LECTURE 1.1- Defining language
1-What do we mean by language?
The way of approaching this is to take it from the question of whether language is uniquely human ability, because when you
think about whether or not non-human animals can use language, that raises some really interesting questions about how
language works in the brain.
What do we mean by language? Well, it is kind of a topic that's up for debate, and these pictures are kind of meant to show
some potential things that you might call language.
First one shows a prairie dog, they've got a really complex
communication system. The second one is Kanzi, the bonobo
chimpanzee, and Sue Savage Rumbaugh working with his
lexigram board. He is probably the closest you can get to see in
language use in non-human animals. About sign language and
whether or not that constitutes a language or whether it's more
kind of a coding system for coding other forms of language, there still debate. Of all the examples here. Sign language is by
far the strongest example of what we call a language. So, British sign language, it's a language in its own right. And it has its
own syntax and vocabulary that is separate to English.
This guy on the end, this is Whorf the Klingon, from Star Trek Next Generation. He's there to represent invented languages.
Esperanto is an invented language created with the intention that everyone in Europe would know Esperanto and we could all
talk to each other. (Look at The land of invented languages by Akira Okrend)
1.1-Alex the parrot
Well, technically, he's Alex, the ex parrot, because he's unfortunately no longer with us, and he was trained by Irene
Pepperberg.
Things to notice about Alex:
He's good at reasoning with categories: Could classify 40 objects according to colour and material.
When she asked him a question like how many green blocks? His response to that is not just a simple kind of learnt
stimulus response., because to answer that question, he has to think about the category of what's a block and what's
not a block, but he also has to think about the category of what's blue and what's green. So, it's actually coded for it.
That's a complex task, a young child wouldn't be able to do that.
He's clearly very intelligent and he clearly understands what she's saying to him and he knows how to respond to it.
He seems to produce spontaneous utterances: there's a point where he sounds like a child who doesn't want to go to
sleep. So, he's not just responding to what she's saying. He's producing spontaneous utterances. That suggests that
he has an understanding of what he's doing with language.
After 13 years, he had a vocabulary of around 80 words.
He was able to use object names.
He could certainly produce and understand short sequences of words.
He apparently understood the difference between same and different, count up to 6 and had some sense of no.
But he didn't he didn't use very many verbs or function words (e.g., and, the of, etc.). Every well-formed sentence
will always have a verb in a human language, and function words kind of do the syntactic work of languages.
An essential feature of language is that humans are able to use a finite number of rules to generate an infinite
number of sentences. That's not something that Alex had. So, he's impressive, but he's not using language in the
way that a human would.
1.2-Nin human primates: Washoe
She was caught in the wild when she was one year old and raised as a human child. The gardeners taught her American Sign
language (this one because chimpanzees vocal tracks aren't like human vocal tracks and are not physically able to produce
language in the way that we can) *.
*See Koko, the gorilla or Noam Chomsky famous example (Project Nim Cimpsky)
The gardeners argue that she really was acquiring language pretty well:
She learnt between 150 and 200 signs: a combination of nouns, verbs, adjectives.
She could also combine signs: e.g., “Washoe sorry”, “Hug hurry”, etc. That's not very dramatically well-formed,
but you can see that she's combining the signs to communicate what it is that she wants. The gardeners also argued
, that she would combine signs in novel company combinations: they had an example where they took her out for a
walk and she saw a duck and she combined the signs of water and birch, which wasn't a combination of signs that
she'd used. So, they said that she's generating a new utterance from what she's learnt.
She could also answer W.H questions, so by a W.H question. It means, where, why, what, when or how? Those
questions are actually quite difficult to process, children take quite a long time to learn how to answer W.H
questions. So, this shows that she had quite a sophisticated understanding of how language works.
She was also sensitive to word order, so she knew the difference between “You tickle me” versus “I tickle you”.
She had some understanding of the grammatical rules of language and she also seemed to pass the signs on to her
adopted son, which is very kind of human like behaviour. You learn language and then you pass on to the next
generation.
The problem with Washo is that the Gartner's may have been over interpreting the gestures that she produced.
They were working very closely with this animal; they were very attached to her. Now, when other American Sign
Language users were asked to come in and analyse the signs that she was producing, a kind of independent
assessment of how well she was able to use language. They were a lot less convinced of her language use than the
Gardners were. So, it may be that the Gardners were not particularly objective when they interpreted how she used
language.
She was using sign language to talk to a good extent, but how well she did is up for debate.
1.3-Kanzi, the bonobo chimpanzee
Probably the best-known example of language training in primates is Kanzi (trained by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh). This type of
chimpanzees are a little bit different, much more social.
One of the interesting things about Kanzi was that he originally learnt his first acquired symbols (“Yerkish”) from
his mother.
He was able to take arbitrary symbols and map on to words, so he wasn't an example of sign language learning. He
was communicating with the symbols rather than with sign language.
He responds to spoken language, not sign language. By the time he was about four, he'd learnt about 50 of these
and he was really creative with them: produced about 800 combinations of them.
He seems to be sensitive to world order and to the grammatical rules of language.
Rumbaugh argues that 80% of his utterances are spontaneous.
Kanzi comprehension video:
The trainer is giving him instructions and he's following.
Kanzi can’t see Savage-Rumbaugh’s face. He is responding to spoken language, not gestures on the face because it
is covered.
He is sensitive to word order (i.e., what goes on top of what in the instructions: pours coke on the water, not water
on the coke).
Understands references to things that he isn’t looking at (e.g., “take the TV outside”) suggesting that his
understanding of language, it's not just a response to the environment around him. It's something more fundamental
about the meaning of the words.
Kanzi using the lexigram:
Notice that the symbols he is using don’t look like what they mean, the relationship is arbitrary. It's a bit like our
written language which doesn't resemble the things that we're talking about (the word pen doesn't have any
relationship to what a pen looks like or what it does).
He knew how to use 5 different pages of the lexigram, a huge amount.
He lacks grammatical knowledge:
o E.g., “strawberry” can be a name, a request to travel to where the strawberries are, a request to eat
strawberries…
o Doesn’t use function words e.g., “the”, “a”, “to”, “because” (although he appears to understand them: he
knows the difference between on in, under and so on)
o Doesn‘t use morphology e.g., “-ed” to indicate the past tense, or “-s” to indicate plurals
He has learned associations with symbols, and some syntactic rules to some extent:
o E.g., differences between “put your hat on your ball” and “put your ball on your hat”
o But no sophisticated representation of meaning, or complex grammar
, 2-Psychology of language (or psycholinguistics)
There are some serious ethical questions around some of these examples. And you do start to wonder about the purpose of all
of it. It does is tell us a little bit about whether language is something that is uniquely human, that we are born to do and that
only we can do or whether it's something that any intelligent animal can do given enough training.
Now, the reason we might be interested in that for the purposes of psychology is that it has important implications for how
we understand how the brain works and how our cognitive abilities have evolved over time.
A working definition for language would be:
“A human communication system that allows us to talk about anything irrespective of time and space.”
Now, when we study the psychology of language, what we are interested in is what are the processes that underline language
comprehension and production, what happens in dialogue, how does language processing interact with our other cognitive
functions, what is its relationship to things like working memory, what are the social factors that influence our language use,
how does individual variation and language affect our processing, does being bilingual affect other aspects of cognition, etc.
