Introduction to Language

Ark Verma
PSY 499
First Questions…

• What does it mean to know a language?

• How do languages work?
• How did languages end up in their current form?
• What is the relationship between language & thought?
• These are some of the questions that are asked by psycholinguists, i.e.
• psychologists who study the mental and neural processes & behaviors
associated with language.
• Simple definition of language:

• A system of symbols and rules, that enables us to communicate.

• Symbols: sounds, words, intonations etc.

• Rules: syntax or grammar.

• Communication: of needs, wants, intentions, emotions etc.

Characteristics of Language

• Let us look at the some of most basic & essential features of language as
described by Hockett (1960):

• Semanticity: refers to the idea that language communicates meaning, and

specific signals can be assigned specific meaning. Occurs at multiple levels,
for e.g. word, phrase, sentence etc.

• Arbitrariness: that there is no necessary relationship between actual objects or

events in the world, and the symbols that are used to represent these objects
and events in the language.
• for e.g. ship vs. crocodile.
• Discreteness: components of the language are organized into a set of distinct
categories, with clear cut boundaries between different categories.

• for e.g. every speech sound in English is perceived as belonging to one of about
40 phoneme categories.

• Displacement: language can communicate information about events happening

out of the sight of the seaker (spatial displacement), about events that have
happened earlier or will happen later (temporal displacement).

• Different languages achieve displacement in different ways for e.g. English has a
system of auxiliary verbs (e.g. will, was, were, had),whereas Mandarin lacks
tense markers, but uses other means, such as adverbial expressions, to achieve the
same means (e.g. “yesterday, the man goes.” instead of “the man went”).
• Duality of patterning: refers to the fact that we can simultaneously
perceive language stimuli in different ways, for e.g. as a collection of
phonemes or as a set of words.

• for e.g. the word bat contains 3 basic sounds or phonemes, /b/, /a/, & /t/,
but we focus on it as a single word, unless someone asks to detect the
separate sounds.

• Generativity: refers to the fact that languages have a fixed number of

symbols, but a very large and potentially infinite number of messages
can be created by combining those symbols in different patterns. English
has about 40 phonemes, and 26 alphabets, which account for almost
countless number of words that have been said or shall be said in
English.
• An important feature of language that we need to talk about is
grammar.

• Grammar tells us how to combine the symbols to create appropriate

signals to transmit the desired message to a listener.

• Language scientists have distinguished between prescriptive grammars

i.e. strict rules according to which language must be constructed, and
descriptive grammars, i.e. the set of rules or principles that govern the
way people actually use language.
• Jackendoff (2005) suggests that grammars regulate the combination of
symbols into messages in three crucial ways:

• Grammars determines the order that symnbols appear in expressions. For e.g.,
in English, adjectives come before nons, (green car!).

• Grammar dictates different kinds of agreement, i.e. certain words in a sentence

must appear in a specific form because of the presence of another word in the
sentence. for e.g. in English, we have number agreement (girl likes or girls
like) Or in Spanish there is gender agreement (el toro not la toro).

• Grammar determines case marking, i.e. words must appear in particular forms
depending upon the grammatical functions they fulfill. for e.g. He left NOT
Him Left; I like Him NOT I like He.
• So on and so forth…

• One of the more interesting properties of language that Chmosky &

colleagues (Fitch, hauser, & Chomsky, 2005; Hauser et al., 2002) have
proposed is the concept of recursion, i.e. one kind of signal can be
embedded in another signal, iteratively.

• defined as, “the ability to place one component inside another

component of the same type”.
• Tom likes beans.
• Susan thinks (x).
• Susan thinks Tom likes beans.

• Recursion can go essentially in an infinite loop and is limited only by the

speaker’s ability and willingness to continue:

• John knows Dave believes Jenny hopes Carol recognizes Bob realizes …
Susan thinks Tom likes beans.

• Recursion is one of the characteristics that gives language the property of

discrete infinity, i.e. the ability to generate infinite messages from finite
means.
• While most documented langauges have demonstrated the property of
recursion, Piraha, the language of the Piraha people (a small tribe of
hunter gatherers in the Amazon forests.) does not show recursion.

• Hand me the nails that Dan bought.

• Give me the nails. Dan bought those nails. They are the same.

• Dan and ted went to Brazil.

• Dan went to Brazil. Ted went to Brazil.

• If recursion does not occur in Piraha, is it then, a necessary feature of

language?
• Why does Piraha lack recursion?

• Everett’s (2008) answer is that because recursion introduces statements

into a language that do not make direct assertions about the world.
• Everett describes the Piraha as being a very literal - minded people.
They have no creation myths. They do not tell fictional stories. They do
not believe assertions made by others about past events unless the
speaker has direct knowledge of the events or knows someone who does.
As a result, they are very resistant to conversion to Christianity, or any
other faith that requires belief in unseen things..
• Everett argues that these cultural principles determine the form of Piraha
grammar. Nested statements, like relative clauses, require
presuppositions (rather than assertions) and are therefore ruled out.
• This makes a case for Piraha grammar to be shaped by Piraha culture.
Origins of Language and other Non – Human
Communication Systems

• Why do humans have language?

• the continuity hypothesis, i.e. modern human language is quantitatively

different from precursor mental abilities, but is not different in kind or quality
from more basic communication systems. Further, contemporary human
language abilities are just an upgraded version from the abilities of our
ancestors.

• the discontinuity hypothesis, i.e. aspects of modern human language abilities

do represent a clean break from the past. Contemporary human language
abilities are qualitatively different from more basic communication systems,
either in our evolutionary ancestors, or in other non – human animal
communication systems.
• So, how do we test the competing hypotheses?

• One of the ways could be to look at the other non – human

communication systems and compare their features and characteristics
with human language.
• But, one quickly realizes that the although many animals possess rich
symbolic communication systems that enable them to convey
messages to other members of the species and serve important
purposes, but they are NOT equivalent to the complexity of human
language.
• However, to test the argument further, scientists have made several
attempts at teaching language to man’s closest relatives, the apes!
• Do apes talk?
• Apes & monkeys provide useful comparison to humans, because some
apes, such as chimpanzees, are closely biologically related to humans.
They are also highly intelligent, making them a a good candidate to
share some of the complex abilities that are involved in producing and
understanding language.

• for e.g. Diana monkeys make different calls for aerial and ground
predators, as do several other species of monkeys like the vervets!

• Apes may also make different vocalizations to point to different objects.

for e.g. Kanzi, one of the captive apes, was found to be using different
vocal responses to refer to bananas, grapes, or juice!
• Several researchers have attempted to teach language to chimpanzees.
While, they have not been found to be very good at learning vocalizations,
their vocal apparatus not withstanding, they have been fairly good at
picking up gestural communications or sign language.

• Some of the interesting examples include, Nim Chimpsky, Washoe, Kanzi

& Koko!

• These apes have been shown to demonstrate learning of and using upto a
100 or more unique gestures.
• In one of the famous examples, Washoe was reported to make the signs of
“water” and “bird” to describe a duck that had landed on a pond in her
enclosure.
• This could reflect a generative use of previously learned symbols.
• Chimps have also been claimed to have mastered some aspects of
grammar, including the ability to interpret wh – questions (e.g. Who?
What? etc.).

• They have also been claimed to observe the basics of word order by
producing signs that express specific meanings. for e.g. Nim, the
chimp, produced the sign “more” prior to objects such as banana, (“
more banana”).
• So far so good, but how far have they got?

• Savage – Rumbaugh raised a chimp named Panpanzee & a bonobo

names Panbanisha, starting from infancy, in a language rich
environment.

• While both species are biologically distinct, Rumbaugh could hold the
effect of environment as constant while observing changes over time.
• If the two animals acquired the same degree of language skill, this would
suggest that cultural or environmental factors have the greatest influence
on their language development.
• Differences between them would most likely reflect biological differences
between the two species.
• Difference in skill over time would reflect maturational factors.
• On the basis of the study, which lasted for around 4 years, it Rumbaugh
came up with the following conclusions:

• Communication via gesture developed before attempts to use lexigrams in

both apes, and the chimpanzee continued to rely exclusively on gesture for a
whole year after the bonobo had started to use lexigrams.
• Panpanzee appeared more likely than Panbanisha to combine using the
lexigrams with gesturing throughout the study period, and the chimp was
about 50% more likely to combine gesturing and pointing to lexigrams when
she interacted with her trainers.

• Overall, the chimp produced fewer words during the study period.
• As both apes were reared using the same methods, under essentially identical
environmental conditions, differences between the chimp and the bonobo are
not likely to result from differences in the environment, but caused by
biological/genetic differences between the species.
• Savage – Rumbaugh further reported that, among the animals exposed
to enriched language environments from infancy, 4 were able to
acquire a receptive vocabularies of about 500 words or more, with
productive vocabularies of 150 words or more.

• Also, bonobos raised in a language rich environment appear to use

symbols more spontaneously than chimps raised under operant
conditioning methods.
• More importantly though, significant differences have been
documented between the way the most –trained apes could use
language in comparison to the linguistic behavior of even young
children.
• Let us discuss some of these to understand them:

• It has been observed that acquisition of language related behaviours in

apes varies widely from one animal to the other. For instance, while
children universally acquire a native language given normal brain
function, a stable environment, and exposure to language input; some
apes will acquire the ability to interpret symbols and use them to
communicate, and some do not, despite exposure to same models.
• Further, children do not only copy or mimic the behavior of the adult
caregivers, in order to learn language; they actively experiment with the
language, by spontaneously producing speech (e.g. cooing, babbling) and
develop knowledge about the sound system of language before they begin to
produce their first words.

• Also, the acquisition of grammar differs significantly in apes & children.

When children produce multi – word utterances, their longer utterances
contain elements of the shorter utterances, but also new elements. However,
with apes, it is common to observe repetition of elements within utterances. for
e.g. Nim would say, “ eat Nim eat Nim”, and “banana me eat banana” and so
on. This happens in over 90% of apes’ signing behavior. This hints that the
apes may be producing signs not really understanding their symbolic meaning
but rather as routines, to gain rewards.
• It has also been pointed out that apes uses signs in a different way than
humans use words. For instance, humans use words to express
intentions, while apes use of symbols seems much shallower and less
intentional. Also, most apes signs are made in order to get something
(e.g. food reward), whereas many human gestures are used purely for
declarative or informative purpose.

• Further, apes also appear to apply grammatical rules much less

consistently than humans. For e.g. Although Washoe signs “more X” far
more often than he signs “X more”, the difference is not as high as it
should be, to show that he is actually applying a grammatical rule.

• Finally, apes and humans differ greatly in the way they take turns during
interactions. While humans are good at taking turns during a dialogue,
apes interrupt people all the time, usually to ask for food.
Differences between ape and child language.

Apes Children

Utterances are in here & now. Utterances can involve temporal

displacement.
Lack of Syntactic Structure. Clear and consistent syntactic structure.

Little comprehension of syntactic Ability to pick up syntactic relationships

relationship between units. between units.
Need explicit training to learn symbols. Can pick up symbols without training.

Cannot reject ill-formed sentences. Can do slow in later stages.

Rarely ask questions. Frequently ask questions.

Do not use symbols referentially, (second Can use symbols referentially.

degree associations).

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• All in all, though apes display some behaviours similar to the human
language behavior, there are significant differences between the ways,
humans and apes use language.

• Whether, one sees this as in favor of the continuity or the discontinuity

hypothesis, depends upon whether we see human language abilities as
an extension of apes’ language ability or not.
Where has language come from?

• “ the evolution of language is far too vast and complex ( and vague) a
concept for anyone to say anything sensible about it.” (Bickerton,
2007).
• There can be various perspectives from which the evolution of
language can be viewed, and accordingly there are multiple
overlapping accouns of language evolution available.
Developments that contributed to language evolution

• The size of the brain increased and differentiated from other species
around 2.3 million years ago.

• Broca’s area, the neural substrate for language production was formed
around 2 million years ago.

• The human vocal apparatus differentiated from those of the apes,

around 60,000 years ago.
• E.g. lowering of the larynx, smaller & more flexible tongues, finer
musculature of lips and mouth.
• However, the more important problem to trace, when talking about
language evolution, faced by linguists, was to trace the evolution of
“syntax” or “grammar”.
• Two major views have been put forward in this debate:

• Biological Perspective
• Social Perspective
• Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) distinguish between:

• Faculty of Language Broad: includes two organism-internal features, a

sensory-motor system and a conceptual-intentional system that mediate
language within an individual. Also, FLB includes a biological capacity
to learn and master any human language.

• Faculty of Language Narrow: a computational system (narrow syntax)

that generates internal representation and maps them to the sensory
motor system via phonology and to the conceptual-intentional system
via semantics.
• Includes the capacity for recursion.
• Is recent, and uniquely evolved in humans for the purposes of language.
Social Basis of Language Evolution

• Language systems have become complex due to the process of

transmitting through generations. E.g. grammaticalization (going to
gonna).

• Cultural transmission triggered and facilitated language evolution.

• Daniel Everett, presents Piraha, language of the Piraha tribe in the

Brazilian Amazon, as a language lacking recursion, opposing the
claims of Hauser et al., 2002.
Interaction of Factors Contributing to Language Evolution (Christainsen & Kirby, 2003).
Other approaches

• Technological Hypothesis of language evolution (Ruck, 2014)

• “adaptive selection of skilled stone toolmakers was a primary driver of

this overall extension of large scale praxis networks, which expanded to
communicative, and ultimately linguistic functions (Stout & Chaminade,
2012; Vaesen, 2012).

• Mirror Neuron Hypothesis (Rizzolatti & Cragheiro, 2004)

• Learning by imitation.
Overview of research on Language Evolution
Language & Thought

• Do you often “talk” to yourself ? Or Are you “thinking”? Or is it one

and the same thing?
• Behaviorists J.B. Watson & B.F. Skinner, both advocated that “talking
to one’s self” and thinking, are one and the same thing.
• However, in 1947, medical doctors injected a healthy 34 – year old
volunteer, with curare (a poison), and paralysed the throat muscles,
that Watson believed were critical for thought processes.
• About 4 minutes after the injection was administered, the volunteer
completely lost the ability to speak.
• However, despite the loss of speech, the volunteer could still perceive
everything that was happening around him.
• Based on the volunteer’s description of his experience, the researchers
concluded that paralysis of the speech muscles had no effect on the
volunteer’s ability to perceive, think about, or remember, the events
that occurred during total muscular paralysis.
• An alternative way of asking the same question could be whether,
“talking to one’s self (without moving any muscles) is equivalent to
thinking”.
• However, we know that individuals who have lost the ability to speak
or understand language are still able to think.

• For instance, in the case of a French monk, “Brother John”, who

experienced periodic failures to speak or to understand spoken or written
language as the result of the epileptic seizures (Lecours & Joanette,
1980).

• During these episodes, while B. john was incapable of speaking

coherently or writing as well, but his ability to think remained preserved.

• Subjectively, Brother John reported inability to produce the inner

monologue as well.
• However, during his episodes, he could identify familiar objects, was
capable of handling complex tools, carrying out instructions that he had
received before the epileptic seizure began, and also performing short
and long multiplication and division.

• Further, he could remember events that happened while his language

abilities were incapacitated and talk about them afterwards in detail.

• “I could think clearly within my inner self but, when it came to [silently]
talking to myself, I experienced difficulty finding my words” (Lecours &
Joanette, 1980).
• Cases like these, are a demonstration that one does not need language
in order to think (where thinking is defined as the ability to reason,
plan, make decisions, and respond appropriately to complex
environmental stimuli).

• Other examples demonstrate that you do not need to think particularly

well in order to use language.

• William’s syndrome, is a disorder that results in abnormal brain structure

and functioning as well as mental retardation (lightwood, 1952). Severe
mental limitations do not cripple the ability to use language, in patients
with Williams Syndrome.
• For instance, one woman who was unable to do basic arithmetic
calculations or retrieve a small set of objects on request. She could
however, talk fluently and in a perfectly comprehensible manner.

• However, some aspects of the language abilities of the Williams

Syndrome Patients are certainly compromised for e.g. they react
differently to syntax & aspects of semantics than normal individuals.

• Although, it is notable that the language abilities of WMS patients are

more sophisticated than you would expect on the basis of their overall
levels of intelligence and in comparison to patients with other kinds of
mental retardation, including people with Down Syndrome.
• All in all, it ha been demonstrated that one does not need language to
think clearly, and also that one have decent language skills even if
other aspects of non – linguistic thought are impaired.

• Such a scenario is termed as double dissociation in neuroscience,

which implies that both, language and thought can exist independent
of each other.
• For instance: if there are patients available who have language impaired
but thought is fine, and other group of patients in whom thought is
impaired but language skills are fine, it would mean that the two skills
are independent of each other to a particular extent and are not parts of
the same skill set.
Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis, Linguistic Determinism &
Linguistic Relativity

• One of the interesting notions that have sought to link language and
thought, is about the effect they have on each other.

• Edward Sapir & B.L. Whorf developed this idea and proposed that the
language we use has a profound influence on the way we think, or as
some would put it, language determines thought. This came to known
as the Sapir – Whorf Hypothesis, or linguistic determinism.
• One of the sources of this idea, may have been an analysis based on
Eskimo vocabulary, published by Franz Boas (1911); which led to the
belief that while English has a single word snow, Eskimo language has
many words for the concept of snow.
• Whorf proposed that as the Eskimos had more experience with the
snow, they may have carved up the single concept to many
subconcepts, and consequently developed a different word for each of
them.
• The underlying idea being that while Eskimos would appreciate the
different nuances of snow, as their language permits them to see that;
English speaking people will not be able to see the distinctions
between these nuances as their language does not have any words for
these.
• However, that was not to be. Geofferey Pullum, a Scottish linguist,
demonstrated the flaw in these assumptions:

• He showed that Eskimo languages do not have more words for snow
than English does. As, Eskimo language gives just two possible relevant
roots qanik meaning snow in the air or aput meaning snow on the
ground. Hence, it might be wrong to assume that the speakers of English
& Eskimo may perceive snow very differently than each other.

• Indeed, there is no evidence to show that Eskimo speakers or speakers of

any other language groups perceive any differences between different
kinds of snow.
• Moving on, many researchers have also looked for evidence of
linguistic determinism, albeit in different areas. For instance, emotion
and color perception.
• Although they seem to have got some initial success, but it has been
observed that people from all around the world, speaking different
languages recognize the same basic emotions, as happiness, sadness,
anger & disgust.
• These commonalities in perception of emotion, and a similar
organisation of emotional vocabulary across languages both point
towards a shared representation of human emotions across cultures,
despite differences in languages and culture.
• As with emotion perception, perception of colors and color words also work
in the same fashion.

• Most languages have 7 or less basic color terms. Those having only two,
will first have words for white and black; and then words for red, yellow or
green. After that blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray, more or less in
that order.

• Similarities, in color classification also comes from the fact that most
people across language groups seem to have common physiological
mechanisms for color perception, for example we all three types of cones
that react to color in pairwise opposing systems, as black – white, blue –
yellow and red – green (Goldstein, 2006).

• Given this, it is easy to understand why people, even thogh they speak
different languages, perceive color in different ways.
Whorf makes a comeback…

• Let us look at what Alfred Bloom has to say,

“The claim that the language or languages we learn determine the ways
we think is clearly untenable. But it does not necessarily follow that
language is merely a code system which neither affects the process by
which thinking proceeds nor the nature of the thoughts manipulated in
that process.”
• While linguistic determinism, may not be feasible; that language may
affect thinking in some ways has found support in more recent
research.

• Researchers have started to believe that language may affect non –

linguistic perceptual and thought processes, o that speakers of one
language may differently than speakers of other languages on a range
of perceptual and cognitive tasks.
• Chinese offers two examples: counting skill and counterfactual
reasoning.

• For example:

• Chinese number words are more transparent than English, especially

from 10 onwards, the numbers for 11 – 19 are equivalent to saying, “ten
– one”, ”ten – two”, “ten – three” and so on.

• As a result, Chinese children learn to count through teens faster than

English speaking children, because of the more transparent relationship
between the teens and the single digit numbers.
• Further, the greater accuracy at naming number words could come in
handy when the children were to count sets of objects etc.

• Similarly, Piraha offers a more dramatic case of number terminology

affecting cognitive abilities (Everett, 2008).
• Piraha does not have words corresponding to Arabic numerals (one, two,
three ,etc.); instead they have words to quantify objects as fewer or more.
• This lack of number words in the language does not prevent Piraha
speakers from perceiving that different sets of objects have different
quantities of individual objects; they can match sets of different numbers
of objects.
• However, the lack of number words does seem to affect Piraha speaker’s
ability to remember the exact quantity of different sets of items.
• More specifically, when the task involves direct perception of the
objects involved, and does not require maintaining information in
memory, Piraha speakers do equally well as speakers of other
languages; however, when the task requires participants to maintain
the number of objects in memory, Piraha speakers are at a
disadvantage.

• It may be concluded, therefore that while language may not affect

perception directly, language allows speakers to encode knowledge in
a form that is relatively easy to maintain; and hence facilitates aspects
of cognition.
• On a different note, while Chinese speakers may be better in counting;
they struggle when the task involves counterfactual statements.

• Acc. to Bloom, Chinese counterfactuals are expressed using less direct

means (1984, p.276):

“A Chinese speaker might state explicitly “John did not take linguistics”
and then follow that statement by the past implicational statement, “If he
did, then he was excited about it” and the remark would again be
accorded a counterfactual interpretation – i.e., be interpreted as roughly
equivalent to the English, “If he had taken linguistics, he would have been
excited about it.”
• When English and Chinese speakers were tested on counterfactual
reasoning, Bloom showed that while about three quarters of the English
speakers were willing to accept a counterfactual statement, only about one
quarter of the Chinese speakers were willing to do so.

• Bloom reasoned that such a pattern would have happened because the
Chinese speakers could not very well understand the questions, as they were
formulated as counterfactual statements, for e.g. “If all circles are large, and
if this small triangle were a circle, would it be large?” instead of Chinese
equivalent to, “If all circles are large, and if this small triangle is a circle, is
the triangle large?”.

• So, the forms that the two language allow for, makes some aspects of
reasoning more easy for the speakers of the language, for instance English
as opposed to Chinese.
• Finally, there is also some evidence claiming that some aspects of
color perception may not be present universally in the human species.
• While the English language, does not distinguish between different
shades of the colour blue by giving them different words, Russian refers
to lighter shades of blue as, “goluboy” and darker shades of blue, as
“siniy”.

• Consequently, when a Russian speakers need to talk about a blue object,

they would need to categorize the object into a dark or light blue.

• To test the consequences of this, a set of experiments were conductedny

Winawer and colleagues (2007).
• A group of Russian & English speakers were tested. They were given a card
that had three colored squares printed on it, with one square on the top and
two squares adjacent to each other below.

• The speakers’ task was to indicate which of the bottom two squares was the
same color as the top one. Sometimes, all three squares were of lighter
shade or darker shade; and sometimes two squares were either light or dark,
with the third one being from the opposite category.

• If language has no effect on the same perception of color, there should be no

difference in the performance of English as compared to Russian speakers;
but if it has the English speakers should find the task more difficult than the
Russian speakers.
• Indeed, Russian speakers were found to be faster and more accurate
judging the squares, where some of the colors were on opposite sides o
the ”siniy”/”goluboy” boundary and slower when all the colors were
either “siniy” or “goluboy”; whereas

• English speakers had no problems were just as fast and accurate no

matter what arrangement of colors appeared on the cards.
• All in all, research on the relationship between language and thought
demonstrates for the most part, that while language does not really
affect the way one perceives the world, though it might make certain
tasks easier or more difficult.

• Though, the evidence for ad against are both to be treated carefully,

keeping in mind the task, test materials and the participants.