Overview:
One of the most uniquely human abilities is the capacity for creating and understanding language. This lecture introduces students to the major topics within the study of language: phonology, morphology, syntax and recursion. This lecture also describes theories of language acquisition, arguments for the specialization of language, and the commonalities observed in different languages across cultures.
I began this class with a demonstration of--that illustrates two very important facts about language. One is that languages all share some deep and intricate universals. In particular, all languages, at minimum, are powerful enough to convey an abstract notion like this; abstract in the sense that it talks about thoughts and it talks about a proposition and spatial relations in objects. There's no language in the world that you just cannot talk about abstract things with. Every language can do this. But the demonstration [before class] also illustrated another fact about language, which is how different languages are. They sound different. If you know one language, you don't necessarily know another. It's not merely that you can't understand it. It could sound strange or look unusual in the case of a sign language. And so, any adequate theory of language has to allow for both the commonalities and the differences across languages. And this is the puzzle faced by the psychology and cognitive science of language.
Well, let's start with an interesting claim about language made by Charles Darwin. So, Darwin writes, "Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write." And what Darwin is claiming here, and it's a controversial and interesting claim, is that language is special in that there's some sort of propensity or capacity or instinct for language unlike the other examples he gives. Not everything comes natural to us but Darwin suggests that language does.
Well, why should we believe this? Well, there are some basic facts that support Darwin's claim. For one thing, every normal--every human society has language. In the course of traveling, cultures encounter other cultures and they often encounter cultures that are very different from their own. But through the course of human history, nobody has ever encountered another group of humans that did not have a language. Does this show that it's built in? Well, not necessarily. It could be a cultural innovation. It could be, for instance, that language is such a good idea that every culture comes across it and develops it. Just about every culture uses some sort of utensils to eat food with, a knife and a fork, chopsticks, a spoon. This probably is not because use of eating utensils is human nature, but rather, it's because it's just a very useful thing that cultures discover over and over again. Well, we know that this probably is not true with regard to language. And one reason we know this is because of the demonstrated case studies where a language is created within a single generation. And these case studies have happened over history.
The standard example is people involved in the slave trade. The slave trade revolving around tobacco or cotton or coffee or sugar would tend to mix slaves and laborers from different language backgrounds, in part deliberately, so as to avoid the possibility of revolt. What would happen is these people who were enslaved from different cultures would develop a makeshift communication system so they could talk to one another. And this is called a "pidgin," p-i-d-g-i-n, a pidgin. And this pidgin was how they would talk. And this pidgin was not a language. It was strings of words borrowed from the different languages around them and put together in sort of haphazard ways.
The question is what happens to the children who are raised in this society. And you might expect it that they would come to speak a pidgin, but they don't. What happens is, in the course of a single generation, they develop their own language. They create a language with rich syntax and morphology and phonology, terms that we'll understand in a few minutes. And this language that they create is called a "creole." And languages that we know now as creoles, the word refers back to their history. That means that they were developed from pidgins. And this is interesting because this suggests that to some extent the ability to use and understand and learn language is part of human nature. It doesn't require an extensive cultural history. Rather, just about any normal child, even when not exposed to a full-fledged language, can create a language.
And more recently, there's been case studies of children who acquire sign language. There's a wonderful case in Nicaragua in sign language where they acquire sign language from adults who themselves are not versed in sign language. They're sort of second-language learners struggling along. What you might have expected would be the children would then use whatever system their adults use, but they don't. They "creolized" it. They take this makeshift communication system developed by adults and, again, they turn it into a full-blown language, suggesting that to some extent it's part of our human nature to create languages.
Also, every normal human has language. Not everybody in this room can ride a bicycle. Not everybody in this room can play chess. But everybody possesses at least one language. And everybody started to possess at least one language when they were a child. There are exceptions, but the exceptions come about due to some sort of brain damage. Any neurologically normal human will come to possess a language.
What else do we know? Well, the claim that language is part of human nature is supported by neurological studies, some of which were referred to in the chapters on the brain that you read earlier that talk about dedicated parts of the brain that work for language. And if parts of these brains--if parts--if these parts of the brain are damaged you get language deficits or aphasias where you might lose the ability to understand or create language. More speculatively, there has been some fairly recent work studying the genetic basis of language, looking at the genes that are directly responsible for the capacity to learn and use language. And one bit of evidence that these genes are implicated is that some unfortunate people have point mutations in these genes. And such people are unable to learn and use language.
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Morphology is the next level up. Phonology is sounds. Morphology is words. And human language uses this amazing trick described by Ferdinand de Saussure, the great linguist, as "the arbitrariness of the sign." And what this means is we can use--take any arbitrary idea in the world, the idea of a chair or a story or a country, and make a sound or a sign to connect to it. And the link is arbitrary. You might choose to use a word for "dog" as "woof woof" because it sounds like a dog but you can't use a word for "country" that sounds like a country. You could use a sign language thing for "drink" that looks sort of like the act of drinking but you can't use a sign language word for "country" that looks like a country, or for "idea" that looks like an idea.
So, the way languages work is it allows for arbitrary naming. It allows for this map between a symbol, say a spoken word, and any sort of thought we want to use. And those arbitrary mappings, as we come to learn them, make up the vocabulary of a language. I'm talking about words but the more technical term is "morpheme." And what a morpheme is is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. Now often, this is the same thing as a word. So, "dog" is a word. And "dog" is also a morpheme, but not always because there are single morphemes and then there are words that are composed of many morphemes. So, "dogs" and "complained" are one word, but two morphemes and what this means is that you make the word by putting together two morphemes. To put it differently, in order to know what "dogs" means, you never had to learn the word "dogs." All you had to know is the word "dog" and the plural morpheme 's' and you could put them together to create a word.
How many morphemes does the average speaker know? The answer is fairly startling. The average speaker knows, as a low-ball estimate, about 60,000 words. I think the proper estimate is closer to 80,000 or 100,000. What this means, if you average it out, is that since children start learning their first words at about their first year of life, they learn about nine new words a day. And it's not a continuous nine words every day. It goes up and down depending on the age. But still, the amount of words we know is staggering. How many of you know more than one language pretty fluently? Those of you who know other languages might have in your heads 200,000 words or 300,000 words and you're accessing them in a fraction of a second. It is--could legitimately be seen as one of the most astonishing things that people do.
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One of the real surprising findings in my field over the last ten/twenty years has been that the acquisition of sign languages has turned out to be almost exactly the same; in fact, as far as we know, exactly the same as the acquisition of spoken languages. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been just as reasonable to expect that there'd be an advantage for speech over sign. That sign languages may be full-blown languages but they just take--they're just harder to learn because the brain and the body have adapted for speech. It turns out that this just isn't the case. It turns out that sign and--the developmental milestones of sign languages and the developmental milestones of spoken languages are precisely the same. They start babbling at the same point. They start using first words, first sentences, first complicated constructions. There seems to be no interesting difference between how the brain comes to acquire and use the spoken language versus a sign language.
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