●​ Language is a biological adaptation to communicate information

Language and Communication

●​ Language: a system for communicating with others using signals that are combined
according to rules of grammar and convey meaning
●​ Grammar: rules that specify how the units of language combine to produce meaningful
messages
●​ Most social species communicate
●​ Human language differs in important ways
○​ Has a much more complicated structure
○​ Humans use words to refer to intangible things
■​ e.g. democracy, unicorn
○​ Humans use language to name, categorize, and describe things to ourselves
when we think
■​ Influences how knowledge is organized in our brains

Basic Characteristics
●​ Phonemes: smallest units of SOUND recognizable as speech rather than as random
noise
○​ Each differs in how it is produced
●​ Phonological rules: indicates how phonemes can be combined to produce SPEECH
SOUNDS
○​ e.g. the initial sound ts is acceptable in German, but not English
○​ If these rules are broken, speech is described as having an accent
●​ Morphemes: smallest MEANINGFUL units of LANGUAGES
○​ Phonemes contain NO MEANING
●​ Morphological rules: indicates how morphemes can be combined to form WORDS
○​ Content morphemes: refer to things and events (e.g. cat, dog)
○​ Function morphemes: serve grammatical functions to tie a sentence together
(e.g. and, or)
Basic Rules
●​ Syntactic rules: indicates how words can be combined to form PHRASES and
SENTENCES

Meaning
●​ Sounds and rules are critical to convey meaning but a sentence can obey the rules of
syntax and have no meaning
○​ e.g. “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
●​ Deep structure: meaning of the sentence
●​ Surface structure: how the sentence is worded
●​ “The dog chased the cat” and “The cat was chased by the dog”
○​ Both have the same deep structure → have the same meaning
○​ But have different surface structure → constructed differently

Language Development
●​ Children learn language at an astonishingly rapid rate
○​ Average 1 y/o has a vocabulary of 10 words
○​ Expands to 10,000 words in the next 4 years
■​ 6 or 7 new words per day
●​ Children make few errors when learning to speak
○​ Many of them are systematic
○​ There are over 3 million ways to rearrange words in a 10-word sentence
■​ Only a few is grammatically correct and meaningful
●​ Passive mastery develops faster than active mastery
○​ At every stage of language development, children understand language better
than they speak
●​ Distinguishing speech sounds
○​ At birth, infants can distinguish all the contrasting sounds in human languages
■​ In the first 6 months, they lose this ability
 ■​ After 6 months, they can only distinguish among contrasting sounds in the
language they hear spoken around them
○​ I and r sounds are distinct in english (e.g. lead, read)
■​ These sounds are in the same phoneme in japanese
●​ Japanese adults cannot hear the difference between these two
phonemes

Language Milestones

Theories of Language Development

●​ Behaviorist Explanations
○​ B.F. Skinner - we learn language the same way we learn any other​ skill
■​ e.g. reinforcement, shaping, extinction, other basic principles of operant
conditioning
○​ Infants begin to vocalize
■​ Those vocalizations that approximate words are reinforced
■​ Vocalizations that aren’t reinforced gradually diminish
●​ Behaviorist explanations cannot account for fundamental characteristics of language
development
○​ Parents don’t spend time teaching their children to speak grammatically
■​ They respond to the truthfulness of a comment more than its grammar
○​ Children generate more grammatical sentences than they ever hear
■​ Suggests that children don’t just imitate…they learn rules for generating
sentences
 ○​ Errors children make when learning to speak are overgeneralizations of
grammatical rules
■​ e.g. The fishes were fast, I runned to the house
●​ Nativist Explanations
○​ Noam Chomsky (1957, 1959)
■​ Published a blistering reply to the behaviorist approach
■​ Claimed that language-learning capacities are built into the brain
■​ Claimed that the brain acquire language rapidly through exposure to
speech
●​ Nativist theory: language development is an innate, biological capacity
●​ Language acquisition device (LAD): collection of processes that facilitate language
learning
○​ Language processes naturally emerge as infant matures, given that infant
receive adequate input to maintain the acquisition process
●​ Interactionist explanations
○​ Nativist theories are often criticized because they answer why rather than how
language develops
●​ Interactionist approach
○​ Although infants are born with an innate ability to acquire language, social
interactions play a critical role in language
●​ This criticism has nothing to do with the difference between the nativist and interactionist
perspectives
●​ The nativist perspective also states that social interactions play a critical role

Language and Thought: How are they related?

●​ Linguistic relativity hypothesis: language shapes the nature of thought
●​ Benjamin Whorf (1956)
○​ Cities the Inuits as an example
○​ Inuits have many different terms for snow
○​ Believed that because they have so many terms, they think about snow
differently than we do
●​ People anecdotally state that people can’t form memories until they learn language
○​ This means that we think in language
●​ Pinker (1994)
○​ "But it is all wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as
language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a
statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes
because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so
pregnant with implications. (The “fact” that we use only 5% of our brains, that
lemmings commit mass suicide, that the Boy Scout Manual annually outsells all
other books, and that we can be coerced into buying subliminal messages are
other examples.)"
 ○​ "As I showed in The Language Instinct, sentences in a spoken language like
English or Japanese are designed for vocal communication between impatient,
intelligent social beings."
○​ "They achieve brevity by leaving out any information that the listener can
mentally fill in from the context. In contrast, the 'language of thought' in which
knowledge is couched can leave nothing to the imagination, because it is the
imagination."

Pinker is arguing against the idea that thought is the same as language. He believes this is
a "conventional absurdity," a widely accepted belief that contradicts common sense.

1.​ Thought is not language: Pinker rejects the notion that thought is simply a linguistic
process. He argues that thought is a more complex cognitive process that involves
imagination and mental representation, not just the manipulation of symbols.
2.​ Language is designed for communication: Pinker emphasizes that spoken languages
like English or Japanese are specifically designed for efficient communication between
humans. They are concise and rely on context to convey meaning.
3.​ The "language of thought" is different: Pinker proposes that the "language of thought"
is distinct from spoken languages. It is not designed for communication but rather for
internal representation and manipulation of knowledge. This "language of thought" is
more detailed and leaves nothing to the imagination because it is the imagination.

In essence, Pinker is suggesting that while language is a powerful tool for communication, it is
not the sole or even primary vehicle for thought. He argues that thought is a richer and more
complex process that involves both linguistic and non-linguistic elements.

●​ Ambiguity is another problem

○​ A headline reads: “Bundy Beats Date with Chair”
■​ We do a double-take because our mind assigns two meanings to the
string of words
●​ If one string of words in English can correspond to two meanings in the mind, meanings
in the mind cannot be strings of words in english

Concepts and Categories

●​ Concept: mental representation that groups or categorizes shared features of related
objects, events, or other stimuli
○​ An abstract representation, description, or definition that designate a class or
category of things
●​ Brain organizes concepts and classifies them into categories based on shared
similarities
○​ e.g. our category for dog may be “small, furry, four-footed animal that wags its tail
and barks”
○​ e.g. our category for birds may be “small, winged, beaked creature that flies”
●​ Early conceptualizations of concepts and categories rested on necessary and sufficient
conditions
 ○​ Necessary condition: something that MUST be true of the object to belong to the
category → that has to be the case
■​ e.g. being an animal is a necessary condition of being a dog
○​ Sufficient condition: something that, if it is true of the object, proves that it
belongs to the category → that’s all you need
■​ e.g. german shepherd is a sufficient condition for being a dog; it doesn’t
need to be a german shepherd but if it is a german shepherd, that’s all
you need for it to be a dog
●​ Family resemblance theory
○​ Family resemblance: members of a category have features that appear to be
characteristic of category members but is not possessed by every family member
■​ e.g. there is a strong family resemblance between you, your parents, and
your siblings, even though there is no necessarily defining feature that
you all have in common
●​ Prototype theory: psychological categories that are organized around a prototype
○​ Prototype: the “best” or “most typical” member of a category
○​ For North Americans, a prototypical bird would be a wren (a small animal with
feathers and wings that flies through the air, lays eggs, and migrates
○​ For Inuits, a prototypical bird would be a penguin (a small animal that has
flippers, swims, and lays eggs)
○​ Depending on your prototype, a typical concept will be closest to that prototype
■​ e.g. an ostrich isn’t a prototypical bird for North Americans or Inuits
●​ Exemplar theory: making category judgements by comparing a new instance with stored
memories for other instances of the category
○​ Ex. you are in a jungle and you see a hairy, four-legged animal
■​ It may be a wolf, but it looks like your cousin’s german shepherd
■​ You categorize the new animal as a dog because it’s a resemblance of
dogs you’ve encountered
Problem Solving
●​ Two types of problems that interfere with our daily lives
○​ Ill-defined problem: does not have a clear goal or well-defined solution path
■​ e.g. being a better person, finding that special someone, achieving
success
○​ Well-defined problem: clearly specified goals and clearly defined solution paths
■​ e.g. following a clear set of directions to school, solving an algebra
problem, playing a game of chess
●​ Means-Ends Analysis
○​ Karl Duncker presented people with an ill-defined problem and had them think
aloud while solving it
○​ Based on how people solved the problems, he came up with a means-ends
analysis
■​ Means-ends analysis: process of searching for the means or steps to
reduce the differences between the current situation and the desired goal
1.​ Analyze the goal state (i.e. the desired outcome you want
to attain)
2.​ Analyze the current state (i.e. your starting point, or the
current situation)
 3.​ List the differences between the current state and the goal
state
4.​ Reduce the list of differences by
a.​ Direct means (a procedure that solves the problem
without intermediate steps)
b.​ Generating a subgoal (an intermediate step on the
way to solving the problem)
c.​ Finding a similar problem that has a known solution
○​ One of Duncker’s problems
■​ A patient has an inoperable tumor in his abdomen. The tumor is
inoperable because it is surrounded by healthy but fragile tissue that
would be severely damaged during surgery.
■​ How can the patient be saved?
●​ The goal state
○​ A patient without the tumor and with undamaged
surrounding tissue
●​ The current state
○​ A patient with an inoperable tumor surrounded by fragile
tissue
●​ The difference
○​ The tumor
●​ A direct-means solution
○​ To destroy the tumor with x-rays
■​ The required x-ray dose would destroy the fragile
surrounding tissue and possibly kill the patient
●​ A subgoal
○​ Modify the x-ray machine to deliver a weaker dose
■​ This wouldn’t work
■​ The x-ray wouldn’t damage the tissue, but it also
wouldn’t damage the tumor
●​ Analogical Problem Solving: finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying
that solution to the current problem
○​ An island surrounded by bridges is the site of an enemy fortress. The massive
fortification is so strongly defended that only a very large army could overtake it.
Unfortunately, the bridges would collapse under the weight of such a huge force.
So, a clever general divides the army into several smaller units over different
bridges, timing the crossings so that the many streams of soldiers converge on
the fortress at the same time and the fortress is taken.
■​ Does this story suggest a solution to the tumor problem?
●​ Surround the patient with x-ray machines and simultaneously send
weaker doses that converge on the tumor. The combined strength
of the weaker x-ray doses will be sufficient to destroy the tumor,
but the individual doses will be weak enough to spare the
surrounding healthy tissue
 ■​ Studies of the tumor problem
●​ 10% of participants got the correct solution
●​ 30% of participants got the correct solution if they read the island
fortress problem or other analogous story

Creativity and Insight

●​ Functional fixedness: tendency to perceive the functions of objects as fixed and think of
these objects in terms of their normal function
○​ Process that constricts our thinking