Prof. Greg Francis 1/6/11 PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1 Purdue University The language instinct PSY 200 Greg Francis Lecture 26 Why we do not have to worry about teaching language in school. Purdue University Linguistics  Study of language (Noam Chomsky)  sentences  words  sounds  structure  interpretation  The language instinct  Pinker (1994) Purdue University Preconceptions  We tend to think of language as  a great invention of human cognition  taught to children  taught in schools  a cultural invention  This is wrong!  instead, language is an instinct Purdue University Cultural influences  Culture does influence language  Consider words in English » Some derived from the invading Normans (1066) (considered sophisticated and polite) » Some derived from the Anglo-Saxon language of the British Isles (considered crude by the invaders)  Norman: perspiration, dine, deceased, desire, urine, excrement  Anglo-Saxon: sweat, eat, dead, want, piss, shit  But this is not what determines our capability to have language! Purdue University Biology  Language is a specialized skill of human animals  Darwin (1871)  Humans instinctively learn language  effortless  unconscious  procedural knowledge Purdue University Learning  Like all skills, language needs the proper environment to be developed  blinded birds cannot navigate by the stars  Atlantic Ocean turtles that navigate by magnetic fields need to be in the correct ocean  Language development needs exposure to other people for communication  but it needs surprisingly less exposure than you might suspectProf. Greg Francis 1/6/11 PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2 Purdue University Child learning  Children do not learn language by simply imitating others  otherwise they would never come up with statements like Don’t giggle me! We holded the baby rabbits. I’m felling! Purdue University Learning  Instead, each child reinvents language  difficult to test because we rarely get to see a language created from a non-language  however, there are cases!  Slave plantations in the South Pacific mixed together people of many different languages  create a jargon called a pidgin Purdue University Pidgin  For example, in New Guinea  pidgin is similar to English (rulers of the plantation) woman: ‘meri’ (Mary, generic word for woman) another man’s wife: ‘meri bilong enaderfelo man’ hair: ‘grass bilong hed’ helicopter: ‘mixmasta bilong Jesus Christ coffin: ‘die bokus’ piano: ‘bokus bilong teeth yu hitim teeth bokus is cry Purdue University Pidgin  The Ten commandments in pidgen  as translated by the Alexishafen Catholic Mission in 1937  1. Mi Master, God bilong yu, yu no ken mekim masalai end ol tambaran.  2. Yu no ken kolim nating nem bilong God.  3. Yu must santuium sande.  4. Yu mast mekin gud long papamama bilong yu.  5. Yu no ken kilim man.  6. Yu no ken brukim fashin bilong marit.  7. Yu no ken stilim samting.  8. Yu no ken lai.  9. Yu no ken duim meri bilong enaderfelo man.  10. Yu no ken laik stilim samting. Purdue University Learning  In Hawaii at the turn of the century  workers from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, The Philippines, and Puerto Rico were brought in to harvest sugar  they developed a pidgin  some were still alive in 1970 and interviewed to see how the pidgin worked Purdue University Learning  Pidgin is not a true language  word order is arbitrary  no rules  no tenses  no prefixes or suffixes  can only be understood in context of the conversation Me cape buy, me check make. He bought my coffee; he made me out a check. I bought coffee, I made him out a check.Prof. Greg Francis 1/6/11 PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3 Purdue University Creoles  The children of these workers speak very differently  if removed from parents (and so unable to learn native tongue)  they transform the pidgin into a full-fledged language » tenses, rules, prefixes, suffixes,...  Find the same type of transformations among children learning sign-language Purdue University Sign language  Nicaraguan schools for the deaf (1979)  tried to teach children to lip-read (poor results)  but children started making a pidgin on the playground » Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense (LSN)  New students took the pidgin and created a language (creole)  Idioma de Signos Nicarguense (ISN) Purdue University Sign language  You can even see the invention of language in a single child  “Simon,” a deaf boy who also had deaf parents  parents learned American Sign Language (ASL) late in life and so are not very good at it  Simon had little contact with other deaf people  but his signing was much better than his parents!  Language learning is not imitation! Purdue University Education  There is always a group of people who say that we need to get back to the “basics” of education  including studies of grammar  usually, these are veiled versions of racism  In fact, children do not learn language in school  No one learns to speak by properly identifying nouns, pronouns, prepositional phrases, verbs, adverbs,…  Education is good for reading and writing  but writing is dramatically different from speaking  and reading is dramatically different from listening Purdue University Education  But then how do we explain that uneducated people speak improperly?  e.g. gang member in Harlem You know, like some people say if your good an’ shit, your spirit going’ t’heaven…’n’ if you bad, your spirit goin’ to hell. Well bullshit! Your spirit goin’ to hell anyway, good or bad. Purdue University Education  This person is not speaking with bad grammar, but he is also not speaking in Standard American English (SAE)  He’s speaking in a dialect called Black English Vernacular (BEV)  Both languages have certain rules  His statements obey the rules of BEV precisely!  Consider contractions of wordsProf. Greg Francis 1/6/11 PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4 Purdue University Rules  In SAE you can