Imagine an alien species that could pass thoughts from one head to another merely by pulsating air molecules in the space between them. Perhaps these weird creatures could inhabit a future science fiction movie?

Actually, we are those creatures. When we speak, our brain and voice apparatus conjure up air-pressure waves that we send banging against another’s eardrum—enabling us to transfer thoughts from our brain into theirs. As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (1998) has noted, we sometimes sit for hours “listening to other people make noise as they exhale, because those hisses and squeaks contain information.” And thanks to all those funny sounds created in our heads from the air pressure waves, we get people’s attention. We convince them to do things. We maintain relationships (Guerin, 2003). Depending on how you vibrate the air after opening your mouth, you may get a scowl or a kiss.

But language is more than vibrating air. As I [DM] create this paragraph, my fingers on a keyboard generate electronic binary numbers that are translated into the squiggles in front of you. When transmitted by reflected light rays into your retina, those squiggles trigger formless nerve impulses that project to several areas of your brain, which integrate the information, compare it to stored information, and decode meaning. Thanks to language, information is moving from my mind to yours. Monkeys mostly know what they see. Thanks to language (spoken, written, or signed), we comprehend much that we’ve never seen and that our distant ancestors never knew.

If you were able to retain only one cognitive ability, make it language, suggests researcher Lera Boroditsky (2009). Without sight or hearing, you could still have friends, family, and a job. But without language, could you have these things? “Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it’s hard to imagine life without it.”

9-8 What are the structural components of a language?

Consider how we might go about inventing a language. For a spoken language, we would need three building blocks:

Like life constructed from the genetic code’s simple alphabet, language is complexity built of simplicity. In English, for example, 40 or so phonemes can be combined to form more than 100,000 morphemes, which alone or in combination produce the 616,500 word forms in the Oxford English Dictionary. Using those words, we can then create an infinite number of sentences, most of which (like this one) are original.

Linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that all languages share some basic elements, which he calls universal grammar. All human languages, for example, have nouns, verbs, and adjectives as grammatical building blocks. From infancy onward, humans, no matter their language, prefer some syllables, such as blif, over others, such as lbif (Gómez et al., 2014). Nevertheless, the world’s 6000+ languages are structurally very diverse (Evans & Levinson, 2009)—much more diverse than the universal grammar idea implies (Bergen, 2014; Ibbotson, 2012). Behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1957) believed we can explain this diversity with familiar learning principles, such as association (of the sights of things with the sounds of words); imitation (of the words and syntax modeled by others); and reinforcement (with smiles and hugs when the child says something right).

Chomsky also argued that humans are born with a built-in predisposition to learn grammar rules, which helps explain why preschoolers pick up language so readily and use grammar so well. It happens so naturally—as naturally as birds learn to fly—that training hardly helps. We are not born, however, with a built-in specific language. Europeans and Native Australia–New Zealand populations, though geographically separated for 50,000 years, can readily learn each other’s very different languages (Chater et al., 2009). And whatever language we experience as children, whether spoken or signed, we all readily learn its specific grammar and vocabulary (Bavelier et al., 2003). Yet no matter what language we learn, we start speaking it mostly in nouns (kitty, da-da) rather than in verbs and adjectives (Bornstein et al., 2004). Biology and experience work together.

9-9 What are the milestones in language development, and how do we acquire language?

Make a quick guess: How many words of your native language(s) did you learn between your first birthday and your high school graduation? Although you use only 150 words for about half of what you say, you probably learned about 60,000 words (Bloom, 2000; McMurray, 2007). That averages (after age 2) to nearly 3500 words each year, or nearly 10 each day! How you did it—how those 3500 words could so far outnumber the roughly 200 words your schoolteachers consciously taught you each year—is one of the great human wonders.

Could you even state the rules of syntax (the correct way to string words together to form sentences) in the language(s) you speak fluently? Most of us cannot. Yet before you were able to add 2 + 2, you were creating your own original and grammatically appropriate sentences. As a preschooler, you comprehended and spoke with a facility that puts to shame college students struggling to learn a new language.

We humans have an astonishing facility for language. With remarkable efficiency, we sample tens of thousands of words in our memory, effortlessly assemble them with near-perfect syntax, and spew them out, three words a second (Vigliocco & Hartsuiker, 2002). Seldom do we form sentences in our minds before speaking them; we organize them on the fly as we speak. And while doing all this, we also adapt our utterances to our social and cultural context. Given how many ways we can mess up, it’s amazing that we master this social dance. When and how does it happen?

When and How Do We Learn Language?

RECEPTIVE LANGUAGE Children’s language development moves from simplicity to complexity. Infants start without language (in fantis means “not speaking”). Yet by 4 months of age, babies can recognize differences in speech sounds (Stager & Werker, 1997). They can also read lips: They prefer to look at a face that matches a sound, so we know they can recognize that ah comes from wide open lips and ee from a mouth with corners pulled back (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982). This marks the beginning of the development of babies’ receptive language, their ability to understand what is said to and about them. Infants’ language comprehension greatly outpaces their language production. Even at six months, long before speaking, many infants recognize object names (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012, 2013). At 7 months and beyond, babies grow in their power to do what adults find difficult when listening to an unfamiliar language: to segment spoken sounds into individual words.

PRODUCTIVE LANGUAGE Long after the beginnings of receptive language, babies’ productive language, their ability to produce words, matures. Before nurture molds their speech, nature enables a wide range of possible sounds in the babbling stage, beginning around 4 months. Many of these spontaneously uttered sounds are consonant-vowel pairs formed by simply bunching the tongue in the front of the mouth (da-da, na-na, ta-ta) or by opening and closing the lips (ma-ma), both of which babies do naturally for feeding (MacNeilage & Davis, 2000). Babbling does not imitate the adult speech babies hear—it includes sounds from various languages. From this early babbling, a listener could not identify an infant as being, say, French, Korean, or Ethiopian. Deaf infants who observe their deaf parents signing begin to babble more with their hands (Petitto & Marentette, 1991).

By about 10 months old, infants’ babbling has changed so that a trained ear can identify the household language (de Boysson-Bardies et al., 1989). Without exposure to other languages, babies lose their ability to discriminate and produce sounds and tones found outside their native language (Meltzoff et al., 2009; Pallier et al., 2001). Thus, by adulthood, those who speak only English cannot discriminate certain sounds in Japanese speech. Nor can Japanese adults with no training in English hear the difference between the English r and l. For a Japanese-speaking adult, la-la-ra-ra may sound like the same syllable repeated.

Around their first birthday, most children enter the one-word stage. They have already learned that sounds carry meanings, and if repeatedly trained to associate, say, fish with a picture of a fish, 1-year-olds will look at a fish when a researcher says, “Fish, fish! Look at the fish!” (Schafer, 2005). They now begin to use sounds—usually only one barely recognizable syllable, such as ma or da—to communicate meaning. But family members learn to understand, and gradually the infant’s language conforms more to the family’s language. Across the world, baby’s first words are often nouns that label objects or people (Tardif et al., 2008). At this one-word stage, a single inflected word (“Doggy!”) may communicate a sentence (“Look at the dog out there!”).

At about 18 months, children’s word learning explodes from about a word per week to a word per day. By their second birthday, most have entered the two-word stage (TABLE 9.1). They start uttering two-word sentences in telegraphic speech. Like today’s texts or yesterday’s telegrams that charged by the word (TERMS ACCEPTED. SEND MONEY), a 2-year-old’s speech contains mostly nouns and verbs (“Want juice”). (Children recognize noun-verb differences—as shown by their responses to a misplaced noun or verb—earlier than they utter sentences with nouns and verbs [Bernal et al., 2010].) Also like telegrams, 2-year-olds’ speech follows the rules of syntax specific to their language. English-speaking children typically place adjectives before nouns—white house rather than house white. Spanish-speaking children reverse this order, as in casa blanca.

Moving out of the two-word stage, children quickly begin uttering longer phrases (Fromkin & Rodman, 1983). If they get a late start on learning a particular language, such as after receiving a cochlear implant or being adopted by a family in another country, their language development still proceeds through the same sequence, although usually at a faster pace (Ertmer et al., 2007; Snedeker et al., 2007). By early elementary school, children understand complex sentences and begin to enjoy the humor conveyed by double meanings: “You never starve in the desert because of all the sand-which-is there.”

CRITICAL PERIODS Childhood seems to represent a critical (or “sensitive”) period for mastering certain aspects of language before the language-learning window closes (Hernandez & Li, 2007). People who learn a second language as adults usually speak it with the accent of their native language, and they also have difficulty mastering the new grammar. In one experiment, Korean and Chinese immigrants considered 276 English sentences (“Yesterday the hunter shoots a deer”) and decided whether they were grammatically correct or incorrect (Johnson & Newport, 1991). All had been in the United States for approximately 10 years: Some had arrived in early childhood, others as adults. As FIGURE 9.9 reveals, those who learned their second language early learned it best. The older one is when moving to a new country, the harder it will be to learn its language and to absorb its culture (Cheung et al., 2011; Hakuta et al., 2003).

The window on language learning closes gradually in early childhood. Later-than-usual exposure to language (at age 2 or 3) unleashes the idle language capacity of a child’s brain, producing a rush of language. But by about age 7, those who have not been exposed to either a spoken or a signed language gradually lose their ability to master any language.

Deafness and Language Development

The impact of early experiences is evident in language learning in prelingually (before learning language) deaf children born to hearing-nonsigning parents. These children typically do not experience language during their early years. Natively deaf children who learn sign language after age 9 never learn it as well as those who lose their hearing at age 9 after learning a spoken language such as English. They also never learn English as well as other natively deaf children who learned sign in infancy (Mayberry et al., 2002). Those who learn to sign as teens or adults are like immigrants who learn English after childhood: They can master basic words and learn to order them, but they never become as fluent as native signers in producing and comprehending subtle grammatical differences (Newport, 1990). As a flower’s growth will be stunted without nourishment, so, too, children will typically become linguistically stunted if isolated from language during the critical period for its acquisition.

9-10 What brain areas are involved in language processing and speech?

We think of speaking and reading, or writing and reading, or singing and speaking as merely different examples of the same general ability—language. But consider this curious finding: Aphasia, an impairment of language, can result from damage to any of several cortical areas. Even more curious, some people with aphasia can speak fluently but cannot read (despite good vision), while others can comprehend what they read but cannot speak. Still others can write but not read, read but not write, read numbers but not letters, or sing but not speak. Indeed, in 1865, French physician Paul Broca reported that after damage to an area of the left frontal lobe (later called Broca’s area), a person would struggle to speak words while still being able to sing familiar songs and comprehend speech. These cases suggest that language is complex, and that different brain areas serve different language functions.

In 1874, German investigator Carl Wernicke discovered that after damage to an area of the left temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area), people could speak only meaningless sentences. Asked to describe a picture that showed two boys stealing cookies behind a woman’s back, one patient responded: “Mother is away her working her work to get her better, but when she’s looking the two boys looking the other part. She’s working another time” (Geschwind, 1979). Damage to Wernicke’s area also disrupts understanding.

Today’s neuroscience has confirmed brain activity in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas during language processing (FIGURE 9.10). But language functions are distributed across other brain areas as well. Functional MRI scans show that what you experience as a continuous, indivisible stream of experience—language—is actually but the visible tip of an information-processing iceberg. Different neural networks are activated by nouns and verbs (or objects and actions); by different vowels; and by reading stories of visual versus motor experiences (Shapiro et al., 2006; Speer et al., 2009). If you are bilingual, the neural networks that enable your native language differ from those that enable your second language (Perani & Abutalebi, 2005).

The big point to remember: In processing language, as in other forms of information processing, the brain operates by dividing its mental functions—speaking, perceiving, thinking, remembering—into subfunctions. Your conscious experience of reading this page seems indivisible, but you are engaging many different neural networks in your brain to compute each word’s form, sound, and meaning (Posner & Carr, 1992). Different brain areas also process information about who spoke and what was said (Perrachione et al., 2011). We saw this distributed processing in Chapter 6, in the discussion of vision, as the brain engaged in specialized visual subtasks (discerning color, depth, movement, and form).

E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.

9-11 What do we know about other animals’ capacity for language?

Humans have long and proudly proclaimed that language sets us above all other animals. “When we study human language,” asserted Chomsky (1972), “we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essence,’ the qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique [to humans].” Is it true that humans, alone, have language?

Animals display impressive comprehension and communication. Vervet monkeys sound different alarm cries for different predators: a barking call for a leopard, a cough for an eagle, and a chuttering for a snake. Hearing the leopard alarm, other vervets climb the nearest tree. Hearing the eagle alarm, they rush into the bushes. Hearing the snake chutter, they stand up and scan the ground (Byrne, 1991). To indicate threats, monkeys can also combine 6 different calls into a 25-call sequence (Balter, 2010). But is this language? This question launched many studies with chimpanzees.

In the late 1960s, psychologists Allen Gardner and Beatrix Gardner (1969) built on chimpanzees’ natural tendencies for gestured communication by teaching sign language to a chimpanzee named Washoe. After four years, Washoe could use 132 signs; by her life’s end in 2007, she was using more than 245 signs (Metzler, 2011; Sanz et al., 1998). One New York Times reporter, having learned sign language from his deaf parents, visited Washoe and exclaimed, “Suddenly I realized I was conversing with a member of another species in my native tongue.” Some chimpanzees strung signs together to form sentences. Washoe, for example, signed “You me go out, please.” Some word combinations seemed creative—saying water bird for “swan” or apple-which-is-orange for “orange” (Patterson, 1978; Rumbaugh, 1977). But some psychologists grew skeptical. Were the chimps language champs or were the researchers chumps? Consider, said the skeptics:

Controversy can stimulate progress, and in this case, it triggered more evidence of chimpanzees’ abilities to think and communicate. Kanzi, a bonobo with a reported 384-word vocabulary, could understand syntax in spoken English (Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1993, 2009). Kanzi has responded appropriately when asked, “Can you show me the light?” and “Can you bring me the [flash]light?” and “Can you turn the light on?” Given stuffed animals and asked—for the first time—to “make the dog bite the snake,” he put the snake to the dog’s mouth.

So, how should we interpret these case studies? Are humans the only language-using species? If by language we mean verbal or signed expression of complex grammar, most psychologists would now agree that humans alone possess language. Humans, alone, also have a version of a gene (FOXP2) that facilitates speech and language development. If we mean, more simply, an ability to communicate through a meaningful sequence of symbols, then apes are indeed capable of language. And other species do exhibit insight, show family loyalty, communicate with one another, care for one another, and transmit cultural patterns across generations. Working out what this means for the moral rights of other animals is an unfinished task.

9-12 What is the relationship between thinking and language, and what is the value of thinking in images?

Thinking and language intricately intertwine. Asking which comes first is one of psychology’s chicken-and-egg questions. Do our ideas come first and then the words to name them? Or are our thoughts conceived in words and therefore unthinkable without them?

Language Influences Thinking

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) contended that “language itself shapes a [person’s] basic ideas.” The Hopi, who have no past tense for their verbs, could not readily think about the past, said Whorf.

Whorf’s linguistic determinism hypothesis is too extreme. We all think about things for which we have no words. (Can you think of a shade of blue you cannot name?) And we routinely have unsymbolized (wordless, imageless) thoughts, as when someone, watching two men carry a load of bricks, wondered whether the men would drop them (Heavey & Hurlburt, 2008; Hurlburt et al., 2013).

Nevertheless, to those who speak two dissimilar languages, such as English and Japanese, it seems obvious that a person may think differently in different languages (Brown, 1986). Unlike English, which has a rich vocabulary for self-focused emotions such as anger, Japanese has more words for interpersonal emotions such as sympathy (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Many bilingual individuals report having different senses of self, depending on which language they are using (Matsumoto, 1994). In one series of studies with bilingual Israeli Arabs (who spoke both Arabic and Hebrew), participants thought differently about their social world, with differing automatic associations with Arabs and Jews, depending on which language the testing session used (Danziger & Ward, 2010).

Depending on which emotion they want to express, bilingual people will often switch languages. “When my mom gets angry at me, she’ll speak in Mandarin,” explained one Chinese-American student. “If she’s really mad, she’ll switch to Cantonese” (Chen et al., 2012). Bilingual individuals may even reveal different personality profiles when taking the same test in two languages, with their differing cultural associations (Chen & Bond, 2010; Dinges & Hull, 1992), as happened when China-born, bilingual University of Waterloo students were asked to describe themselves in English or Chinese (Ross et al., 2002). The students’ English-language self-descriptions fit typical Canadian profiles, expressing mostly positive self-statements and moods. Responding in Chinese, the same students gave typically Chinese self-descriptions, reporting more agreement with Chinese values and roughly equal positive and negative self-statements and moods. Similar personality changes have been shown when bicultural, bilingual Americans and Mexicans shifted between the cultural frames associated with English and Spanish (Ramírez-Esparza et al., 2006). When responding in their second language, bilingual people’s moral judgments reflect less emotion—they respond with more “head” than “heart” (Costa et al., 2014). “Learn a new language and get a new soul,” says a Czech proverb.

Our words may not determine what we think, but they do influence our thinking (Boroditsky, 2011). We use our language in forming categories. In Brazil, the isolated Piraha people have words for the numbers 1 and 2, but numbers above that are simply “many.” Thus, if shown 7 nuts in a row, they struggle to lay out the same number from their own pile (Gordon, 2004).

Words also influence our thinking about colors. Whether we live in New Mexico, New South Wales, or New Guinea, we see colors much the same, but we use our native language to classify and remember them (Davidoff, 2004; Roberson et al., 2004, 2005). Imagine viewing three colors and calling two of them “yellow” and one of them “blue.” Later you would likely recall the yellows as being more similar. But if you speak the language of Papua New Guinea’s Berinmo tribe, which has words for two different shades of yellow, you would more speedily perceive and better recall the variations between the two yellows. And if your language is Russian, which has distinct names for various shades of blue, such as goluboy and siniy, you might recall the yellows as more similar and remember the blue better. Words matter.

Perceived differences grow as we assign different names. On the color spectrum, blue blends into green—until we draw a dividing line between the portions we call “blue” and “green.” Although equally different on the color spectrum, two different items that share the same color name (as the two “blues” do in FIGURE 9.11, contrast B) are harder to distinguish than two items with different names (“blue” and “green,” as in Figure 9.11, contrast A) (Özgen, 2004). Likewise, two places seem closer and more vulnerable to the same natural disaster if labeled as in the same state rather than at an equal distance in adjacent states (Burris & Branscombe, 2005; Mishra & Mishra, 2010). Tornadoes don’t know about state lines, but people do.

Given words’ subtle influence on thinking, we do well to choose our words carefully. Is “A child learns language as he interacts with his caregivers” any different from “Children learn language as they interact with their caregivers”? Many studies have found that it is. When hearing the generic he (as in “the artist and his work”) people are more likely to picture a male (Henley, 1989; Ng, 1990). If he and his were truly gender free, we shouldn’t skip a beat when hearing that “man, like other mammals, nurses his young.”

To expand language is to expand the ability to think. Young children’s thinking develops hand in hand with their language (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1986). Indeed, it is very difficult to think about or conceptualize certain abstract ideas (commitment, freedom, or rhyming) without language! And what is true for preschoolers is true for everyone: It pays to increase your word power. That’s why most textbooks, including this one, introduce new words—to teach new ideas and new ways of thinking.

Increased word power helps explain what McGill University researcher Wallace Lambert (1992; Lambert et al., 1993) has called the bilingual advantage. In published studies—though perhaps less so in unpublished studies (Bialystok et al., 2015; de Bruin et al., 2015a,b)—bilingual people have exhibited skill at inhibiting one language while using the other. And thanks to their well-practiced “executive control” over language, they have also been better at inhibiting their attention to irrelevant information (Kroll & Bialystock, 2013).

Lambert helped devise a Canadian program that has, since 1981, immersed millions of English-speaking children in French (Statistics Canada, 2013). Not surprisingly, the children attain a natural French fluency unrivaled by other methods of language teaching. Moreover, compared with similarly capable children in control groups, they do so without detriment to their English fluency, and with increased aptitude scores, creativity, and appreciation for French-Canadian culture (Genesee & Gándara, 1999; Lazaruk, 2007).

Whether we are in the linguistic minority or majority, language links us to one another. Language also connects us to the past and the future. “To destroy a people, destroy their language,” observed poet Joy Harjo.

Thinking in Images

When you are alone, do you talk to yourself? Is “thinking” simply conversing with yourself? Words do convey ideas. But sometimes ideas precede words. To turn on the cold water in your bathroom, in which direction do you turn the handle? To answer, you probably thought not in words but with implicit (nondeclarative, procedural) memory—a mental picture of how you do it (see Chapter 8).

Indeed, we often think in images. Artists think in images. So do composers, poets, mathematicians, athletes, and scientists. Albert Einstein reported that he achieved some of his greatest insights through visual images and later put them into words. Pianist Liu Chi Kung harnessed the power of thinking in images. One year after placing second in the 1958 Tchaikovsky piano competition, Liu was imprisoned during China’s cultural revolution. Soon after his release, after seven years without touching a piano, he was back on tour. Critics judged Liu’s musicianship as better than ever. How did he continue to develop without practice? “I did practice,” said Liu, “every day. I rehearsed every piece I had ever played, note by note, in my mind” (Garfield, 1986).

For someone who has learned a skill, such as ballet dancing, even watching the activity will activate the brain’s internal simulation of it, reported one British research team after people underwent fMRIs while watching videos (Calvo-Merino et al., 2004). So, too, will imagining a physical experience, which activates some of the same neural networks that are active during the actual experience (Grèzes & Decety, 2001). Small wonder, then, that mental practice has become a standard part of training for Olympic athletes (Suinn, 1997; Ungerleider, 2005).

One experiment on mental practice and basketball free-throw shooting tracked the University of Tennessee women’s team over 35 games (Savoy & Beitel, 1996). During that time, the team’s free-throw accuracy increased from approximately 52 percent in games following standard physical practice to some 65 percent after mental practice. Players had repeatedly imagined making free throws under various conditions, including being “trash-talked” by their opposition. In a dramatic conclusion, Tennessee won the national championship game in overtime, thanks in part to their free-throw shooting.

Mental rehearsal can also help you achieve an academic goal, as researchers demonstrated with two groups of introductory psychology students facing a midterm exam one week later (Taylor et al., 1998). (Scores of other students, not engaging in any mental simulation, formed a control group.) The first group spent five minutes each day visualizing themselves scanning the posted grade list, seeing their A, beaming with joy, and feeling proud. This outcome simulation had little effect, adding only 2 points to their exam-score average. Another group spent five minutes each day visualizing themselves effectively studying—reading the textbook, going over notes, eliminating distractions, declining an offer to go out. This process simulation paid off: This second group began studying sooner, spent more time at it, and beat the others’ average by 8 points.

The point to remember: It’s better to spend your fantasy time planning how to get somewhere than to dwell on the imagined destination.

* * *

What, then, should we say about the relationship between thinking and language? As we have seen, language influences our thinking. But if thinking did not also affect language, there would never be any new words. And new words and new combinations of old words express new ideas. The basketball term slam dunk was coined after the act itself had become fairly common. So, let us say that thinking affects our language, which then affects our thought (FIGURE 9.12).

Psychological research on thinking and language suggests that the human mind is simultaneously capable of striking intellectual failures and striking intellectual power. Misjudgments are common and can have disastrous consequences. So we do well to appreciate our capacity for error. Yet our efficient heuristics often serve us well. Moreover, our ingenuity at problem solving and our extraordinary power of language mark humankind as almost “infinite in faculties.”

Learning Objectives

Test Yourself by taking a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within the chapter). Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term memory of the concepts (McDaniel et al., 2009).

Question

Question

Question

Question

Question

Terms and Concepts to Remember

Test yourself on these terms.

Question

Experience the Testing Effect

Test yourself repeatedly throughout your studies. This will not only help you figure out what you know and don’t know; the testing itself will help you learn and remember the information more effectively thanks to the testing effect.

Question 9.8

Question 9.9

Question 9.10

Question 9.11

Question 9.12

Use to create your personalized study plan, which will direct you to the resources that will help you most in .