PSYCH 1XX3 Lecture 5: Language
4 May 2018
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LANGUAGE
Unit One: Introduction to Language
Language
● When we communicate, we send and receive information to another individual or group
● There are many different forms of communication, however the most complex is
language
● Language is abstracts
● Psychologists consider communication between humans as language only (i.e.: growl of
a dog, song of a bird =/= language)
Natural Language: Regular
● There is criteria that determine what a “true” language is
● Language is regular - it is governed by rules and grammar
● An entire sentence can be reorganized and still have the same meaning, because rules
detail how each word fits with the words around it
Natural Language: Arbitrary
● Language is arbitrary
● The sound assigned to symbolize a certain concept is completely random
● There is nothing about the sound of a word that indicates what the word means
○ E.g.: the word cat
does not indicate that it refers to a furry animal with whiskers
and a tail
● If the sounds used to represent an object had to relate or describe the object in some
way, it would not make sense to have different languages
Natural Language: Productive
● Language is productive
● There are almost limitless ways to combine words to describe objects, situations, and
actions
● This is evident when observing native language development in infants, who craft new
word and sound combinations that have not been explicitly taught
The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis
● The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis states that language influences the way we think and the
way we perceive and experience the world
● Language is used to think (inner monologue) and to communicate
● Evidence to support the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis:
○ A study of the Piraha, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Brazil
○ The native language contains only three counting words: a word to represent
one, two, and many
○ According to the hypothesis, the tribe should have trouble understanding fine
numerical concepts because the language lacks words for the distinctions
○ Peter Gordon of Columbia University asked members of the Piraha tribe to match
groups of objects according to the number of items within each group
○ Gordon laid out a number of familiar objects, such as sticks or nuts and asked
members of the tribe to lay out the same number of objects on their side
○ Members of the tribe performed well with groups of one or two, but performance
worsened with sets greater than three
● There is also evidence that counters the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis
● Consider cultures that lack particular words to differentiate relatives
○ E.g.: the Wyoming Arapaho Indians use only one word to differentiate any senior
male relatives (brother, father, uncle, grandfather)
■ Despite this, they clearly understand the differences between these
individuals, and are able to understand precisely how they are related
○ E.g.: in the Korean language, there are very precise terms for each member of
the family
■ Joe Kim’s father’s older brother is called Kuhn-a-bo-jee, while Joe Kim’s
mother’s older brother is called sam-chun
■ In English, both of these relatives are simply called uncle
● Researchers still debating the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, and a key question remains
unanswered: can you have abstract thought without language?
Unit Two: The Structure of Language
Morphemes
● There are over 3000 languages active in the world today
● All human languages contain some similar features
● All languages use sounds, words, or symbols to transmit information
● These symbols are called morphemes
● In oral language, morphemes are the smallest units of sound that contain information
● In a manual, or sign language, morphemes are identified in units of signs rather than
sound
● Often a word, but some words contain multiple morphemes
● E.g.: the word table
is a single morpheme, but the word tablecloth
is a single word that
contains two morphemes: table
and cloth
. Each of these morphemes provides a different
piece of information
● A morpheme can also stand alone as an individual word
● Not all morphemes make sense as an individual word
○ E.g.: the word tables
is also made up of two morphemes: table
identifies the
object, and the morpheme s
indicates that there is more than one
Phonemes
● Phonemes are the smallest unit of sounds in a word
● We can break up a morpheme into its constituent sounds, called phonemes
●
● Various languages contain different libraries of useable phonemes and rules about how
they can be combined
● To make English sounds, we can combine certain phonemes, such as /ch/, /ai/, /r/, but
not others, such as /k/, /v/, /t/, which may be allowed in another language
● In English, you can follow the rules of phoneme combinations to make up a plausible
word that has no meaning
Syntax
● The rules that govern how sentences are put together, also known as grammar
● Each language has its own distinct rules about the order in which sounds and words can
be combined
● The rules that govern how words are grouped together to form a sentence is called
syntax
● Differences in syntactic rules among languages are as varied as the cultures they
originate from
● Some languages assign gender to objects
● Other languages do not assign grammatical gender to all nouns, only where it
corresponds to biological gender
Syntax and Semantics
● Semantics refers to the meaning of each individual word in a sentence
● Therefore, a word may have perfect syntactical structure yet have no semantic meaning
whatsoever
●
● While this sentence is syntactically correct, there is no real meaning and therefore it is
not semantically correct
