Psy/360 - Language and Cognition

Language and Cognition

Language is an important mechanism used in most individual’s everyday life. It helps define their culture, their backgrounds, who they are and where their place in the world is. Most of us don’t put a lot of thought into what mental processes work together to allow an individual to express his thoughts and ideas through language, but it is impossible to analyze the language development process without factoring in the important role that cognition plays in that event. This essay intends to present different hypothesis that try to explain how cognition and language are related, and how deeply connected they must be in order to allow the proper functioning and interaction of individuals in society. As thinkers try to understand if people who speak different languages think differently, or if there is a certain level of cognitive development required to allow language skills acquisition, the debate concerned with the relationship between language and cognition is one that will see no end in the near future. 

Language can be defined as the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication. This system allows individuals to express and communicate thoughts and feelings by using speech sounds and written symbols. The scientific study of language is linguistics. There are four key features of language, which are phonemes, words, sentences and text. Phonemes-phonetics can be considered the most important key feature of languages, because this aspect is what makes each language different from one another. Phonemes are sounds usually indicated by slash symbols, and these sounds cannot be broken into smaller sounds. Phonetics studies the physical properties of those speech sounds, and what they mean. Words, the second key feature in languages can be defined as a unit of language formed by one of more spoken sounds. When words are put together, sentences are formed. Sentences are grammatical units of one word or more. Text refers to conversations, or a group of sentences put together to relay a message. The four levels of language structure and processing are phonemes, words, sentences, and texts. Phonemes make up words, which make up sentences, which make up texts.

Is language fundamentally different than other cognitive abilities, or does it involve the same mental processes and characteristics? It is still unknown to scientists how exactly language and cognition interact during the thinking process, or how fundamental language is for thinking. “Language accumulates cultural wisdom; cognition develops mental representations modeling surrounding world and adapts cultural knowledge to concrete circumstances of life. Language is acquired from surrounding language “ready-made” and therefore can be acquired early in life. This early acquisition of language in childhood encompasses the entire hierarchy from sounds to words, to phrases, and to highest concepts existing in culture. Cognition is developed from experience. Yet cognition cannot be acquired from experience alone; language is a necessary intermediary, a ‘teacher.’” (Perlovsky, 2011). 

Although language development is a process that most individuals take for granted, as many other cognitive functions, it must be learned. Children, for instance, not only have to learn the names for thousands of objects, feelings, situations, colors, animals, and more, but they also have to learn how to put those words together and form cohesive sentences. Chomsky developed in the 1950s an interesting concept of how and which mind mechanisms influenced the language process. “It seemed obvious to Chomsky that surrounding language cultures do not carry enough information for a child to learn language, unless specific language learning mechanisms are inborn. These mechanisms should be specific enough for learning complex language grammars and still flexible enough so that a child of any ethnicity from any part of the world would learn whichever language is spoken around.” (Perlovsky, 2011). Chomsky’s biggest innovation was to interpret language abilities as akin to a mental organ. He believed that children were born with a “language acquisition device” and some linguistic knowledge. He also believed that children did not learn how to speak solely by imitation adults, as they will often use incorrect verbal forms that they have not learned from adults, like “goed” or speaked”. These kinds of mistakes, according to Chomsky, happen because instead of just imitating adults, children extract rules from what they constantly hear. “Because the language imput to children is mfull of mistakes, stops and restarts, Chomsky felt that children could not learn the language using general purpose problem-solving or regularity-extraction skills” (Harris, n.d.). A lexicon, on the other hand, is the vocabulary of a language, and what the sounds mean in that language. It is impossible to know a language without knowing its lexicon, or its vocabulary. 

Scientists and psychologies have been trying for decades to understand to what extent is human thinking dependent on the possession and understanding of a language. Is it possible for humans to think without language skills? Some philosophers believe that it is conceptually necessary that all thoughts are dependent on language skills. On the other hand, there are philosophers that believe that thoughts are independent of language, not only conceptually but also metaphysically and causally (Carruthers, 2012). In between these two very different ideas, there are many others that believe that some language is necessary in the thinking processes, if not always, at least at times.

During the second quarter of the twentieth century, behaviorism was the predominant school of thought in psychology. Psychologists believed that most kinds on animal behavior were associated to the response to a stimulus. At that time, Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist, presented the idea that because of linguistic differences in grammar and usage, speakers of different languages conceptualize and experience the world differently. He was impressed at the variety of grammatical forms and modes of conceptualization present in the many languages throughout the world. For instance, some languages do not have specific words for what we know as “left” or “right”, but use instead geocentric coordinates like east, west, north or south. He also though it was interesting how some cultures on known colors as light or dark, instead of having a specific name for each one. Eskimos, on the other hand, have countless words just to describe the snow. Whorf proposed than that all these cultural linguistic differences impact the cognitive processes of people in each of those cultures. He also proposed that a deep relation exists between language and thought. His theory, which was known as the Whorfian hypothesis (or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), in its strongest formulation this hypothesis has it that the structure of one’s native language determines one’s conceptual categorization of the world. The Whorfian hypothesis generated a good deal of debate and empirical testing in the 1950s and 1960s. (Carruthers, 2012). Although Whorf’s ideas are still popular in some areas of social sciences, the cognitive revolution that occurred in psychology in the early years of his period made that some of his main ideas would fall into dispute amongst cognitive scientists, especially during the second half of the twentieth century.

The first half of the twentieth century presented an important question, as scientists, philosophers and psychologists tried to understand if the relationship between cognition and language was influenced by each language’s grammatical structures and vocabulary. With the upcoming arrival of cognitive psychology, a new question would arise: are cognition and language similar or different human abilities? This question has received many controversial answers for the past few decades. Nowadays, scientists emphasize that our species have evolved thanks to the distinction between different areas of human ability, either some natural to individuals, such as language and basic number use, and areas that require learning, like algebra or playing a musical instrument.

References

Carruthers, P. (2012). Language in cognition. Retrieved from http://faculty.philosophy.umd.edu/pcarruthers/Language%20in%20cognition.pdf

Harris, C. L. (n.d.). Language and cognition. Retrieved from http://www.bu.edu/psych/charris/papers/Encyclopedia.pdf

Leonid Perlovsky, “Language and Cognition Interaction Neural Mechanisms,” Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, vol. 2011, Article ID 454587, 13 pages, 2011. doi:10.1155/2011/454587