THE LEVELS OF LANGUAGE ANALYSIS

• Language is a system for combining symbols (such as words) so that an infinite

number of meaningful statements can be made for the purpose of communicating
with others.
• Language allows people not only to communicate with one another but also to
represent their own internal mental activity.
• In other words, language is a very important part of how people think.
• The structures of languages all over the world share common characteristics.
• They consist of the sounds that exist within a language, word meanings, word order,
the rules for making words into other words, the meanings of sentences and phrases,
and the rules for practical communication with others.
• GRAMMAR: Grammar is the system of rules governing the structure and use of a
language.
• According to famed linguist Noam Chomsky, humans have an innate ability to
understand and produce language through a device he calls the language acquisition
device, or LAD.
• He defined the LAD as an innate “program” that contained a schema for human
language.
• The children matched the language they heard against this schema and, thus, language
developed in a well-researched sequence.
• While humans may learn the specific language (English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc.)
through the processes of imitation, reinforcement, and shaping; the complexities of the
grammar of a language are, according to Chomsky, to some degree “wired in” to the
developing brain.
• Recent research has supported Chomsky’s ideas, with evidence of both hierarchical
development of language comprehension and the underlying brain processes involved.
• The LAD “listens” to the language input of the infant’s world and then begins to
produce language sounds and eventually words and sentences in a pattern found across
cultures.
• Grammar includes phonemes (the basic sounds of language), morphology (the study of
the formation of words), rules for the order of words known as syntax, and pragmatics
(the practical social expectations and uses of language).
PHONEMES: Phonemes are the basic units of sound in a language.
• The a in the word car is a very different phoneme from the a in the word day, even
though it is the same letter of the alphabet.
• The difference is in how we say the sound of the a in each word.
• Phonemes are more than just the different ways in which we pronounce single letters,
too. Th, sh, and au are also phonemes.
• Phonemes for different languages are also different, and one of the biggest problems
for people who are trying to learn another language is the inability to both hear and
pronounce the phonemes of that other language.
• Although infants are born with the ability to recognize all phonemes, after about 9
months, that ability has deteriorated, and the infant recognizes only the phonemes of
the language to which the infant is exposed.

MORPHEMES: Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning within a language.

• For morphemes example, the word playing consists of two morphemes, play and ing.
SYNTAX: Syntax is a system of rules for combining words and phrases to form
grammatically correct sentences.
• Syntax is quite important, as just a simple mix-up can cause sentences to be completely
misunderstood.
• For example, “John kidnapped the boy” has a different meaning from “John, the
kidnapped boy,” although all four words are the same (Lasnik, 1990).
• Another example of the importance of syntax can be found in the lobby of a Moscow
hotel across from a monastery: “You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous
composers, artists, and writers are buried daily except Thursday.”
• So if people want to watch famous composers, artists, and writers being buried, they
should not go to this monastery on Thursday.

SEMANTICS: Semantics are rules for determining the meaning of words and sentences.
• Sentences, for example, can have the same semantic meaning while having different
syntax: “Johnny hit the ball” and “the ball was hit by Johnny.”
PRAGMATICS: The pragmatics of language has to do with the practical aspects of
communicating with others, or the social “niceties” of language.
• Simply put, pragmatics involves knowing things like how to take turns in a
conversation, the use of gestures to emphasize a point or indicate a need for more
information, and the different ways in which one speaks to different people.
• For example, adults speak to small children differently than they do to other adults by
using simpler words.
• Both adults and children use higher-pitched voices and many repeated phrases when
talking to infants; such child-directed speech plays an important role in the
development of language in children.
• Part of the pragmatics of language includes knowing just what rhythm and emphasis
to use when communicating with others, called intonation.
• When speaking to infants, adults and children are changing the inflection when they
use the higher pitch and stress certain words differently than others.
• Some languages, such as Japanese, are highly sensitive to intonation, meaning that
changing the stress or pitch of certain words or syllables of a particular word can
change its meaning entirely (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986).
• For example, the Japanese name Yoshiko should be pronounced with the accent or stress
on the first syllable: YO-she-koh.
• This pronunciation of the name means “woman-child.” But if the stress is placed on the
second syllable (yo-SHE-ko), the name means “woman who urinates.”

DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE
• The development of language is a very important milestone in the cognitive development
of a child because language allows children to think in words rather than just images, to
ask questions, to communicate their needs and wants to others, and to form concepts.
• Language development in infancy is influenced by the language they hear, a style of
speaking known as child-directed speech.
• Infants and toddlers attend more closely to this kind of speech, which creates a learning
opportunity in the dialogue between caregiver and infant.
• Other researchers are looking at the infant’s use of gestures and signs.
• Infants also seem to understand far more than they can produce, a phenomenon known as
the receptive-productive lag
• They may be able to only produce one or two words, but they understand much longer
sentences from their parents and others.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

• As with the different views on the relative importance of nature and nurture,
researchers have long debated the relationship between language and thought.
• Does language actually influence thought, or does thinking influence language?
• Two very influential developmental psychologists, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky,
often debated the relationship of language and thought.
• Piaget (1926, 1962) theorized that concepts preceded and aided the development
of language.
• For example, a child would have to have a concept or mental schema for “mother”
before being able to learn the word “mama.”
• In a sense, concepts become the “pegs” upon which words are “hung.”
• Piaget also noticed that preschool children seemed to spend a great deal of time
talking to themselves—even when playing with another child.
• Each child would be talking about something totally unrelated to the speech of the
other, in a process Piaget called collective monologue.
• Piaget believed that this kind of non-social speech was very egocentric (from the
child’s point of view only, with no regard for the listener) and that as the child
became more socially involved and less egocentric, these non-social speech patterns
would reduce.
• Vygotsky, however, believed almost the opposite. He theorized that language actually
helped develop concepts and that language could also help the child learn to
control behaviour—including social behaviour (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978, 1987).
• For Vygotsky, the word helped form the concept: Once a child had learned the word
“mama,” the various elements of “mama-ness”—warm, soft, food, safety, and so on—
could come together around that word.
• Vygotsky also believed that the “egocentric” speech of the preschool child was
actually a way for the child to form thoughts and control actions.
• This “private speech” was a way for children to plan their behaviour and organize
actions so that their goals could be obtained.
• Since socializing with other children would demand much more self-control and
behavioural regulation on the part of the preschool child, Vygotsky believed that
private speech would actually increase as children became more socially active in the
preschool years. This was, of course, the opposite of Piaget’s assumption, and the
evidence seems to bear out Vygotsky’s view: Children, especially bright children,
do tend to use more private speech when learning how to socialize with other
children or when working on a difficult task
 LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS
• The hypothesis that language shapes and influences thoughts was accepted by many
theorists, with a few notable exceptions, such as Piaget.
• One of the best-known versions of this view is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (named for
the two theorists who developed it, Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee
Whorf).
• This hypothesis assumes that the thought processes and concepts within any culture are
determined by the words of the culture (Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956).
• It has come to be known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, meaning that thought
processes and concepts are controlled by (relative to) language.
• That is, the words people use determine much of the way in which they think about the
world around them.
• One of the most famous examples used by Whorf to support this idea was that of the
Inuits, Native Americans living in the Arctic.
• Supposedly, the Inuits have many more words for snow than do people in other cultures.
• One estimate was 23 different words, whereas other estimates have ranged in the
hundreds.
• Unfortunately, this anecdotal evidence has turned out to be false, being more myth
than reality (Pullum, 1991).
• In fact, English speakers also have many different words for snow (sleet, slush,
powder, dusting, and yellow to name a few).
• Is there evidence for the linguistic relativity hypothesis? Neither Sapir nor Whorf
provided any scientific studies that would support their proposition.
• There have been numerous studies by other researchers, however.
• For example, in one study researchers assumed that a language’s color names would
influence the ability of the people who grew up with that language to distinguish
among and perceive colors.
• The study found that basic color terms did directly influence color recognition
memory (Lucy & Shweder, 1979).
• But an earlier series of studies of the perception of colors by Eleanor Rosch- Heider
and others had already found just the opposite effect: Members of the Dani tribe,
who have only two names for colors, were no different in their ability to perceive all
of the colors than were the English speakers in the study.
• More recent studies support Rosch-Heider’s findings and the idea of a cognitive
universalism (concepts are universal and influence the development of language)
rather than linguistic relativity.
• Other research suggests that although the linguistic relativity hypothesis may not
work for fine perceptual discriminations such as those in the Rosch-Heider studies, it
may be an appropriate explanation for concepts of a higher level.
• In one study, researchers showed pictures of two animals to preschool children
(Gelman & Markman, 1986).
• The pictures were of a flamingo and a bat. The children were told that the flamingo
feeds its baby mashed-up food but the bat feeds its baby milk.
• Then they were shown a picture of a blackbird (which looked more like the bat than
the flamingo).
• Half of the children were told that the blackbird was a bird, while the other children
were not.
• When asked how the blackbird fed its baby, the children who had been given the bird
label were more likely to say that it fed its baby mashed-up food than were the
children who were not given the label, indicating that the preschoolers were
making inferences about feeding habits based on category membership rather
than perceptual similarity—the word bird helped the children who were given that
label to place the blackbird in its proper higher-level category.
• Research continues in the investigation of relationships between language and thought
and appears to support linguistic relativity and how language can shape our thoughts
about space, time, colors, and objects (Boroditsky, 2001, 2009).
• Even our reasoning can be impacted, including making important decisions on such
topics as how to manage crime (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2013, 2015).
• However, researchers do not always agree, and for some studies that offer support,
there are others that reinterpret the data, fail to replicate, or offer critiques of the
original studies, so findings are sometimes still in question.
 ANIMAL STUDIES IN LANGUAGE

• There are really two questions about animals and language. The first is “Can animals
communicate?” and the second is “Can animals use language?”
• The answer to the first question is a definite “Yes.” Animals communicate in many
ways. They use sounds such as the rattle of a rattlesnake or the warning growl of an
angry dog.
• There are also physical behaviours, such as the “dance” of honeybees that tells the
other bees where a source of pollen is (Gould & Gould, 1994).
• But the answer to the second question is more complicated, because language is
defined as the use of symbols, and symbols are things that stand for something else.
• Words are symbols, and gestures can be symbols. But the gestures used by animals
are instinctual, meaning they are controlled by the animal’s genetic makeup.
• The honeybee doing the “dance” is controlled completely by instinct, as is the
growling dog.
• In human language, symbols are used quite deliberately and voluntarily, not by
instinct, and abstract symbols have no meaning until people assign meaning to them.
• Can animals be taught to use symbols that are abstract?
• There have been attempts to teach animals (primates and dolphins) how to use sign
language (as animals lack the vocal structure to form spoken words), but many of
these attempts were simply not “good science.”
• The most successful of these experiments (which is not without its critics as well) has
been with Kanzi, a bonobo chimpanzee trained to press abstract symbols on a
computer keyboard (Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994).
• Kanzi actually was not the original subject of the study—his mother, Matata, was the
chimp being trained.
• She did not learn many of the symbols, but Kanzi watched his mother use the keyboard
and appeared to learn how to use the symbols through that observation.
• One estimate suggested Kanzi could understand about 150 spoken English words.
• Trainers who speak to him are not in his view, so he is not responding to physical
cues or symbols.
• He has managed to follow correctly complex instructions up to the level of a 2-year-
old child (Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1998).
• A later report suggested Kanzi and his half-sister Pan-Banisha eventually acquired a
working vocabulary of 480 symbols and understood up to 2,000 English words!
(Roffman et al., 2012)
• However, aside from anecdotal reports based on video recordings, little to no data have
been offered in published studies.
• One published study with Kanzi does suggest he makes sounds that seem to have
consistent meaning across different situations (Taglialatela et al., 2003).
• Nearly 100 videotaped hours of Kanzi engaged in day-to-day activities were analyzed
for these sounds.
• The researchers were able to identify four sounds that seemed to represent banana,
grapes, juice, and the word yes. (However, remember that four sounds do not come
close to making an entire language.)
• Other studies, with dolphins (Herman et al., 1993) and with parrots (Pepperberg, 1998,
2007), have also met with some success.
• Is it real language? The answer seems to be a qualified “yes.” The qualification is
that none of the animals that have achieved success so far can compare to the level of
language development of a 3-year-old human child (Pinker, 1995).
• However, linguists still debate whether these animals are truly learning language if
they are not also learning how to use syntax—combining words into grammatically
correct sentences as well as being able to understand the differences between sentences
such as “The girl kissed the boy” and “The boy kissed the girl.”
• As yet, there is no conclusive evidence that any of the animals trained in language
have been able to master syntax (Demers, 1988; Johnson, 1995; Pinker, 1995).