AP Psychology

Module 36 - Thinking and Language

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Imagine an alien species that could pass thoughts from one head to another merely by pulsating air molecules in the space between them. Perhaps these weird creatures could inhabit a future science fiction movie? Actually, we are those creatures. When we speak, our brain and voice apparatus conjure up air pressure waves that we send banging against another's eardrum-enabling us to transfer thoughts from our brain into theirs. As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (1998) has noted, we sometimes sit for hours "listening to other people make noise as they exhale, because those hisses and squeaks contain information." And thanks to all those funny sounds created in our heads from the air pressure waves we send out, we get people's attention, we get them to do things, and we maintain relationships (Guerin, 2003). Depending on how you vibrate the air after opening your mouth, you may get slapped or kissed.

But language is more than vibrating air. As I create this paragraph, my fingers on a keyboard generate electronic binary numbers that are translated into squiggles of dried carbon pressed onto the page in front of you. When transmitted by reflected light rays into your retina, the printed squiggles trigger formless nerve impulses that project to several areas of your brain, which integrate the information, compare it with stored information, and decode meaning. Thanks to language, information is moving from my mind to yours. Monkeys mostly know what they see. Thanks to language (spoken, written, or signed) we comprehend much that we've never seen and that our distant ancestors never knew.

Today, notes Daniel Gilbert (2006), "The average newspaper boy in Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name."

To Pinker (1990), language is "the jewel in the crown of cognition." If you were able to retain one cognitive ability, make it language, suggests researcher Lera Boroditsky (2009). Without sight or hearing, you could still have friends, family, and a job. But without language, could you have these things? "Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it."

Language Structure

FOCUS QUESTIONS: What are the structural components of a language?

Consider how we might go about inventing a language. For a spoken language, we would need three building blocks:

Language becomes increasingly complex as we move from one level to the next. In English, for example, 40 or so phonemes can be combined to form more than 100,000 morphemes, which alone or in combination produce the 616,500 word forms in the Oxford English Dictionary. Using those words, we can then create an infirute number of sentences, most of which (like this one) are original. Like life constructed from the genetic code's simple alphabet, language is complexity built of simplicity. I know that you can know why I worry that you think this sentence is starting to get too complex, but that complexity-and our capacity to communicate and comprehend it-is what distinguishes human language capacity (Hauser et al., 2002; Premack, 2007).

Language Development

Make a quick guess: How many words will you have learned during the years between your first birthday and your high school graduation? Although you use only 150 words for about half of what you say, you will have learned about 60,000 words in your native language during those years (Bloom, 2000; McMurray, 2007). That averages (after age 2) to nearly 3500 words each year, or nearly 10 each day! How you do it-how those 3500 words so far outnumber the roughly 200 words your schoolteachers are consciously teaching you each year-is one of the great human wonders.

Could you even state all your language's rules of syntax (the correct way to string words together to form sentences)? Most of us cannot. Yet, before you were able to add 2 + 2, you were creating your own original and grammatically appropriate sentences. As a preschooler, you comprehended and spoke with a facility that puts to shame college students struggling to learn a foreign language. We humans have an astonishing facility for language. With remarkable efficiency, we sample tens of thousands of words in our them out, three words a second (Vigliocco & Hartsuiker, 2002). Seldom do we form sentences in our minds before speaking them. Rather we organize them on the fly as we speak. And while doing all this, we also adapt our utterances to our social and cultural context, following rules for speaking (How far apart should we stand?) and listening (Is it OK to interrupt?). Given how many ways there are to mess up, it's amazing that we can master this social dance. So when and how does it happen?

When Do We Learn Language?

FOCUS QUESTIONS: What are the milestones in language development?
RECEPTIVE LANGUAGE

Children's language development moves from simplicity to complexity. Infants start without language (in fantis means "not speaking").Yet by 4 months of age, babies can recognize differences in speech sounds (Stager & Werker, 1997). They can also read lips: They prefer to look at a face that matches a sound, so we know they can recognize that ah comes from wide open lips and ee from a mouth with corners pulled back (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982). This marks the beginning of the development of babies' receptive language, their ability to understand what is said to and about them. At 7 months and beyond, babies grow in their power to do what you and I find difficult when listening to an unfamiliar language: to segment spoken sounds into individual words. Moreover, their adeptness at this task, as judged by their listening patterns, predicts their language abilities at ages 2 and 5 (Newman et al., 2006).

PRODUCTIVE LANGUAGE

Babies' productive language, their ability to produce words, matures after their receptive language. They recognize noun-verb differences - as shown by their responses to a misplaced noun or verb-earlier than they utter sentences with nouns and verbs (Bernal et al., 2010).

Before nurture molds babies' speech, nature enables a wide range of possible sounds in the babbling stage, beginning around 4 months of age. Many of these spontaneously uttered sounds are consonant-vowel pairs formed by simply bunching the tongue in the front of the mouth (da-da, na-na, ta-ta) or by opening and closing the lips (ma-ma), both of which babies do naturally for feeding (MacNeilage & Davis, 2000). Babbling is not an imitation of adult speech-it includes sounds from various languages, including those not spoken in the household. From this early babbling, a listener could not identify an infant as being, say, French, Korean, or Ethiopian. Deaf infants who observe their deaf parents signing begin to babble more with their hands (Petitto & Marentette, 1991).

By the time infants are about 10 months old, their babbling has changed so that a trained ear can identify the household language (de Boysson-Bardies et al., 1989). Without exposure to other languages, babies lose their ability to hear and produce sounds and tones found outside their native language (Meltzoff et al., 2009; Pallier et al., 2001). Thus, by adulthood, those who speak only English cannot discriminate certain sounds in Japanese speech. Nor can Japanese adults with no training in English hear the difference between the English r and I. For a Japanese-speaking adult, la-la-ra-ra may sound like the same syllable repeated. (Does this astonish you as it does me?) A Japanese-speaking person told that the train station is "just after the next light" may wonder, "The next what? After the street veering right, or farther down, after the light?"

Around their first birthday, most children enter the one-word stage. They have already learned that sounds carry meanings, and if repeatedly trained to associate, say, fish with a picture of a fish, 1-year-olds will look at a fish when a researcher says, "Fish, fish! Look at the fish!" (Schafer, 2005). They now begin to use sounds - usually only one barely recognizable syllable, such as ma or da-to communicate meaning. But family members quickly learn to understand, and gradually the infant's language conforms more to the family's language. Across the world, baby's first words are often nouns that label objects or people (Tardif et al., 2008). At this one-word stage, a single inflected word ("Doggy!") may equal a sentence. ("Look at the dog out there !")

At about 18 months, children's word learning explodes from about a word per week to a word per day. By their second birthday, most have entered the two-word stage (see TABLE 36.1). They start uttering two-word sentences in telegraphic speech. Like today's text messages or yesterday's telegrams that charged by the word (TERMS ACCEPTED. SEND MONEY), a 2-year-old's speech contains mostly nouns and verbs (Want juice). Also like telegrams, it follows rules of syntax: The words are in a sensible order. English-speaking children typically place adjectives before nouns - white house rather than house white. Spanish reverses this order, as in casa blanca. Moving out of the two-word stage, children quickly begin uttering longer phrases (Frornkin & Rodman, 1983). If they get a late start on learning a particular language, such as after receiving a cochlear implant or being adopted by a family in another country, their language development still proceeds through the same sequence, although usually at a faster pace (Ertmer et al., 2007; Snedeker et al., 2007). By early elementary school, children understand complex sentences and begin to enjoy the humor conveyed by double meanings: "You never starve in the desert because of all the sand-which-is there."

Explaining Language Development

FOCUS QUESTIONS: How do we acquire language?

The world's 7000 or so languages are structurally very diverse (Evans & Levinson, 2009). Linguist Noam Chomsky has nonetheless argued that all languages do share some basic elements, which he calls universal gramma. All human languages, for example, have nouns, verbs, and adjectives as grammatical building blocks. Moreover, said Chomsky, we humans are born with a built-in predisposition to learn grammar rules, which helps explain why preschoolers pick up language so readily and use grammar so well. It happens so naturally-as naturally as birds learn to fly-that training hardly helps.

We are not, however, born with a built-in specific language. Europeans and Native Australia-New Zealand populations, though geographically separated for 50,000 years, can readily learn each others' languages (Chater et al., 2009). And whatever language we experience as children, whether spoken or signed, we all readily learn its specific grammar and vocabulary (Bavelier et aI., 2003). But no matter what language we learn, we start speaking it mostly in nouns (kitty, da-da) rather than in verbs and adjectives (Bornstein et aI., 2004). Biology and experience work together.

STATISTICAL LEARNING

When adults listen to an unfamiliar language, the syllables all run together. A young Sudanese couple new to North America and unfamiliar with English might, for example, hear United Nations as "Un eye Tednay Shuns." Their 7 -month-old daughter would not have this problem. Human infants display a remarkable ability to learn statistical aspects of human speech. Their brillns not only discern word breaks, they statistically analyze which syllables, as in "hap-py-ba-by," most often go together. After just two minutes of exposure to a computer voice speaking an unbroken, monotone string of nonsense syllables (bidakupadotigolabubidaku …), 8-month-old infants were able to recognize (as indicated by their attention) three-syllable sequences that appeared repeatedly (Saffran et al., 1996,2009).

In further testimony to infants' surprising knack for soaking up language, research shows that 7-month-olds can learn simple sentence structures. After repeatedly hearing syllable sequences that follow one rule (an ABA pattern, such as ga-ti-ga and li-na-lz), infants listened longer to syllables in a different sequence (an ABB pattern, such as wo-fe-fe, rather than wo-fe-wo). Their detecting the difference between the two patterns supports the idea that babies come with a built-in readiness to learn grammatical rules (Marcus et al., 1999).

CRITICAL PERIODS

Could we train adults to perform this same feat of statistical analysis later in the human life span? Many researchers believe not. Childhood seems to represent a critical (or "sensitive") period for mastering certain aspects of language before the language-learning window closes (Hernandez & Li, 2007). People who learn a second language as adults usually speak it with the accent of their native language, and they also have difficulty mastering the new grammar. In one experiment, Korean and Chinese immigrants considered 276 English sentences ("Yesterday the hunter shoots a deer”) and decided whether they were grammatically correct or incorrect aohnson & Newport, & 1991). All had been in the United States for approximately 10 years: Some had arrived in early childhood, others as adults. As FIGURE 36.1 reveals, those who learned their second language early learned it best. The older one is when moving to a new country, the harder it will be to learn its language and to absorb its culture (Cheung et al., 2011; Hakuta et al., 2003).

The window on language learning closes gradually in early childhood. Later-than-usual exposure to language (at age 2 or 3) unleashes the idle language capacity of a child's brain, producing a rush of language. But by about age 7, those who have not been exposed to either a spoken or a signed language gradually lose their ability to master any language.

The impact of early experiences is evident in language learning in the 90+ percent of prelingually deaf children born to hearing-nonsigning parents. These children typically do not experience language during their early years. Natively deaf children who learn sign language after age 9 never learn it as well as those who lose their hearing at age 9 after learning English. They also never learn English as well as other natively deaf children who learned sign in infancy (Mayberry et al., 2002). Those who learn to sign as teens or adults are like immigrants who learn English after childhood: They can master basic words and learn to order them, but they never become as fluent as native signers in producing and comprehending subtle grammatical differences (Newport, 1990). As a flower's growth will be stunted without nourishment, so, too, children will typically become linguistically stunted if isolated from language during the critical period for its acquisition.

The Brain and Language

FOCUS QUESTIONS: What brain areas are involved in language processing and speech?

We think of speaking and reading, or writing and reading, or singing and speaking as merely different examples of the same general ability-language. But consider this curious finding: Aphasia, an impairment of language, can result from damage to any of several cortical areas. Even more curious, some people with aphasia can speak fluently but cannot read (despite good vision), while others can comprehend what they read but cannot speak. Still others can write but not read, read but not write, read numbers but not letters, or sing but not speak. These cases suggest that language is complex, and that different brain areas must serve different language functions.

Indeed, in 1865, French physician Paul Broca reported that after damage to an area of the left frontal lobe (later called Broca's area) a person would struggle to speak words while still being able to sing familiar songs and comprehend speech.

In 1874, German investigator Carl Wernicke discovered that after damage to an area of the left temporal lobe (Wernicke's area) people could speak only meaningless words. Asked to describe a picture that showed two boys stealing cookies behind a woman's back, one patient responded: "Mother is away her working her work to get her better, but when she's looking the two boys looking the other part. She's working another time" (Geschwind, 1979). Damage to Wernicke's area also disrupts understanding.

Today's neuroscience has confirmed brain activity in Broca's and Wernicke's areas during language processing (see FIGURE 36.2). But neuroscience is refining our understanding of how our brain processes language. Language functions are distributed across other brain areas as well. Functional MRI scans show that different neural networks are activated by nouns and verbs, or objects and actions; by different vowels; and by reading stories of visual versus motor experiences (Shapiro et al., 2006; Speer et al., 2009). Different neural networks also enable one's native language and a second language learned later in life (perani &Abutalebi, 2005).

And here's another funny fMRI finding. Jokes that play on meaning ("Why don't sharks bite lawyers? ... Professional courtesy”) are processed in a different brain area than jokes that play on words ("What kind of lights did Noah use on the ark? ... Flood lights”) (Goel & Dolan, 2001).

The big point to remember is this: In processing language, as in other forms of information processing, the brain operates by dividing its mental functions - speaking, perceiving, thinking, remembering - into subfunctions. Your conscious experience of reading this page seems indivisible, but your brain is computing each word's form, sound, and meaning using different neural networks (Posner & Carr, 1992). We saw this also in Module 18's discussion of vision, for which the brain engages specialized subtasks, such as discerning depth, movement, form, and color. And in vision as in language, a localized trauma that destroys one of these neural work teams may cause people to lose just one aspect of processing. In visual processing, a stroke may destroy the ability to perceive movement but not color. In language processing, a stroke may impair the ability to speak distinctly without harming the ability to read.

Think about it: What you experience as a continuous, indivisible stream of experience is actually but the visible tip of a subdivided information-processing iceberg.

* * *

Returning to our debate about how deserving we humans are of our name Homo sapiens, let's pause to issue an interim report card. On decision making and risk assessment, our error-prone species might rate a C+. On problem solving, where humans are inventive yet vulnerable to fixation, we would probably receive a better mark, perhaps a B. On cognitive efficiency, our fallible but quick heuristics earn us an A. And when it comes to our creativity, and our learning and using language, the awestruck experts would surely award the human species an A+.

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: There has been controversy at some universities about allowing fluency in sign language to fulfill a second-language requirement for an undergraduate degree. As you start planning for your own college years, what is your opinion?

TEST YOURSELF: If children are not yet speaking, is there any reason to think they would benefit from parents and other caregivers reading to them?

Language and Thought

FOCUS QUESTIONS: What is the relationship between language and thinking, and what is the value of thinking in images? Thinking and language intricately intertwine. Asking which comes first is one of psychology's chicken-and-egg questions. Do our ideas come first and we wait for words to name them? Or are our thoughts conceived in words and therefore unthinkable without them?

Language Influences Thinking

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) contended that language determines the way we think: "Language itself shapes a [person's] basic ideas."The Hopi, who have no past tense for their verbs, could not readily think about the past, said Whorf. Whorf's linguistic determinism hypothesis is too extreme. We all think about things for which we have no words. (Can you think of a shade of blue you cannot name?) And we routinely have unsymbolized (wordless, imageless) thoughts, as when someone, while watching two men carry a load of bricks, wondered whether the men would drop them (Heavey & Hurlburt, 2008; Hurlburt & Akhter, 2008).

Nevertheless, to those who speak two dissimilar languages, such as English and Japanese, it seems obvious that a person may think differently in different languages (Brown, 1986). Unlike English, which has a rich vocabulary for self-focused emotions such as anger, Japanese has more words for interpersonal emotions such as sympathy (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Many bilingual individuals report that they have different senses of self, depending on which language they are using (Matsumoto, 1994). In one series of studies with bilingual Israeli Arabs (who speak both Arabic and Hebrew), participants thought differently about their social world, with differing automatic associations with Arabs and Jews, depending on which language the testing session used (Danziger &Ward, 2010).

Bilingual individuals may even reveal different personality profiles when taking the same test in their two languages (Dinges & Hull, 1992). This happened when China-born, bilingual students at the University of Waterloo in Ontario were asked to describe themselves in English or Chinese (Ross et al., 2002). The English-language self-descriptions fit typical Canadian profiles: Students expressed mostly positive self-statements and moods. Responding in Chinese, the same students gave typically Chinese self-descriptions: They reported more agreement with Chinese values and roughly equal positive and negative self-statements and moods. "Learn a new language and get a new soul” says a Czech proverb. Similar personality changes have been shown when bicultural, bilingual Americans and Mexicans shifted between the cultural frames associated with English and Spanish (Ramirez-Esparza et al., 2006).

So our words may not determine what we think, but they do influence our thinking (Boroditsky, 2011). We use our language in forming categories. In Brazil, the isolated Piraha tribespeople have words for the numbers 1 and 2, but numbers above that are simply "many." Thus, if shown 7 nuts in a row, they find it very difficult to layout the same number from their own pile (Gordon, 2004).

Words also influence our thinking about colors. Whether we live in New Mexico, New South Wales, or New Guinea, we see colors much the same, but we use our native language to classify and remember colors (Davidoff, 2004; Roberson et al., 2004, 2005). If your language is English, you might view three colors and call two of them "yellow" and one of them "blue." Later you would likely see and recall the yellows as being more similar. But if you are a member of Papua New Guinea's Berinmo tribe, which has words for two different shades of yellow, you would more speedily perceive and better recall the distinctions between the two yellows. And if your language is Russian, which has distinct names for different shades of blue, such as galubay and sinly, you might remember the blue better. Words matter.

Perceived differences grow when we assign different names to colors. On the color spectrum, blue blends into green - until we draw a dividing line between the portions we call "blue" and "green." Although equally different on the color spectrum, two different items that share the same color name (as the two "blues" do in FIGURE 36.3, contrast B) are harder to distinguish than two items with different names ("blue" and "green," as in Figure 36.3, contrast A) (Özgen, 2004).

Given words' subtle influence on thinking, we do well to choose our words carefully. Does it make any difference whether I write, "A child learns language as he interacts with his caregivers" or "Children learn language as they interact with their caregivers"? Many studies have found that it does. When hearing the generic he (as in "the artist and his work"), people are more likely to picture a male (Henley, 1989; Ng, 1990). If he and his were truly gender free, we shouldn't skip a beat when hearing that "man, like other mammals, nurses his young."

To expand language is to expand the ability to think. As Unit IX points out, young children's thinking develops hand in hand with their language (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1986). Indeed, it is very difficult to think about or conceptualize certain abstract ideas (commitment, freedom, or rhyming) without language! And what is true for preschoolers is true for everyone: It pays to increase your word power. That's why most textbooks, including this one, introduce new words-to teach new ideas and new ways of thinking. And that's also why psychologist Steven Pinker (2007) titled his book on language The Stuff of Thought.

Increased word power helps explain what McGill University researcher Wallace Lambert (1992; Lambert et al., 1993) calls the bilingual advantage. Although their vocabulary in each language is somewhat smaller than that of people speaking a single language, bilingual people are skilled at inhibiting one language while using the other. And thanks to their well-practiced "executive control" over language, they also are better at inhibiting their attention to irrelevant information (Bialystock & Craik, 2010). This superior attentional control is evident from 7 months of age into adulthood (Emmorey et al., 2008; Kovacs & Mehler, 2009).

Lambert helped devise a Canadian program that immerses English-speaking children in French. (The number of non-Quebec children enrolled rose from 65,000 in 1981 to 300,000 in 2007 [Statistics Canada, 2010].) For most of their first three years in schooL the English-speaking children are taught entirely in French, and thereafter gradually shift to classes mostly in English. Not surprisingly, the children attain a natural French fluency unrivaled by other methods of language teaching. Moreover, compared with similarly capable children in control groups, they do so without detriment to their English fluency, and with increased aptitude scores, creativity, and appreciation for French-Canadian culture (Genesee & Gandara, 1999; Lazaruk, 2007) .

Whether we are in the linguistic minority or majority, language links us to one another. Language also connects us to the past and the future. "To destroy a people, destroy their language," observed poet Joy Harjo.

Thinking in Images

When you are alone, do you talk to yourself? Is "thinking" simply conversing with yourself? Without a doubt, words convey ideas. But aren't there times when ideas precede words? To turn on the cold water in your bathroom, in which direction do you turn the handle? To answer, you probably thought not in words but with implicit (nondeclarative, procedural) memory-a mental picture of how you do it (see Module 31).

Indeed, we often think in images. Artists think in images. So do composers, poets, mathematicians, athletes, and scientists. Albert Einstein reported that he achieved some of his greatest insights through visual images and later put them into words. Pianist Liu Chi Kung showed the value of thinking in images. One year after placing second in the 1958 Tschaikovsky piano competition, Liu was imprisoned during China's cultural revolution. Soon after his release, after seven years without touching a piano, he was back on tour, the critics judging his musicianship better than ever. How did he continue to develop without practice? "I did practice," said Liu, "every day. I rehearsed every piece I had ever played, note by note, in my mind" (Garfield, 1986).

For someone who has learned a skill, such as ballet dancing, even watching the activity will activate the brain's internal simulation of it, reported one British research team after collecting fMRIs as people watched videos (Calvo-Merino et al., 2004). So, too, will imagining a physical experience, which activates some of the same neural networks that are active during the actual experience (Grezes & Decety, 2001). Small wonder, then, that mental practice has become a standard part of training for Olympic athletes (Suinn, 1997).

One experiment on mental practice and basketball foul shooting tracked the University of Tennessee women's team over 35 games (Savoy & Beitel, 1996). During that time, the team's free-throw shooting increased from approximately 52 percent in games following standard physical practice to some 65 percent after mental practice. Players had repeatedly imagined making foul shots under various conditions, including being "trash-talked" by their opposition. In a dramatic conclusion, Tennessee won the national championship game in overtime, thanks in part to their foul shooting.

Mental rehearsal can also help you achieve an academic goal, as researchers demonstrated with two groups of introductory psychology students facing a midterm exam 1 week later (Taylor et al., 1998). (Scores of other students formed a control group, not engaging in any mental simulation.) The first group spent 5 minutes each day visualizing themselves scanning the posted grade list, seeing their A, beaming with joy, and feeling proud. This outcome simulation had little effect, adding only 2 points to their exam-scores average. Another group spent 5 minutes each day visualizing themselves effectively studying-reading the textbook, going over notes, eliminating distractions, declining an offer to go out. This process simulation paid off: This second group began studying sooner, spent more time at it, and beat the others' average by 8 points. The point to remember: It's better to spend your fantasy time planning how to get somewhere than to dwell on the imagined destination.

* * *

What, then, should we say about the relationship between thinking and language? As we have seen, language influences our thinking. But if thinking did not also affect language, there would never be any new words. And new words and new combinations of old words express new ideas. The basketball term slam dunk was coined after the act itself had become fairly common. So, let us say that thinking affects our language, which then affects our thought (see FIGURE 36.4).

Psychological research on thinking and language mirrors the mixed views of our species by those in fields such as literature and religion. The human mind is simultaneously capable of striking intellectual failures and of striking intellectual power. Misjudgments are common and can have disastrous consequences. So we do well to appreciate our capacity for error. Yet our efficient heuristics often serve us well. Moreover, our ingenuity at problem solving and our extraordinary power of language mark humankind as almost "infinite in faculties."

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: Do you use certain words or gestures that only your family or closest circle of friends would understand? Can you envision using these words or gestures to construct a language, as the Nicaraguan children did in building their version of sign language?

TEST YOURSELF: To say that "words are the mother of ideas" assumes the truth of what concept?