u201d rather than \u201cthe girl gave the boy a book\u201d) even if different words are involved (Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000). Finally, people in conversation tend to exhibit similar accents and rates of speech, and they are often associated with people\u2019s social identity (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991). So, if you have lived in different places where people have somewhat different accents (e.g., the United States and the United Kingdom), you might have noticed that when you speak with Americans you use an American accent but when you speak with Britons you use a British accent.\n\nPickering and Garrod (2004) suggest that these interpersonal alignments at different levels of language use can activate similar situation models <\/strong>in the minds of those who are engaged in a conversation. Situation models are representations about the topic of a conversation. So, if you are talking about Gary and Mary with your friends, you might have in your mind a situation model of Gary giving Mary a ring. Pickering and Garrod\u2019s theory suggests that as you describe a situation using language, others in the conversation begin to use similar words and grammar, and many other aspects of language use converge. As you all do so, similar situation models begin to be built in everyone\u2019s mind through the mechanism known as priming. Priming <\/strong>occurs when your thinking about one concept (e.g., ring) reminds you about other related concepts (e.g., marriage or wedding ceremony). So, if everyone in the conversation knows about Gary, Mary, and the usual course of events associated with a ring \u2014 involving engagement, wedding, marriage, and so on \u2014 everyone is likely to construct a shared situation model about Gary and Mary. Thus, making use of our highly developed interpersonal ability to imitate (i.e., executing the same action as another person) and cognitive ability to infer (i.e., one idea leading to other ideas), we humans coordinate our common ground, share situation models, and communicate with each other.\nWhat Do We Talk About?<\/span><\/h1>\nWhat are humans doing when they are talking? Surely, we can communicate about ordinary things such as what to have for dinner, but also more complex and abstract things such as the meaning of life and death, liberty, equality, fraternity, and many other philosophical thoughts. When naturally occurring conversations were actually observed (Dunbar, Marriott, & Duncan, 1997), a staggering 60\u201370% of everyday conversation, for both men and women, turned out to be gossip \u2014 people talk about themselves and others whom they know (Figure IL.17). Just like Adam and Ben, more often than not, people use language to communicate about their social world.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"]
Figure IL.17. <\/em><\/strong>Gossip<\/strong>. <\/em>Studies show that people love to gossip. By gossiping, humans can communicate and share their representations about their social world \u2014 who their friends and enemies are, what the right thing to do is under what circumstances, and so on.[\/caption]\n\nGossip may sound trivial and seem to belittle our noble ability for language, surely one of the most remarkable human abilities of all that distinguish us from other animals. On the contrary, some have argued that gossip \u2014 activities used to think and communicate about our social world \u2014 is one of the most critical uses to which language has been put. Robin Dunbar speculated that gossiping is the human equivalent of grooming, that is, when monkeys and primates attend to each other by cleaning each other\u2019s fur. Dunbar (1996) argued that it is an act of socialising, signaling the importance of one\u2019s partner. Furthermore, by gossiping, humans can communicate and share their representations about their social world: who their friends and enemies are, what the right thing to do is under what circumstances, and so on. By doing that, they can regulate their social world, making more friends and enlarging their own group \u2014 often called the ingroup<\/strong>, the group to which one belongs \u2014 against other groups \u2014 known as outgroups <\/strong>\u2014 that are more likely to be one\u2019s enemies. Dunbar has argued that it is these social effects that have given humans an evolutionary advantage and larger brains, which, in turn, help humans to think more complex and abstract thoughts and, more importantly, maintain larger ingroups. Dunbar (1993) estimated an equation that predicts average group size of nonhuman primate genera from the size of their average neocortex, which is the part of the brain that supports higher order cognition. In line with his social brain hypothesis<\/strong>, Dunbar showed that those primate genera that have larger brains tend to live in larger groups. Furthermore, using the same equation, Dunbar was able to estimate the group size that human brains can support, which turned out to be about 150 \u2014 approximately the size of modern hunter-gatherer communities. Dunbar\u2019s argument is that language, brain, and human group living have co-evolved; language and human sociality are inseparable.\n\nDunbar\u2019s hypothesis is controversial. Nonetheless, our everyday language use often ends up maintaining the existing structure of intergroup relationships. Language use can have implications for the ways in which we construe our social world. For one thing, there are subtle cues that people use to convey the extent to which someone\u2019s action is just a special case in a particular context or a pattern that occurs across many contexts, like a character trait. According to G\u00fcn Semin and Klaus Fiedler (1988), someone\u2019s action can be described by an action verb that describes a concrete action (e.g., she runs), a state verb that describes the actor\u2019s psychological state (e.g., she likes running), an adjective that describes the actor\u2019s personality (e.g., she is athletic), or a noun that describes the actor\u2019s role (e.g., she is an athlete). Depending on whether a verb, an adjective, or a noun is used, speakers can convey the permanency and stability of an actor\u2019s tendency to act in a certain way \u2014 verbs convey particularity, whereas adjectives convey permanency. Intriguingly, people tend to describe positive actions of their ingroup members using adjectives (e.g., she is generous) rather than verbs (e.g., she gave a tall man some change), and negative actions of outgroup members using adjectives (e.g., she is cruel) rather than verbs (e.g., she kicked a dog). Anne Maass, Daniela Salvi, Luciano Arcuri, and G\u00fcn Semin (1989) called this a linguistic intergroup bias<\/strong>, which can produce and reproduce the representation of intergroup relationships by painting a picture favouring the ingroup. That is, ingroup members are typically good, and if they do anything bad, that\u2019s more an exception in special circumstances; in contrast, outgroup members are typically bad, and if they do anything good, that\u2019s more an exception.\n\nPeople tend to tell stories that evoke strong emotions (Rim\u00e9, Mesquita, Boca, & Philoppot, 1991). Such emotive stories can then spread far and wide through people\u2019s social networks. When a group of 33 psychology students visited a city morgue \u2014 no doubt an emotive experience for many \u2014 they each told their experience to about six people on average; each of the people who heard about it told one person, who in turn told another person on average. By the third retelling of the morgue visit, 881 people had heard about this in their community within 10 days. If everyone in society is connected with one another by six degrees of separation (Travers & Milgram, 1969) and if a chain letter can travel hundreds of steps via the Internet (Liben-Nowell & Kleinberg, 2008), the possibility of emotive gossip traveling through a vast social network is not a fantasy. Indeed, urban legends that evoke strong feelings of disgust tend to spread in cyberspace and become more prevalent on the Internet (Heath, Bell, & Sternberg, 2001).\n\nIn addition, when people exchange their gossip, it can spread through broader social networks<\/strong>. If gossip is transmitted from one person to another, the second person can transmit it to a third person, who then transmits it to a fourth, and so on through a chain of communication. This often happens for emotive stories. If gossip is repeatedly transmitted and spread, it can reach a large number of people. When stories travel through communication chains, they tend to become conventionalised (Bartlett, 1932). A Native American tale (the cultural origin of the tale is not specified) of the \u201cWar of the Ghosts\u201d recounts a warrior\u2019s encounter with ghosts traveling in canoes and his involvement with their ghostly battle. He is shot by an arrow but doesn\u2019t die, returning home to tell the tale. After his narration, however, he becomes still, a black thing comes out of his mouth, and he eventually dies. When it was told to a student in England in the 1920s and retold from memory to another person, who, in turn, retold it to another and so on in a communication chain, the mythic tale became a story of a young warrior going to a battlefield, in which canoes became boats, and the black thing that came out of his mouth became simply his spirit (Bartlett, 1932). In other words, information transmitted multiple times was transformed to something that was easily understood by many; information was assimilated into the common ground shared by most people in the linguistic community. More recently, Yoshihisa Kashima (2000) conducted a similar experiment using a story that contained a sequence of events that described a young couple\u2019s interaction that included both stereotypical and counter-stereotypical actions (e.g., a man watching sports on TV on Sunday as opposed to a man vacuuming the house). After the retelling of this story, much of the counter-stereotypical information was dropped, and stereotypical information was more likely to be retained. Because stereotypes are part of the common ground shared by the community, this finding too suggests that conversational retellings are likely to reproduce conventional content.\nPsychological Consequences of Language Use<\/span><\/h1>\nWhat are the psychological consequences of language use? When people use language to describe an experience, their thoughts and feelings are profoundly shaped by the linguistic representation that they have produced rather than the original experience (Holtgraves & Kashima, 2008). For example, Jamin Halberstadt (2003) showed a picture of a person displaying an ambiguous emotion and examined how people evaluated the displayed emotion. When people verbally explained why the target person was expressing a particular emotion, they tended to remember the person as feeling that emotion more intensely than when they simply labelled the emotion.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"]
Figure IL.18. <\/strong>Verbalising emotions. <\/strong>By verbalising our own emotional experiences, such as in a conversation with a close friend, we can improve our psychological well-being.[\/caption]\n\nThus, constructing a linguistic representation of another person\u2019s emotion apparently biased the speaker\u2019s memory of that person\u2019s emotion. Furthermore, linguistically labelling one\u2019s own emotional experience appears to alter the speaker\u2019s neural processes. When people linguistically labelled negative images, the amygdala \u2014 a brain structure that is critically involved in the processing of negative emotions such as fear \u2014 was activated less than when they were not given a chance to label them (Lieberman et al., 2007). Potentially because of these effects of verbalising emotional experiences, linguistic reconstructions of negative life events can have some therapeutic effects on those who suffer from the traumatic experiences (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). Sonja Lyubomirsky, Lorie Sousa, and Rene Dickerhoof (2006) found that writing and talking about negative past life events improved people\u2019s psychological well-being, but just thinking about them worsened it. Furthermore, if a certain type of language use (i.e., linguistic practice) is repeated by a large number of people in a community, it can potentially have a significant effect on their thoughts and actions (Holtgraves & Kashima, 2008). This notion is often called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis <\/strong>(Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956). For instance, if you are given a description of a man, Steven, as having greater than average experience of the world (e.g., well-traveled, varied job experience), a strong family orientation, and well-developed social skills, how do you describe Steven? Do you think you can remember Steven\u2019s personality five days later? It will probably be difficult, but if you know Chinese and are reading about Steven in Chinese (the original paper does not specify whether this is Mandarin or Cantonese), as Curt Hoffman, Ivy Lau, and David Johnson (1986) showed, the chances are that you can remember him well. This is because English does not have a word to describe this kind of personality, whereas Chinese does: sh\u00ec g\u00f9<\/em>. This way, the language you use can influence your cognition. In its strong form, it has been argued that language determines thought, but this is probably wrong. Language does not completely determine our thoughts \u2014 our thoughts are far too flexible for that \u2014 but habitual uses of language can influence our habit of thought and action. For instance, some linguistic practice seems to be associated even with cultural values and social institutions, like dropping pronouns. Pronouns such as \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d are used to represent the speaker and listener of a speech in English. In an English sentence, these pronouns cannot be dropped if they are used as the subject of a sentence. So, for instance, \u201cI went to the movie last night\u201d is fine, but \u201cWent to the movie last night\u201d is not in standard English. However, in other languages such as Japanese, pronouns can be, and in fact often are, dropped from sentences. It turns out that people living in those countries where pronoun drop languages are spoken tend to have more collectivistic values (e.g., employees having greater loyalty toward their employers) than those who use non\u2013pronoun drop languages such as English (Kashima & Kashima, 1998). It was argued that the explicit reference to \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cI\u201d may remind speakers of the distinction between the self and other, and it may remind speakers of the differentiation between individuals. Such a linguistic practice may act as a constant reminder of the cultural value, which, in turn, may encourage people to perform the linguistic practice.\n\nAn example of evidence for Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes from a comparison between English and Mandarin speakers (Boroditsky, 2000). In English, time is often metaphorically described in horizontal terms. For instance, good times are ahead of us, or hardship can be left behind us. We can move a meeting forward or backward. Mandarin speakers use similar horizontal metaphors too, but vertical metaphors are also used. So, for instance, the last month is called sh\u00e0ng g\u00e8 yu\u00e8 <\/em>or \u201cabove month,\u201d and the next month, xi\u00e0 g\u00e8 yu\u00e8 <\/em>or \u201cbelow month.\u201d To put it differently, the arrow of time flies horizontally in English, but it can fly both horizontally and vertically in Chinese. Does this difference in language use affect English and Chinese speakers\u2019 comprehension of language?\n\nThis is what Boroditsky (2000) found. First, English and Mandarin speakers\u2019 understanding of sentences that use a horizontal positioning (e.g., June comes before August) did not differ much. When they were first presented with a picture that implies a horizontal positioning (e.g., the black worm is ahead of the white worm), they could read and understand them faster than when they were presented with a picture that implies a vertical positioning (e.g., the black ball is above the white ball). This implies that thinking about the horizontal positioning, when described as ahead or behind, equally primed (i.e., reminded) both English and Chinese speakers of the horizontal metaphor used in the sentence about time. However, English and Chinese speakers\u2019 comprehension differed for statements that do not use a spatial metaphor (e.g., August is later than June). When primed with the vertical spatial positioning, Chinese speakers comprehended these statements faster, but English speakers more slowly, than when they were primed with the horizontal spatial positioning. Apparently, English speakers were not used to thinking about months in terms of the vertical line, when described as above or below. Indeed, when they were trained to do so, their comprehension was similar to Chinese speakers (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2010).\n\nThe idea that language and its structures influence and limit human thought is called linguistic relativity<\/strong>. The most frequently cited example of this possibility was proposed by Benjamin Whorf (1897\u20131941), a linguist who was particularly interested in Aboriginal languages. Whorf argued that the Inuit people of Canada had many words for snow, whereas English speakers have only one, and that this difference influenced how the different cultures perceived snow. Whorf argued that the Inuit perceived and categorised snow in finer details than English speakers possibly because the English language constrained perception. Although the idea of linguistic relativism seemed reasonable, research has suggested that language has less influence on thinking than might be expected. For one, in terms of perceptions of snow, although it is true that the Inuit do make more distinctions among types of snow than English speakers do, the latter also make some distinctions (e.g., think of words like powder, slush, whiteout, and so forth). It is also possible that thinking about snow may influence language, rather than the other way around.\n\nIn a more direct test of the possibility that language influences thinking, Eleanor Rosch (1973) compared people from the Dani culture of New Guinea, who have only two terms for colour, dark and bright, with English speakers who use many more terms. Rosch hypothesised that if language constrains perception and categorisation, then the Dani should have a harder time distinguishing colours than English speakers would. However, Rosch\u2019s research found that when the Dani were asked to categorise colours using new categories, they did so in almost the same way that English speakers did. Similar results were found by Michael Frank, Daniel Everett, Evelina Fedorenko, and Edward Gibson (2008), who showed that the Amazonian tribe known as the Pirah\u00e3, who have no linguistic method for expressing exact quantities, not even the number one, were nevertheless able to perform matches with large numbers without problem.\n\nAlthough these data led researchers to conclude that the language we use to describe colour and number does not influence our understanding of the underlying sensation, another more recent study has questioned this assumption. Debi Roberson, Ian Davies, and Jules Davidoff (2000) conducted another study with Dani participants and found that, at least for some colours, the names that they used to describe colours did influence their perceptions of the colours. Other researchers continue to test the possibility that our language influences our perceptions, and perhaps even our thoughts (Levinson, 1998), and yet the evidence for this possibility is, as of now, mixed.\nDevelopment of Language<\/span><\/h1>\n
\n Psychology in Everyday Life: The Case of Genie<\/h2>\n<\/header>\n
\n\nIn the fall of 1970, a social worker in the Los Angeles area found a 13-year-old girl who was being raised in extremely neglectful and abusive conditions. The girl, who came to be known as Genie, had lived most of her life tied to a potty chair or confined to a crib in a small room that was kept closed with the curtains drawn. For a little over a decade, Genie had virtually no social interaction and no access to the outside world. As a result of these conditions, Genie was unable to stand up, chew solid food, or speak (Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler, & Rigler, 1974; Rymer, 1993). The police took Genie into protective custody.\n\nGenie\u2019s abilities improved dramatically following her removal from her abusive environment, and early on, it appeared she was acquiring language \u2014 much later than would be predicted by critical period hypotheses that had been posited at the time (Fromkin et al., 1974). Genie managed to amass an impressive vocabulary in a relatively short amount of time. However, she never mastered the grammatical aspects of language (Curtiss, 1981). Perhaps being deprived of the opportunity to learn language during a critical period impeded Genie\u2019s ability to fully acquire and use language. Genie\u2019s case, while not conclusive, suggests that early language input is needed for language learning. This is also why it is important to determine quickly if a child is deaf and to begin immediately to communicate in sign language in order to maximise the chances of fluency (Mayberry, Lock, & Kazmi, 2002).\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nAll children with typical brains who are exposed to language will develop it seemingly effortlessly. They do not need to be taught explicitly how to conjugate verbs, they do not need to memorise vocabulary lists, and they will easily pick up any accent or dialect that they are exposed to. Indeed, children seem to learn to use language much more easily than adults do. You may recall that each language has its own set of phonemes that are used to generate morphemes, words, and so on. Babies can discriminate among the sounds that make up a language (e.g., they can tell the difference between the \u201cs\u201d in vision and the \u201css\u201d in fission), and they can differentiate between the sounds of all human languages, even those that do not occur in the languages that are used in their environments. However, by the time that they are about one year old, they can only discriminate among those phonemes that are used in the language or languages in their environments (Jensen, 2011; Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 2002).\nLearning Language<\/span><\/h1>\nLanguage learning begins even before birth because the fetus can hear muffled versions of speaking from outside the womb. Christine Moon, Robin Cooper, and William Fifer (1993) found that infants only two days old sucked harder on a pacifier when they heard their mothers\u2019 native language being spoken \u2014 even when strangers were speaking the languages \u2014 than when they heard a foreign language. Babies are also aware of the patterns of their native language, showing surprise when they hear speech that has different patterns of phonemes than those they are used to (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 2004).\n\nDuring the first year or so after birth, long before they speak their first words, infants are already learning language. One aspect of this learning is practice in producing speech. By the time they are six to eight weeks old, babies start making vowel sounds (e.g., ooohh, aaahh, goo) as well as a variety of cries and squeals to help them practice.\n\nAt about seven months, infants begin babbling<\/strong>, which is to say they are engaging in intentional vocalisations that lack specific meaning. Children babble as practice in creating specific sounds, and by the time they are one year old, the babbling uses primarily the sounds of the language that they are learning (de Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand, 1984). These vocalisations have a conversational tone that sounds meaningful even though it is not. Babbling also helps children understand the social, communicative function of language (Figure IL.19). Children who are exposed to sign language babble in sign by making hand movements that represent real language (Petitto & Marentette, 1991).\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"350\"]
Figure IL.19. Baby vocal exchanges<\/strong>. <\/em>Babies often engage in vocal exchanges to help them practice language.[\/caption]\n\nAt the same time that infants are practicing their speaking skills by babbling, they are also learning to better understand sounds and eventually the words of language. One of the first words that children understand is their own name, usually by about six months, followed by commonly used words like \u201cbottle,\u201d \u201cmama,\u201d and \u201cdoggie\u201d by 10 to 12 months (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995).\n\nThe infant usually produces their first words at about one year of age. It is at this point that the child first understands that words are more than sounds \u2014 they refer to particular objects and ideas. By the time children are two years old, they have a vocabulary of several hundred words, and by kindergarten their vocabularies have increased to several thousand words. By Grade 5, most children know about 50,000 words; by the time they are in university, most know about 200,000. This may vary for people who don\u2019t attend university or complete higher education.\n\nThe early utterances of children contain many errors, for instance, confusing \/b\/ and \/d\/, or \/c\/ and \/z\/, and the words that children create are often simplified, in part because they are not yet able to make the more complex sounds of the real language (Dobrich & Scarborough, 1992). Children may say \u201ckeekee\u201d for kitty, \u201cnana\u201d for banana, and \u201cvesketti\u201d for spaghetti in part because it is easier. Often these early words are accompanied by gestures that may also be easier to produce than the words themselves. Children\u2019s pronunciations become increasingly accurate between one and three years, but some problems may persist until school age.\n\nMost of a child\u2019s first words are nouns, and early sentences may include only the noun. \u201cMa\u201d may mean \u201cmore milk please,\u201d and \u201cda\u201d may mean \u201clook, there\u2019s Fido.\u201d Eventually the length of the utterances increases to two words (e.g., \u201cmo ma\u201d or \u201cda bark\u201d), and these primitive sentences begin to follow the appropriate syntax of the native language.\n\nBecause language involves the active categorisation of sounds and words into higher level units, children make some mistakes in interpreting what words mean and how to use them. In particular, they often make overextensions <\/strong>of concepts, which means they use a given word in a broader context than appropriate. For example, a child might at first call all adult men \u201cdaddy\u201d or all animals \u201cdoggie.\u201d\n\nChildren also use contextual information, particularly the cues that parents provide, to help them learn language. Infants are frequently more attuned to the tone of voice of the person speaking than to the content of the words themselves and are aware of the target of speech. Janet Werker, Judith Pegg, and Peter McLeod (1994) found that infants listened longer to a woman who was speaking to a baby than to a woman who was speaking to another adult.\n\nChildren learn that people are usually referring to things that they are looking at when they are speaking (Baldwin, 1993) and that the speaker\u2019s emotional expressions are related to the content of their speech. Children also use their knowledge of syntax to help them figure out what words mean. If a child sees an adult point to a strange object and hears them say, \u201cthis is a dirb,\u201d they will infer that a \u201cdirb\u201d is a thing, but if they hear them say, \u201cthis is a one of those dirb things,\u201d they will infer that it refers to the colour or another characteristic of the object. Additionally, if they hear the word \u201cdirbing,\u201d they will infer that \u201cdirbing\u201d is something that we do (Waxman, 1990).\nHow Children Learn Language: Theories of Language Acquisition<\/span><\/h2>\n
\n\nPsychological theories of language learning differ in terms of the importance they place on nature versus nurture, yet it is clear that both matter. Children are not born knowing language; they learn to speak by hearing what happens around them. Human brains, unlike those of any other animal, are wired in a way that leads them, almost effortlessly, to learn language.\n\nPerhaps the most straightforward explanation of language development is that it occurs through principles of learning, including association, reinforcement, and the observation of others (Skinner, 1965). There must be at least some truth to the idea that language is learned because children learn the language that they hear spoken around them rather than some other language. Also supporting this idea is the gradual improvement of language skills with time. It seems that children modify their language through imitation, reinforcement and shaping, as would be predicted by learning theories.\n\nHowever, language cannot be entirely learned. For one, children learn words too fast for them to be learned through reinforcement. Between the ages of 18 months and five years, children learn up to 10 new words every day (Anglin, 1993). More importantly, language is more generative than it is imitative. Generativity <\/strong>refers to the fact that speakers of a language can compose sentences to represent new ideas that they have never before been exposed to. Language is not a predefined set of ideas and sentences that we choose when we need them, but rather a system of rules and procedures that allows us to create an infinite number of statements, thoughts, and ideas, including those that have never previously occurred. When a child says that they \u201cswimmed\u201d in the pool, for instance, they are showing generativity. No native speaker of English would ever say \u201cswimmed,\u201d yet it is easily generated from the normal system of producing language.\n\nOther evidence that refutes the idea that all language is learned through experience comes from the observation that children may learn languages better than they ever hear them. Deaf children whose parents do not use sign language very well nevertheless are able to learn it perfectly on their own, and they may even make up their own language if they need to (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1998). A group of deaf children in a school in Nicaragua, whose teachers could not sign, invented a way to communicate through made-up signs (Senghas, Senghas, & Pyers, 2005). The development of this new Nicaraguan Sign Language has continued and changed as new generations of students have come to the school and started using the language. Although the original system was not a real language (i.e., it was created from scratch and did not descend from our ancestral past), it is becoming closer and closer every year, showing the development of a new language in modern times.\n\nThe linguist Noam Chomsky is a believer in the nature approach to language, arguing that human brains contain a language acquisition device that includes a universal grammar <\/strong>that underlies all human language (Chomsky, 1965, 1972). According to this approach, each of the many languages spoken around the world \u2014 there are between 6,000 and 8,000 \u2014 is an individual example of the same underlying set of procedures that are hardwired into human brains. Chomsky\u2019s account proposes that children are born with a knowledge of general rules of syntax that determine how sentences are constructed and then coordinate with the language the child is exposed to.\n\n<\/div>\nChomsky differentiates between the deep structure of an idea <\/strong>\u2014 how the idea is represented in the fundamental universal grammar that is common to all languages \u2014 and the surface structure of the idea <\/strong>\u2014 how it is expressed in any one language. Once we hear or express a thought in surface structure, we generally forget exactly how it happened. At the end of a lecture, you will remember a lot of the deep structure (i.e., the ideas expressed by the instructor), but you cannot reproduce the surface structure (i.e., the exact words that the instructor used to communicate the ideas).\n\nAlthough there is general agreement among psychologists that babies are genetically programmed to learn language, there is still debate about Chomsky\u2019s idea that there is a universal grammar that can account for all language learning. Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson (2009) surveyed the world\u2019s languages and found that none of the presumed underlying features of the language acquisition device were entirely universal. In their search, they found languages that did not have noun or verb phrases, that did not have tenses (e.g., past, present, future), and even some that did not have nouns or verbs at all, even though a basic assumption of a universal grammar is that all languages should share these features.\nBilingualism and Cognitive Development<\/span><\/h2>\nBilingualism<\/strong>, which is the ability to speak two languages, is becoming more and more frequent in the modern world. Nearly one-half of the world\u2019s population, including 17% of Canadian citizens, grows up bilingual.\n\nIn Canada, education is under provincial jurisdiction; however, the federal government has been a strong supporter of establishing Canada as a bilingual country and has helped pioneer the French immersion programs in the public education systems throughout the country. In contrast, many US states have passed laws outlawing bilingual education in schools based on the idea that students will have a stronger identity with the school, the culture, and the government if they speak only English. This is, in part, based on the idea that speaking two languages may interfere with cognitive development. There appears to be little evidence for such an assertion. In fact, throughout most of human history, human beings have lived in multilingual societies. In literate societies, it was common for people to use one language for everyday use and another for official or literary purposes (Sanskrit in Ancient India and Southeast Asia, Greek in the Roman empire, Latin in Western Europe, Persian in the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and Classical Arabic in the Islamic World were all used as academic language while other languages were used in day-to-day interactions).\n\nA variety of minority language immersion programs are now offered across the country depending on need and interest. In British Columbia, for instance, the city of Vancouver established a new bilingual Mandarin Chinese-English immersion program in 2002 at the elementary school level in order to accommodate Vancouver\u2019s both historic and present strong ties to the Mandarin-speaking world. Similar programs have been developed for both Hindi and Punjabi to serve the large South Asian cultural community in the city of Surrey. By default, most schools in British Columbia teach in English, with French immersion options available. In both English and French schools, one can study and take government exams in Japanese, Punjabi, Mandarin, French, Spanish, and German at the secondary level.\n\nSome early psychological research showed that, when compared with monolingual children, bilingual children performed more slowly when processing language, and their verbal scores were lower. However, these tests were frequently given in English, even when this was not the child\u2019s first language, and the children tested were often of lower socioeconomic status than the monolingual children (Andrews, 1982).\n\nMore current research that has controlled for these factors has found that, although bilingual children may, in some cases, learn language somewhat more slowly than do monolingual children (Oller & Pearson, 2002), bilingual and monolingual children do not significantly differ in the final depth of language learning, nor do they generally confuse the two languages (Nicoladis & Genesee, 1997). In fact, participants who speak two languages have been found to have better cognitive functioning, cognitive flexibility, and analytic skills in comparison to monolinguals (Bialystok, 2009). Research has also found that learning a second language produces changes in the area of the brain in the left hemisphere that is involved in language (Figure IL.20), such that this area is denser and contains more neurons (Mechelli et al., 2004). Furthermore, the increased density is stronger in those individuals who are most proficient in their second language and who learned the second language earlier. Thus, rather than slowing language development, learning a second language seems to increase cognitive abilities.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"]
Figure IL.20A. Bilingual children and gray matter.<\/strong> Andrea Mechelli and colleagues (Mechelli et al., 2004) found that children who were bilingual had increased gray matter density (i.e., more neurons) in cortical areas related to language in comparison to monolinguals (panel a).[\/caption]\n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n \n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"] Figure IL.20B. Bilingual children and gray matter.<\/strong> They found that gray matter density correlated positively with second language proficiency (panel b).[\/caption]\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"] Figure IL.20C. Bilingual children and gray matter.<\/strong> They found that gray matter density correlated negatively with the age at which the second language was learned (panel c).[\/caption]\nBiology of Language<\/h1>\nFor the 90% of people who are right-handed, language is stored and controlled by the left cerebral cortex, while for some left-handers this pattern is reversed. These differences can easily be seen in the results of neuroimaging studies that show that listening to and producing language creates greater activity in the left hemisphere than in the right. Broca\u2019s area<\/strong>, an area in front of the left hemisphere near the motor cortex, is responsible for language production (Figure IL.21). This area was first localized in the 1860s by the French physician Paul Broca, who studied patients with lesions to various parts of the brain. Wernicke\u2019s area<\/strong>, an area of the brain next to the auditory cortex, is responsible for language comprehension.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_304\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1024\"]
Figure IL.21. <\/strong>Broca\u2019s Area and Wernicke\u2019s Area<\/strong>. Drawing of the human brain showing Broca\u2019s area and Wernicke\u2019s area.[\/caption]\n\nEvidence for the importance of Broca\u2019s area and Wernicke\u2019s area in language is seen in patients who experience aphasia<\/strong>, a condition in which language functions are severely impaired. People with Broca\u2019s aphasia have difficulty producing speech, whereas people with damage to Wernicke\u2019s area can produce speech, but what they say makes no sense, and they have trouble understanding language.\nCan Animals Learn Language?<\/span><\/h1>\nNonhuman animals have a wide variety of systems of communication. Some species communicate using scents; others use visual displays, such as baring the teeth, puffing up the fur, or flapping the wings; and still others use vocal sounds. Male songbirds, such as canaries and finches, sing songs to attract mates and to protect territory, and chimpanzees use a combination of facial expressions, sounds, and actions, such as slapping the ground, to convey aggression (de Waal, 1989). Honeybees use a waggle dance to direct other bees to the location of food sources (von Frisch, 1956). The language of vervet monkeys is relatively advanced in the sense that they use specific sounds to communicate specific meanings. Vervets make different calls to signify that they have seen either a leopard, a snake, or a hawk (Seyfarth & Cheney, 1997). Despite their wide abilities to communicate, efforts to teach animals to use language have had only limited success. One of the early efforts was made by Catherine and Keith Hayes (1952), who raised a chimpanzee named Viki in their home along with their own children, but Viki learned little and could never speak. Researchers speculated that Viki\u2019s difficulties might have been, in part, because she could not create the words in her vocal cords. Subsequent attempts were made to teach primates to speak using sign language or boards on which they could point to symbols.\n\nIn another famous case, an African grey parrot called Alex was able to identify and name certain objects, and even categorise them in terms of shape or colour (Pepperberg, 2010). Alex used the words he had been taught and eventually began to use other words that he had not been trained for; this was evidence that he was picking up words and using them correctly merely by being exposed to them. Alex was also able to make rudimentary phrases without being taught them specifically.\n\nAllen and Beatrix Gardner worked for many years to teach a chimpanzee named Washoe to sign using ASL. Washoe, who lived to be 42 years old, could label up to 250 different objects and make simple requests and comments, such as \u201cplease tickle\u201d and \u201cme sorry\u201d (Fouts, 1997). Washoe\u2019s adopted daughter Loulis, who was never exposed to human signers, learned more than 70 signs simply by watching her mother sign.\n\nThe most proficient nonhuman language user is Kanzi, a bonobo who lives at the Language Learning Center at Georgia State University (Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994; Raffaele, 2006). The following YouTube link shows that Kanzi has a propensity for language that is in many ways similar to humans.\n\nWatch this video: Kanzi and Novel Sentences (2 minutes)<\/a>\n\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2Dhc2zePJFE\n\n\u201cKanzi and Novel Sentences\u201d video by IowaPrimate .LearningSanctuary is licensed under the Standard YouTube licence.\n\nKanzi learned faster when he was younger than when he got older. He learns by observation, and he can use symbols to comment on social interactions rather than simply for food treats. Kanzi can also create elementary syntax and understand relatively complex commands. Kanzi can make tools and can even play the video game Pac-Man.\n\nYet even Kanzi does not have a true language in the same way that humans do. Human babies learn words faster and faster as they get older, but Kanzi does not. Each new word he learns is almost as difficult as the one before. Kanzi usually requires many trials to learn a new sign, whereas human babies can speak words after only one exposure. Kanzi\u2019s language is focused primarily on food and pleasure and only rarely on social relationships. Although he can combine words, he generates few new phrases and cannot master syntactic rules beyond the level of about a two-year-old human child (Greenfield & Savage-Rumbaugh, 1991).\n\nIn summary, although many animals communicate, none of them has a true language. With some exceptions, the information that can be communicated in nonhuman species is limited primarily to displays of liking or disliking and related to basic motivations of aggression and mating. Humans also use this more primitive type of communication \u2014 in the form of nonverbal behaviours <\/strong>such as eye contact, touch, hand signs, and interpersonal distance \u2014 to communicate their like or dislike for others, but they, unlike animals, also supplant this more primitive communication with language. Although other animal brains share similarities to ours, only the human brain is complex enough to create language. What is perhaps most remarkable is that although language never appears in nonhumans, language is universal in humans. All humans, unless they have a profound brain abnormality or are completely isolated from other humans, learn language.\n\nSource: Adapted from Kashima (2020).\n
Image Descriptions<\/h1>\n<\/a>Figure IL.12. English Consonants image description:<\/strong> The consonants are between two brackets ().\n
- Include children in the activity of baking or literally include them as an ingredient when baking<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Grandmother of Eight Makes Hole in One\n
![Mouth Anatomy<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator, is licensed under a\u00a0](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Mouth_anatomy-de.svg\"){kind=link}