Chapter 7Language and ThinkingTopic I: Language and Language AcquisitionFrom Sounds to Meaning Phonemes: Basic Sounds Morphemes: Units of Meaning Syntax: Making and Understanding SentencesLanguage Acquisition Language Acquisition in Humans Language Acquisition in Chimpanzees Raising Chimps as Children Using Sign Language and Smarter Chimps What Did the Chimps Learn?Explanations for Language Acquisition Learning (Skinner) Innate Neural Mechanisms (Chomsky) Rapid Review of Language and Language Acquisition Questions for Making Connection What do you spend most of your time doing? The answer is simple; thinking. Indeed, almost every moment you're awake you are reviewing whathappened in the past, solving problems, or planning for the future, all of which involve thinking. In fact, it's difficult not to think for more than a couple of moments. Furthermore, the importance of thinking is reflected in the difference between us and our close relatives the chimpanzees. Chimps are better at doing things like swinging through the trees, but we're better atthinking and it's that ability that has led to our greater development. If thinking is our most used and important skill, what's second? Language.Not only do we spend a lot of time using language in talking, listening, reading, and writing, but language often provides the basis for thinking because we usually think in words. I'll begin this chapter by examining language, and then I'll go on to discuss thinking. -------------------------Topic I: Language and Language AcquisitionWhen I speak French, native speakers of French laugh at my accent. Why do most people have an accent for languages they learn later in life? Why don't some people hear their own accents?Can chimpanzees be taught to talk? If they can't actually talk, can they learn to communicate with humans by using sign language? What can we learn about human language from chimpanzees?Until she was thirteen years old, Genie was strapped into a chair in a small bedroom where she had almost no human contact, heard virtually no language, and was punished for making any noise. When Genie was discovered, she had practically no language. The question was, could Genie learn language at the age of thirteen?Language can be defined as a system of symbols that enables individuals to communicate with one another (Ashcraft, 1994). The symbols in that system can be sounds (spoken words), signs (written words), and gestures, and you use those symbols in almost everything you do. Think for a moment about what it would be like if you didn't have language. You wouldn't be able to communicate with others, and your ability to think might also be limited because to some extent you use language in thinking. Indeed,language is one of the most important skills you have. It's interesting that regardless of what remote area of the world anthropologists have searched, they have never found a group of humans who didn't use language. Furthermore, although the members of some groups count by making notches on a bone while we may use computers, all groups have languages that are equally complex (Pinker, 1994). In fact, "stone age" groups that have not had contact with the "outside" world have languages that are as highly developed as English. Clearly, having a highly developed language is a universal and crucial characteristic of a human being. Despite the importance of language, we usually don't give much attentionto it unless we develop a language disorder, such as dyslexia or a stroke, wipes out our language. Furthermore, when we do think about language, we often oversimplify it. For example, you may assume that you learned language in the same way that you learned to do math problems or ride a bike, but as you'll soon discover, the acquisition of language is a verydifferent and unique process. From Sounds to Meaning First we must develop an understanding of the basic building blocks of language and how those blocks are put together. Specifically, in this section we'll examine (a) the sounds of language, (b) how we combine sounds to form words, and (c) how we combine words to form sentences. An understanding of these factors is interesting and relevant because it explainswhy we have accents and why we may have difficulty learning a new language.Phonemes; Basic Sounds Phonemes (FOH-neemz) are the basic sounds that we use in forming words. For example, the word who is made up of two phonemes, h and u. There are hundreds of different phonemes, and different languages use different but overlapping sets of phonemes. For example, German employs some guttural sounds that do not occur in English. English uses about 40 phonemes, while other languages have more or fewer. In a sense, a phoneme is the ultimate "sound bite," and as with many sound bites, by themselves they do not have much meaning. It's interesting to note that you were born with the ability to hear and pronounce the entire range of phonemes, but by the time you were six months or a year old, you had lost the ability to hear and pronounce most of the phonemes (Kuhl et al., 1992). Overall then, it appears that there is acritical period for retaining the phonemes of one's native language. Given that you lose some phonemes, the question is, why do you lose some and keep others? The answer is simple: You keep the phonemes that you hear during the first year of life and you lose the phonemes that you don't hear. That was demonstrated in a study in which investigators recordedand analyzed the babbling (use of random phonemes) of two infants, one in a French-speaking family and one in an English-speaking family (Levitt & Utman, 1992). The infants started with the same phonemes, but over time the phonemes they used in their babbling began to mimic the phonemes used by their parents. The fact that you lose phonemes means that later in life you may not be able to hear or use some phonemes. For example, Japanese infants can hear both "la" and "ra," but most Japanese adults cannot hear "la" because it is one of the phonemes they lose. However, you aren't actually deaf to the phonemes you can't hear. Instead, when a phoneme you lost is used, you "translate" that phoneme into one that is in your phoneme repertoire. That means that in some cases you'll hear a word differently from how it is actually being pronounced. For example, when the phoneme "la" is used withmost Japanese adults, they substitute "ra".
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