In This Chapter
Considering language in all its forms
Talking about human language
Exploring how people learn language
Language was one of the first areas that cognitive psychologists studied, and it’s still one of the most important. Here’s why:
- Language cuts across all areas of study, gathering in perception and attention, long- and short-term memory, thinking and decision-making.
- Language was an area in which cognitive psychology could prove itself against rival approaches. Behaviourists had tried to explain language as they would any other behaviour, using learned associations between observable events. But cognitive psychologists demonstrated that, perhaps more than any other human behaviour, people can understand language only in terms of the mental machinery that makes it possible.
- Language is an extremely intricate mechanism. Cognitive psychologists like to understand how things work inside the human brain and language gives them something to sink their teeth into.
Some cognitive psychologists see language as being unique to humans. In this chapter, we discuss whether language is indeed what sets humans apart from other animals, covering what makes human language so unusual and how people learn it under normal and extreme circumstances.
Monkey Business: Looking at Language in the Animal Kingdom
People often see language as the one thing that makes humans special – gather round and stare at the amazing talking ape! But humans seem to distinguish themselves from other species in many ways (for example, by having an awareness of their own mortality and appreciating beauty in art). Therefore, you may ask whether humans are special because they have language or whether they have language because they’re special.
One important question to consider is whether language is specific to humans or whether other species have similar abilities too. In this section, we look at different animal communication systems, not only to understand language in all its forms, but also to get a better idea of what makes human language special. We investigate the languages animals use to communicate, describe how people recognise unfamiliar languages and explore teaching language to other species.
Investigating how animals communicate
Many people argue that other animals are clearly capable of communicating with one another and so nothing’s special about language.
Cognitive psychologists don’t dispute the fact that animals are capable of communication, but they do make a distinction between different forms of communication, the relative complexity involved and the kinds of messages that can be transmitted.
Here, we consider three examples of the huge variety of communication systems in the animal kingdom and try to get a picture of perhaps why they aren’t as powerful as human language. We show that bees and vervet monkeys produce meaning without much variety and that birds produce variety without much meaning. Only humans seem to communicate in a way that has both variety and meaning.
Through human language, people can communicate any meaning. For example, someone can translate this book into any human language (such as Italian, Mandarin Chinese or American Sign Language) without losing any of the main ideas. But, as far as we know, it can’t be translated into any of the known animal communications systems – they just don’t have the ability to convey new concepts.
Calling all monkeys
Vervet monkeys have several distinct calls to warn other members of the group of the presence of predators – they use different calls for different predators. So when vervets see a snake, they make a specific call that causes the other monkeys to climb into trees. But if they see an eagle, they make a different noise that causes the others to shield themselves from aerial attack.
Vervet calls were one of the first examples of a non-human vocal language to be discerned and created quite a stir in the scientific community – here was evidence of another species using what appeared to be a language. But, despite extensive studies of vervets, little evidence has been found that vervets are capable of going beyond a simple repertoire of alarm calls.
Singing to the birds
Many species of bird appear to produce an almost endlessly varied repertoire of songs, which seem much more varied than the vervet’s simple set of calls.
In the countryside you can hear a variety of birds making recognisable vocalisations, which differ remarkably in their complexity. At one extreme is the cuckoo’s simple and repetitive call – so simple that clockmakers imitated the sound in cuckoo clocks hundreds of years ago with fairly simple mechanisms. At the other extreme is the blackbird, which seems to produce a constantly varying and interesting stream of short melodies. You’d struggle to find any repetition or obvious pattern in its song, almost as though it’s being judged on its originality or creativity – which may well be the case.
To the cognitive psychologist, the cuckoo call suggests a simple underlying cognitive process, but the variety in the blackbird’s song suggests that something more interesting is going on in its bird brain.
Despite the apparent variety of some birdsong, scientists aren’t sure that the different songs have different meanings in the same way that the vervet monkeys’ calls do. Although the birds produce a lot of variety, they don’t seem to be communicating different meanings. Scientists may be wrong, but to the best of their knowledge only two main messages are communicated by birdsong: ‘I’m fit so don’t mess with me’ and ‘I’m attractive so reproduce with me’. Perhaps complexity and variety enhance the power of these messages, but they don’t seem to transmit different meanings as human language does.
Dancing with the bees
Research has unearthed a less familiar form of communication, which bees use to communicate the location of food sources to other members of a beehive. (The ‘language’ of bees is well understood because of some clever experiments by Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch.)
Bees communicate through a special ‘dance’, which they perform on the vertical wall of the hive. They repeat a series of figure-of-eight movements, waggling their abdomens at different speeds. The angle, speeds and waggles of this dance communicate the direction and distance to food sources, and the other bees follow these instructions.
The precise details of a bee’s dance can vary considerably and signal many subtle distinctions in direction and distance, but the language is restricted to a specific set of information. In a sense, it’s more like filling in a form with certain standard pieces of information rather than producing sentences.
The bee dance seems very clever but only communicates the direction and distance of food. Bees can only answer one question – ‘Where’s the food?’ They don’t seem to be able to make small talk or gossip (but we leave you to decide whether that makes them inferior to humans or not!).
Recognising other languages (in sea and space)
You may object to the main point of the preceding section – that animal communication lacks the power of human language to express novel ideas. How do psychologists know that this point is correct? The short answer is, they don’t.
A majority of people who study language and animal communication hold the view that human language is special. But others disagree, and argue that humans can’t rule out the intelligence of a system that they don’t understand.
Aliens and dolphins
This debate raises the question of how humans can recognise an intelligent communication from an unknown source. Interestingly, people studying earth-bound communication, such as from whales and dolphins, and those interested in detecting potential signals from aliens (such as The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence [SETI] Institute [www.seti.org], which scans space for radio signals and analyses them for signs of intelligence), face the same problem: how do people know when a signal is intelligent? What are the hallmarks of language?
In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, science-fiction author Douglas Adams presents dolphins as the true intelligent species on Earth. This idea has been played with for a long time: the inspirational cosmologist Carl Sagan said, ‘It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to 50 words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese’.
Patterns in human language
If humans can’t be sure whether other species aren’t communicating in languages as sophisticated as their own, how can they expect to recognise intelligent communication? What should they be looking for – whether in animals or extra-terrestrials?
Well, some interesting patterns exist in human language. In the 1930s, George Zipf noticed that if people take a large sample of text and count how often different words occur in it, and then rank the words from most frequent to least frequent and draw a graph of the frequencies, they get a graph with a distinctive curve (like the one in Figure 13-1).
This shape is an example of something called a power law (a relationship between two variables where as one variable increases, the other changes by the amount to a certain power). Such patterns occur in many natural phenomena, but seeing it in language is interesting. The curve may suggest that people analysing signals from outer space or from other species need to look for distinctive statistical patterns in language.
Unfortunately, because many other natural phenomena follow this pattern, spotting a signal that exhibits this pattern doesn’t mean that it’s intelligent. Also, just because something doesn’t follow this pattern, it doesn’t mean that it’s not an intelligent signal.
The patterns in language occur because of repetition – in every language, a small number of sounds occur very frequently and a large number of sounds occur very infrequently. English speakers spend a lot of time saying the word ‘the’ but relatively little time saying ‘pterodactyl’!
In modern communication systems such as third-generation mobile phones, engineers put a lot of effort into removing this repetition to pack more information into a signal. The result is signals with no obvious patterns. So perhaps any sufficiently advanced signal would be indistinguishable from background noise – unless humans knew the code.
Another way of looking at this problem is this: how can humans devise a way of communicating with other species? This problem faces scientists who are interested in sending signals to other potential alien civilisations (see the nearby sidebar ‘The Arecibo message’) and people trying to teach animals to use language (check out the following section).
You may want to think about to what extent someone or something has to be human to understand, or learn, a human language. Is it just a question of being sufficiently intelligent, or do humans have a specific brain make-up that means that only they can use human language?
Teaching language to other species
Some researchers believe that humans aren’t special, but that language is: in other words, human culture invented language, and it enabled people to make massive advances. According to this view, the main difference between humans and apes is that humans have a more advanced culture. If humans can teach apes their special language skills, apes should then be able to demonstrate intelligence too. Starting in the 1960s, a number of researchers set out to train different species to communicate using human languages, or at least something akin to human languages.
One example project started in 1970 by Herbert Terrace tried to teach language to a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky (a play on the name of famous linguist Noam Chomsky). As with similar projects, Nim was raised in a context intended to be as similar as possible to a human child, though because chimpanzees lack human vocal capabilities, Nim was taught American Sign Language.
Although Nim learned to produce some interesting sentences, the complexity of his language never reached that achieved by a typical 4-year-old human child. As with other attempts to teach languages to other species, the linguistic achievement seemed to plateau at a stage equivalent to a young child and never went beyond it.
Also, questions remain about the creativity of the language displayed by such animals. For example, if a chimp combines the signs for ‘water’ and ‘bird’ when she sees a duck in a lake, is this a genuine sign of linguistic creativity (creating the phrase ‘water bird’) or just lucky coincidence (producing separate signs for ‘water’ and ‘bird’ in succession but not in a genuinely creative way)?
In more recent years, researchers have taught various forms of language to other species, including dolphins and grey parrots, with some degree of success. Other species do seem to be able to go beyond the simple fixed systems displayed by vervets (see the earlier section ‘Investigating how animals communicate’), but they don’t seem, so far, to have achieved the complexity that human children reach by the age of about 5.
Discovering What Makes Human Language Special
In this section, we describe the features of communication and demonstrate that human language potentially uniquely employs them all. We also present a theory of language that suggests all humans have an innate ability to learn grammatical structures. We show the importance of creativity in language and potentially in all human cognition.
Getting specific on what sets human language apart: Hockett’s design features
In the 1960s, American linguist Charles Hockett proposed a set of design features for human language, to try and define what, if anything, makes it special or even unique.
The following list details what he came up with. As you read through it, consider to what extent these features are exclusive to human language and to what extent they’re necessary for it.
- Vocal auditory channel: Language uses voices and sounds and by doing so frees you to do other tasks (such as moving), but it isn’t essential, as sign language demonstrates.
- Broadcast transmission and directional reception: When you speak to a whole surrounding group, they all perceive you as the speaker.
- Rapid fading: A sound dies out quickly and allows you to say something else – which is different, say, from communicating by scent.
- Interchangeability: Any member of the species can say anything – unlike mating displays by animals, in which only sexual animals send certain signals in order to attract a mate.
- Complete feedback: You’re aware of exactly what you’re saying.
- Specialisation: You use specialised organs for speech – the vocal apparatus doesn’t serve other purposes.
- Semanticity: Speech has meaning – the sounds you make refer to things, unlike, for example, birdsong (see the earlier ‘Investigating how animals communicate’ section).
- Arbitrariness: You use sounds as symbols to refer to things – for example, no relationship exists between the word ‘dog’ and the animal it represents, except for people who’ve learned the connection.
- Discreteness: Words and speech sounds have separate and distinct meanings. You don’t blend sounds like you blend paints: for example, ‘dog’ and ‘fog’ are very different words with a sharp distinction between them. Also, people speak one word at a time and each word is perceived as distinct and non-overlapping.
- Displacement: You can use language to refer to things that are distant in space or time (or even completely imaginary). Contrast that with pointing, which has to indicate something present.
- Openness or creativity: You have the ability to say new things. You can invent sentences that have never been said before and create new phrases or words to refer to new developments.
- Tradition: Language is passed on to new generations in a culture.
- Duality of patterning: You can combine units of sound with no meaning in themselves in different ways to produce different meaning – the letters ‘g’, ‘o’ and ‘d’ can spell ‘dog’ or ‘god’.
- Prevarication: You can say things that are untrue (though of course, For Dummies’s readers never tell porkies!).
- Reflexiveness: Language can be used to refer to itself – such as ‘I was only joking’, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’, ‘This sentence is false’.
- Learnability: Human infants learn whichever language they grow up with. Many animal communication systems are innate rather than learned.
You may think that forms of animal communication meet each of these requirements – but human communication meets them all. None of these design features are unique to human language, but (at least probably) no single animal communication system exhibits all these features.
A system of language: According to Noam Chomsky
A defining moment in the history of psychology was the publication, in 1957, of a book titled Syntactic Structures by a young professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has since become one of the most famous, and most cited, thinkers of all time. In a nutshell, he said that human language is governed by rules that are internalised in people’s minds. Although they aren’t aware of these rules, whenever they produce a sentence they show evidence of using them.
So when you learn a language (especially as a child learning your native language), you don’t learn a set of words or phrases or sentences but a whole system, which enables you to produce and comprehend an infinite number of different possible sentences. No one teaches you these rules – somehow you just figure them out.
Chomsky believes that this system is quite different to any other forms of animal communication. The idea is that humans have an innate language centre in their brain that contains the basic structures of language (the syntax and grammar). Animal communication, on the other hand, isn’t governed by such complex grammatical structures.
Infinite creativity: Writing the world’s longest sentence, and making it longer
Language is a discrete, combinatorial system – it involves definite units that people can combine in many ways (but not mix, blur or blend) to produce a huge amount of variety.
Steven Pinker points out that The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for the longest sentence. But, he demonstrates, coming up with an even longer sentence is easy: you just write a sentence that includes this longest sentence, for example, ‘The longest sentence is… .’
Some nursery rhymes use this idea, such as ‘This is the house that Jack built’, which begins:
- This is the house that Jack built!
- This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
- This is the rat that ate the malt
- That lay in the house that Jack built.
It ends:
- This is the farmer sowing his corn
- That kept the cock that crowed in the morn
- That waked the priest all shaven and shorn
- That married the man all tattered and torn
- That kissed the maiden all forlorn
- That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
- That tossed the dog that worried the cat
- That killed the rat that ate the malt
- That lay in the house that Jack built!
The last verse is all one sentence consisting of ‘This is …’ followed by a single phrase beginning with ‘the farmer …’.
Chomsky also argued that human languages have a feature called recursion, which makes them much more powerful than simple word-chain devices. Recursion allows someone to talk about a thing that contains a thing of the same type – for example, English has noun phrases such as ‘the man’ to refer to a specific person or thing. But you can make the phrase more complicated, such as ‘the man in the room’, and take it further as ‘the man in the room under the stairs’ or ‘the man in the room under the stairs in the old house’ or ‘the man in the room under the stairs in the old house on the hill’.
In theory, no limit exists to how far you can go with this process – though, in practice, you’re limited by memory, breath and the patience of your listener. This distinction between what you can do in theory and what you can do in practice is termed the competence-performance distinction.
Relating language to other human skills
Other skills may have similar mental roots to language. Humans aren’t just better at using language – they can do many other things that seem to leave other species behind. For example, the same creativity that humans exhibit in language is also manifested in the arts, technology and understanding.
In 1951, the neuroscientist Karl Lashley wrote an influential paper about the problem of serial order (how the order of information presented affects memory). He argued that many skills have a hierarchical structure. In language, people build sentences out of phrases, phrases out of words and words out of basic sounds. Similarly, composers make songs out of verses and choruses and each of those is made of short bars of music, which are, in turn, made from individual notes. This breaking down into units of decreasing size can be applied to behaviours as diverse as dancing, playing video games or understanding historical events.
Perhaps language isn’t what makes humans special; maybe it’s some more general capacity for creative thought that enables them to excel at a whole variety of skills including, but not limited to, language.
‘Uggh. Mama. Me Want Be Psychologist!’ Developing Language Skills
Language research contains a key argument about how humans acquire language. On the one hand, some theorists believe that language is innate. This notion is based on the idea that the human brain has evolved to be able to process language. On the other hand, some researchers believe that experience is required in order to develop language and that it’s learnt through behaviour modification.
The American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine gave the example of an explorer coming upon a tribe who speak an unknown language. A tribesman points at a rabbit and says ‘gavagai’. What does he mean? The explorer may assume that the word means rabbit – seems simple enough. But perhaps ‘gavagai’ is the name of a particular pet rabbit, or it may refer to any animal, or perhaps the concepts of ‘running away’, ‘scared’ or even ‘lunch’. Language is flexible, and it allows people to express a huge variety of meanings. So how does a person who doesn’t know the language ever make sense of what it all means?
In this section, we walk you through the stages of language acquisition in children and the problems they face, cover how adults learn additional languages and consider how language is learned in extreme or unusual circumstances.
Picking up language skills in childhood
Children face problems when acquiring language, and they make mistakes. One suggestion is that they have constraints on what they’re able to learn. For example, young children don’t like to learn two words with exactly the same meaning. They also seem to assume a certain level of generality:
- Over-generalising: They may think that a word has a wider meaning than it does, for example, wanting to use ‘Fido’ to refer to all dogs or even all mammals.
- Under-generalising: They may assume a narrower meaning, such as using the word ‘dog’ only to refer to their own pet dog and no others.
Children also show further biases in their language acquisition:
- Whole object assumption: A new word is likely to refer to a whole object (for example, rabbit) rather than part of it (for example, ear).
- Taxonomic constraint: When dealing with new words, children assume different labels for objects (for example, poodle – dog – animal). If a child already knows ‘dog’ and ‘animal’, she’s likely to assume that ‘poodle’ is a type of dog.
- Mutual exclusivity: Every word has a different meaning – British-born American linguist Eve Clark calls this the principle of contrast. If a child already knows the word ‘elephant’ and someone points at an elephant and says ‘trunk’ the child believes that the word refers to part of the elephant, where the person is pointing.
To demonstrate the above biases, psychologists examined what happens if children hear a new word referring to an object. Researchers found that the way in which children interpret the word depends on whether they already know a name for the object. If the object is unfamiliar, they interpret the word as being a name for the whole object, but if the object is familiar they interpret the word as referring to some noticeable part of the object.
Children learn new words at a phenomenal rate – they acquire about ten words per day, on average around the ages of 3 to 4 years, which suggests that they must be keeping track of a huge amount of information.
Following the stages of language acquisition in children
Although, of course, different patterns and rates of learning exist, language acquisition seems to go through a series of stages:
- Babbling (6–8 months): Babies produce a string of consonant-vowel sequences. The frequency with which certain speech sounds occur reflects the language to which they’re exposed, suggesting that they’re modifying speech to fit language.
- One-word (9–18 months): Children begin to use single words or parts of words, often to name objects, such as ‘mummy’, ‘milk’, ‘cup’.
- Two-word (18–24 months): Children show the first signs of syntax or grammar as they begin to produce pairs of words in different combinations such as ‘more milk’, ‘daddy gone’.
- Early multi-word (24–30 months): Children begin to produce utterances containing three or more words, but the language is often telegraphic – it tends to include only the most meaningful words, and it lacks the grammatical function of words and affixes such as ‘ing’ and ‘ed’. For example, ‘me go toilet’, ‘mummy put shoe’.
- Later multi-word (30 months on): Children begin using full grammatical sentences, although they still make errors, such as ‘I goed to the shops’.
Learning languages in later life
Adults have difficulty learning languages whereas children seem to do so effortlessly, leading some psychologists to argue for a critical period for language acquisition, an idea you can interpret in two different ways:
- Humans are specifically programmed genetically to learn language in the first few years of life.
- Brain development imposes a more general limit on language acquisition ability beyond a certain age.
Noam Chomsky proposed that language develops a bit like a biological organ – it follows a genetically defined programme that unfolds in a specific way and within a specific time frame. Others believe that language development is affected by more general issues and that the difficulty in learning language in later life is because the brain is less malleable. According to this view, the building blocks of language normally occur when the brain is developing rapidly and is able to adapt and change rapidly, known as synaptic plasticity.
Speaking more than one language
An interesting but not unusual case is when children learn more than one language. Estimates suggest that a majority of the world’s children grow up in environments in which two or more common languages exist and so bilingualism is more normal than monolingualism.
An interesting feature of children learning two languages is that initially they seem to treat it as one language – learning only one word for each object. But they seem to reach a point of sudden realisation when they begin happily to accept two words for everything.
Another interesting feature of bilingualism is a phenomenon called code-switching, in which a bilingual speaker switches between two languages in a single sentence. This switching isn’t random but seems to follow something called the equivalence constraint – a switch can only occur at a point where it doesn’t break the grammatical rules of either language. For example, a French/English speaker is unlikely to say ‘a car americaine’ or ‘une American voiture’, because the phrases are wrong in both languages. But the switch ‘J’ai acheté an American car’ (I bought an American car) is possible because English and French share the rule that a verb is followed by its object.
Considering language development in extreme circumstances
Cognitive psychologists like to test theories using experiments that alter the conditions under which a phenomenon occurs, to see its effect. For obvious reasons (they can’t take a random group of children and raise them without language for ethical reasons), they can’t interfere with the process of language acquisition to see what factors matter. But throughout history some unusual, often unpleasant, events have occurred in which circumstances affected children’s learning. These extreme situations can provide some insight into the extremes of the human ability to learn language.
Genie: A case of extreme neglect
Some evidence seems to back up the idea that children have a critical period in language acquisition.
Genie was a child raised under conditions of extreme neglect until the age of 13 years. After being discovered, she was given intensive help, including language tuition, but her language never progressed into the fluent style of language normally acquired by relatively young children. Although possibly evidence for a ‘critical period’, researchers can’t be sure that Genie’s problems with language acquisition weren’t just down to the age she started learning or a side effect of her more general neglect. Read more about Genie in Chapter 21.
Nicaraguan sign language
Children don’t just seem to learn languages; they can also create them.
In the 1980s in Nicaragua, a new centre was opened for deaf children. No sign language was available, and so the children were taught lip reading with spoken Spanish and some simple finger spelling, but with little success. However, these children did learn to communicate using a sign language they created among themselves. Linguists found it to be very rich in structure.
Pidgins and creoles
Even when learning an existing language, children are undergoing a process of guided creativity, most clearly seen in the case of pidgin and creole languages (terms used to describe two types of ‘invented’ language).
A pidgin is a language that adults create when they don’t share a common language but need to communicate. Such situations occurred in the early days of international trading and also as a result of the slave trade. Usually these languages were quite rudimentary and lacked the more complex grammar of normal languages, most likely because the people creating these languages were usually late learners, and older people usually can’t learn new languages to the same degree of fluency as children.
Sometimes romances developed between two people who only shared a pidgin language, and they settled down and raised children. Interestingly, the children took the pidgin language to a level beyond that of their parents, adding more grammar and increasing its richness to the point where it had most of the complexity of a full language. These enriched pidgins are known as creoles. A number of communities across the world speak creole today as the main language, including Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. The process by which children transform a pidgin into a creole is called creolisation.
