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Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Language

Chapter Review

Language is the biologically given communication system of our species, and appears in all cultures. Not only does our language express thought and convey information, it also expresses and solidifies social and cultural bonding.

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LANGUAGE

  • Languages consist of a hierarchy of units that combine and recombine to form higher-level categories. At the bottom are units of sound, which combine into morphemes and words.
  • The sound categories that matter in a language are called its phonemes. English uses about 40 different phonemes. Other languages have their own sets.
  • The smallest language units that carry meaning are morphemes. Content morphemes carry the main burden of meaning. Function morphemes add details to the meaning and also serve various grammatical purposes.
  • A phrase is an organized grouping of words, and a sentence is an organized grouping of phrases. Some sequences of words in a language are allowed, but others are not, in accord with the rules of syntax. These rules describe the phrase structure of a sentence, which can be depicted by means of a tree diagram.

HOW LANGUAGE CONVEYS MEANING

  • According to the definitional theory of word meaning, bundles of semantic features constitute the meaning of each word. Various observations have led to a second theory, that the meaning of words is represented by an ideal (or prototype) case, and membership in the category depends on resemblance to this prototype. A combination of these two theories best handles the psychological data on word meaning.
  • Sentences express propositions, in which some comment, or predicate, is made about a topic (the subject of the sentence). A proposition can be regarded as a miniature drama in which the verb is the action and the nouns are the performers, each of which plays a different semantic role.
  • Sentence interpretation is very rapid, beginning before whole sentences are heard. This often causes listeners to jump to temporary false interpretations, called garden paths. To recover from these momentary misunderstandings, listeners and readers consider not only the structure they are hearing but also plausible semantic relations among the words. This includes integrating the sentence with what they can see in the visually observed world. In conversation, a further source of information comes from the fact that speakers and listeners continually fill in the blanks in what is uttered, using inference to help them interpret the full meaning of what is said.

HOW WE LEARN A LANGUAGE

  • Language is part of our human endowment. However, human languages differ in myriad details from each other and thus have to be learned by children rather than being almost wholly innate as in many other animal species.
  • From the very first moments after birth, infants’ ears and minds are open to detect the sounds of language, and also to organize these sounds into words. Initially, infants respond to just about all sound distinctions made in any language, but by 12 months of age they are more sensitive to sound contrasts in their own language than to those in other languages.
  • Infants rapidly learn to identify the boundaries between morphemes and words. One important cue that helps them do this is a keen sensitivity to the frequencies with which specific syllables occur right next to each other.
  • Word learning is heavily influenced by the ways the child is disposed to categorize objects and events, as reflected in the fact that young children acquire the basic-level words for whole objects (dog) before learning the superordinates (animal) or subordinates (Chihuahua).
  • Children also use the structure of the language as a way of guiding their word learning. Remarkably, some understanding of syntax, and the way it links up with meaning, is found in children under two years of age, even though these children themselves often speak only in single-word utterances.
  • Children’s speech progresses very rapidly by the beginning of the third year of life, with the start of little sentences and the use of function words. Overregularization errors (e.g., holded for held) are clear evidence that children do not learn language by imitation; they suggest instead that young children learn rules that govern how the language is structured.

LANGUAGE LEARNING IN CHANGED ENVIRONMENTS

  • Under normal conditions, language emerges in much the same way in virtually all children. They progress from babbling to one-word speech, advance to two-word sentences, and eventually graduate to complex sentence forms and meanings. This progression is consistent with the claim that language development is rooted in our shared biological heritage. But what happens when children grow up in radically different environments? Data from isolated children, those deprived of ordinary human contact for many years, suggest that normal language development may take place as long as language learning begins during some sensitive period for the acquisition of linguistic information, which may end roughly at the age of puberty.
  • Many persons born deaf learn sign language. This gestural system has hand shapes and positions that combine to form individual words (analogous to the phonemes of spoken language), and it has morphemes and grammatical principles for combining words into sentences that are closely similar to those of spoken language. Babies born to deaf users of sign language go through the same steps on the way to adult knowledge as do hearing children learning English. Thus, language does not depend on the auditory-vocal channel.
  • Blind children learn language as rapidly and as well as sighted children do. Here too, language emerges in all of its complexity and on schedule despite a dramatic shift away from the standard circumstances of language learning.

LANGUAGE LEARNING WITH CHANGED ENDOWMENTS

  • Since language learning and use are determined by brain function, changing the brain should have strong effects. This is confirmed by several sorts of evidence, including cases of aphasia, as well as cases of persons with apparently inherited syndromes such as specific language impairment. In addition, as the brain matures, a sensitive period for language learning draws to a close, so that later learning (both of a first language and of later languages) becomes more difficult.
  • It appears that even our nearest animal relative, the chimpanzee, cannot come close to attaining human language. For now, the evidence suggests that animals including baboons, dogs, dolphins, and even parrots can learn words, and that they show evidence of rudimentary propositional thought. But there is little evidence that they can create (or understand) the sorts of syntactic structures that humans use routinely.

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

  • According to the Whorfian hypothesis, the language one speaks determines the way one thinks. Language obviously conveys information, and this influences thought; language can also be used to draw our attention to some content, and, again, this influences thought. However, the ways that language governs how we can think generally, or what we can think at all, are probably quite limited. Special language features can dramatically influence interpretations of ambiguous speech in momentary ways because the language processing system is highly responsive to frequency information which differs cross-linguistically.
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