Chapter 9: Language and
Thought
BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE
Language
The Nature of Language
The Evolution of
Language in Humans
Language Development
in Individuals
Theories
of Language Acquisition
Can
Animals Learn Human Language?
Language,
Culture, and Thought
Thinking, Reasoning, and Decision making
How Do We Represent Thoughts
in our Minds?
Visual
Representation
Verbal
Representation
How
Do We Reason About Evidence?
Critical
Thinking
Psychology in
the Real World: Applying Critical Thinking Beyond the Classroom
How
Do We Make Judgments and Decisions?
Breaking New
Ground: Nonrational Decision Making
Rational
Choice Theory
Evidence
Against Rational Choice Theory
How
These Findings Changed People’s Minds
Making
Connections in Language and Thought: Learning a Second Language
Chapter Review
EXTENDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
LANGUAGE
- Language and thought develop side by side with few
exceptions. One is not possible
without the other, at least in adult humans. More so, culture and
civilization as we know it could not exist without language.
The Nature of
Language
- Human language is an open and symbolic communication system that has rules
of grammar and allows its users to express abstract and distant ideas.
- This definition involves several assumptions: open means that the system is free
to change, and symbolic means
that there is no real connection between a sound and the meaning or idea
associated with it. And finally, it is rule-based.
o
Syntax refers to the rules on how
one arranges words in a particular language.
o
Grammar comprises the entire set of rules
for combining symbols and sounds to speak and write a particular language.
- Most researchers argue that human language is special
because it allows for the communication of abstract ideas and new ideas.
The Evolution of
Language in Humans
- Evidence indicates that early hominids had at least a
form of protolanguage or pre-language. Although no one knows for
sure when fully grammatical language first appeared, archaeologists and
linguists suggest that probably only our species (Homo sapiens) used grammatical and syntactical language. If
so, language is less than 150,000 to 200,000 years old.
- Anthropologists and psychologists argue that the
complexity of the human brain and the human ability to use language co-evolved.
That is, as the frontal lobes grew larger, people became capable of
thinking and communicating more and more complex and abstract thoughts.
Increases in the size of human social groups may have triggered increased
brain size as well. The more complex a group is, the greater the need for
its members to communicate.
Nature-Nurture
Pointer: The development
of language, the evolution of the brain, and the development of culture are all
connected.
Language Development
in Individuals
In language development we see
that receptive language skills come before productive skills. One reason for
this may be that receptive skills occur in the left hemisphere, specifically
Wernicke’s area, whereas language production is associated with the
left-hemisphere region called Broca’s area. This suggests that Wernicke’s area
developed earlier than Broca’s area.
Stages of
Language Development
- Cooing:
The first form of speech in infants, present prior to 6 months of age;
this is the sound of vowels being repeated. These sounds are universal and
are seen in deaf babies, as well.
- Babbling:
around 5 to 6 months of age, infants begin to babble. Babbling is the
repetition of sounds that infants extract from their world. These are
known as phonemes, a small unit of sound. Before babies’ brains have been
fully shaped by their native language, they can make and hear more sounds
than their parents can. As children progress through the babbling stage,
and with repeated exposure to the subset of sounds in their native
language, they “prune” away sounds that are not used in that language and
lose the ability to say or perceive non-native sounds.
- One-word utterances: Around 12 months, most
children universally speak their first word. Often, this first word is a
familiar person or object.
- Two-word utterances: These appear around 18 months of age. This is basically a very simple sentence.
- Sentence phase: Around 2.5-3 years of age,
children begin to use simple sentences. This transition happens so quickly
that linguists usually have a tough time studying it. These sentences may
not always be what adults consider grammatically correct, but they are
grammatical sentences.
- This order is predictable, universal, and is related
to brain development. By 3 years of age, the brain is approximately 80% of
the size of an adult brain.
The Sensitivity
Period
- Lennenberg argued for a critical, or sensitive,
period for language acquisition. He argued that children exposed to human
language before a certain age will never fully develop language. Why? Because
the brain has pruned connections that would have been used.
- An example of Lennenberg’s argument is the case of
Genie. He parents severely abused her and locked her away with minimal
contact until she was found at approximately 13.5 years of age. At age 17,
after 4 years of language training, Genie’s language skills were still
extremely delayed. Brain imaging revealed that when she was speaking or
listening, the activity was located mostly in her right hemisphere, as
opposed to the norm, which would be the left hemisphere. This case
suggests that left hemisphere speech development requires stimulation from
the environment during a certain critical period if it is to develop
properly.
- Activity: Show The
Mockingbird Don’t Sing,
released in 2001. This is based on the case of Genie.
Theories of Language
Acquisition
- Barring no major deficit or trauma, all humans learn
to speak, including those who were born deaf. This suggests that we have
innate, genetically based structures in the brain that enable us to learn
language.
Sociocultural
Theories
- This is based on how social factors like culture,
socioeconomic status (SES), birth order, school, peers, television, and
verbally responsive parents shape language development.
- This is based on the role of imitation, or doing what
you see others do. Newborns as young as 50 minutes old will stick out
their tongues or open their mouths when they see an adult do so. And also child-directed
speech, or adults using a higher pitch, simplifying sentence
structure, and using emotion to convey meaning. These are universal
effects.
- Also, we see the involvement of interdependent brain
processes, such as mirror neurons, clusters of brain cells that fire not
only when an individual performs some task, such as sticking out one’s tongue,
but also when an individual observes another
person do the same task. Mirror neurons facilitate social learning and
imitation.
- CONNECTION:
One reason that newborn infants are capable of imitating behavior
immediately after birth is because humans and other animals have “mirror
neurons.” These were detected first after a chance observation in
laboratory monkeys. (See Chapter 3 and Chapter 8.)
Conditioning
and Learning Theory
- As discussed in Chapter 8, learning theorists argue
that language is like any other behavior: it exists because it is
reinforced and shaped. Skinner argues that parents reinforce language and
thus the behavior increases. He argued the universal sequence of language
acquisition was in essence due to shaping. Unfortunately, this theory doesn’t
account for everything, as parents often don’t reinforce for grammar and
syntax.
Nativist
Theory
- Nativist
view: We discover language
rather than learn it; language development is “native,” or inborn. One
source of evidence is that the brain appears to be “wired” for language
acquisition evidenced by Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of the brain, which
are dedicated to speech production and comprehension, respectively.
- Another piece of evidence is that children universally
appear to overgeneralize language
rules; for example, they learn to add “ed” to a word to show past tense, so
they’ll say “bringed” instead of “brought.” These errors and other
evidence have led to the idea that there exists a “universal grammar.”
- One of the early proponents of this perspective was
Noam Chomsky. He argued that humans are born with a language
acquisition device (LAD) – an innate, biologically based capacity to
acquire language. That is, because of the universal ease and automatic
nature of learning to speak in complete and grammatical sentences, often
with no explicit instruction, he argues that language is part of our
nature. Moreover, the sequence of acquisition is roughly the same for all
children on the planet, in poor or rich countries, industrialized or non-industrialized.
Even the difficulty of the language being learned has no effect. All
languages will develop about the same way and at the same time,
regardless.
- Universal grammar follows universal principles,
specific rules of a specific language (e.g., syntax), as well as
parameters or the different rules of what is allowed and what is not in
different languages. Children learn these rules easily because of a
built-in language acquisition device.
Nature,
Nurture, and Language Learning
- Social and learning theorists argue for the
importance of social input and stimulation, whereas nativist theorists
argue for the importance of brain structures and genetic factors; but as
the case of Genie tells us, both are needed to fully explain language
acquisition. That is, innately
guided learning is the interaction between nature and nurture.
- Dale and colleagues (2000) compared vocabulary and
grammar skills in 1,008 identical twin pairs to those same skills in 1,890
fraternal twin pairs; all were about 2 years old. Parents assessed their
vocabulary and grammar skills by completing questionnaires dealing with
the kinds of words and sentences their children could say. Results
indicate that identical twin pairs were more similar in vocabulary and
grammar than were fraternal twin pairs, and that about 25% of vocabulary
development and about 40% of learning about grammar are genetically
influenced.
Can Animals Learn
Human Language?
- A number of captive apes have learned ASL to
different degrees and have been able to communicate with humans. Perhaps the most linguistically gifted
ape to date is Kanzi, a bonobo chimp. Savage-Rumbaugh was attempting to
teach an adult chimp, Matata, sign language. Although she never had much
success, her son Kanzi had been observing the training and quickly learned
a larger vocabulary than his mother.
The research team compared 7-year-old Kanzi’s language comprehension
to that of a 2½-year-old human child, Alia. They found that they performed
commands at similar levels of success – about 70%.
- Other researchers have also found spontaneous
teaching of sign language by trained chimps to their offspring. That said, most research indicates that
chimps lack universal grammar and take longer to learn language.
Language, Culture,
and Thought
- Whorf-Sapir hypothesis: language creates thought as
much as thought creates language.
- Linguistic determinism hypothesis: our language determines
our way of thinking and our perceptions of the world.
- Most research on the topic does not support the
strong view that language determines our thinking, but rather that it
influences our thinking. This position is known as linguistic relativism.
THINKING, REASONING, AND
DECISION MAKING
·
Cognition: “to know” or to refer to mental
processes involved in acquiring, processing, and storing knowledge.
·
Cognitive psychology is the science of
how people think, learn, remember, and perceive.
·
Three fundamental questions about cognition and
reasoning:
How Do We Represent Thoughts
in Our Minds?
- Mental representation: a structure in our mind—such as an idea or
image—that stands for something else, such as the external object or
thing. Mental representations, therefore, allow us to think about and
remember things in the past, imagine things in the future, and think about
abstract ideas.
Visual
Representation.
- We think both in images and in words.
- CONNECTION:
The occipital lobes and parietal lobes of the brain develop before the
temporal and frontal lobes. This pattern of growth partly explains why we
see before we can talk. (See Chapter 5.)
- Every animal with eyes perceives visual images, but
only those animals with more cortex are better able to keep and store
those visual sensations in mind after the sensory stimulation stops.
- Visual imagery: involves visual representations created by brain
after the original stimulus is no longer present. This allows you to
imagine things that are not currently being perceived.
- Neuroscientists have shown that the brain is
activated in much the same way while imagining a task as it is while
performing that task.
- Mental rotation: The process of imagining an object rotating in
three-dimensional space. Typically, males show an advantage here and this
pattern is cross-culturally supported.
Some researchers point to testosterone’s role as studies looking at
female rats injected with high doses of testosterone have found increased
performance on spatial tasks.
Nature-Nurture Pointer: High levels of testosterone, in men and
women, are associated with the ability to perform spatial and mental rotation
tasks.
Verbal
Representation
- Concept:
a mental grouping of objects, events, or people. Concepts help
us organize our perceptions of the world.
·
Concept
hierarchy: organizes information in a particular way, with some being
general and others specific.
·
Parallel
distributive processing (PDP): associations between concepts activate
many networks or nodes at the same time.
·
CONNECTION:
Parallel networks of concepts help us establish, maintain, and retrieve
memories (see Chapter 7).
- Category: a concept that organizes other concepts
around what they all share in common. Some examples of a category fit that
category better than others.
- Prototypes: The best-fitting examples of a
category.
How Do We Reason
About Evidence?
- Reasoning: the process
of drawing inferences or conclusions from principles and evidence.
- Deductive reasoning: we reason from general statements to specific conclusions.
If-then thinking.
- Inductive reasoning: drawing general conclusions from specific evidence.
Conclusions drawn from inductive reasoning are less certain than those
drawn from deductive reasoning.
o
Causal inferences are a direct result of
inductive reasoning. These are statements that explain many specific facts or
observations. That is, A causes B.
o
The confirmation bias: the tendency to selectively
attend to information that supports one’s general beliefs while ignoring
information or evidence that contradicts one’s beliefs.
o
Example:
Wason looked at the ability of individuals to “falsify” versus “confirm” their
own theories. Wason gave subjects the task of determining the hidden rule
behind a sequence of three numbers and found that people are so inclined to test
only ideas that confirm their beliefs that they forget that one of the best
ways to test an idea is to try to tear it down – that is, disconfirm it. Most
people are strongly swayed in thinking due to the confirmation bias.
Critical Thinking
·
Critical thinking: “The ability to analyze facts, generate and organize
ideas, defend opinions, make comparisons, draw inferences, evaluate arguments,
and solve problems” (Chance, 1986, p. 6).
- Qualities of Critical Thinking Most Agreed-Upon by
Experts
▪ Analyze ▪
Interpret
▪
Evaluate ▪
Explain
▪ Make
Inferences ▪
Self-Regulate
- Scientific thinking: involves the cognitive skills
required to generate, test, and revise theories.
- Metacognitive thinking: thinking about thinking. That is, it requires the ability first to
think and then to reflect on one’s own thinking.
Psychology in the Real World: Applying
Critical Thinking Beyond the Classroom
- To apply critical thinking skills we should ask
ourselves, “what is the evidence for this conclusion, and is it valid?”
Unfortunately, many people, including adults sometimes are lacking in
critical and scientific reasoning.
- Kuhn (1993) studied the connection between scientific
and informal or everyday reasoning skills in adults. She asked 160
subjects, ranging in age from teenagers through people in their sixties,
their theories on three topics: what causes prisoners to return to a life
of crime, what causes children to fail in school, and what causes
unemployment. After stating their theories, participants were asked for
evidence on which they based their ideas. Only 40% of the participants
could give actual evidence (that is, information that is based on actual
observations that bear on the theory’s correctness).
- Critical thinking requires that we be open to evidence
that bears on whether our ideas are correct or not, even if we are not
happy with the evidence.
How
Do We Make Judgments and Decisions?
- Heuristics: methods for making complex and
uncertain decisions and judgments.
The
Representativeness Heuristic
- Representativeness heuristic: when we estimate the
probability of one event based on how typical or representative it is of
another event. That is, if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck,
it’s probably a duck.
- Discussion: You may want to ask students if this could be a serious
error. Point out that racial profiling is an example of the
representitiveness heuristic and thus could have very serious errors
associated with it.
The
Availability Heuristic
- Availability
heuristic: a strategy we
use when we make decisions based on the ease with which estimates come to
mind. One reason may be the event’s vividness.
Vividness increases availability and thus may lead us to overestimate how
likely certain events are.
- Example:
People’s fear of a shark attack after one is publicized. Even though you
are statistically more likely to get struck by lightning, most folks have
a greater fear of getting bitten than struck. This may also be why people
stayed out of the ocean after Jaws came
out.
Breaking New Ground: Nonrational Judgments
Making Connections in Language and Thought: Learning a Second Language
- See “Making the Connections” section for detailed
explanation.
KEY TERMS
availability heuristic: a
device we use to make decisions based on the ease with which estimates come to
mind or how available they are to our awareness.
babbling: sounds made as a result of an
infant’s experimentation with a complex range of phonemes, which includes consonants
as well as vowels; starts around 5-6 months.
casual inferences: judgments about causation of one
thing by another.
category: a concept
that organizes other concepts around what they all share in common.
child-directed speech: changes in adult speech
patterns—apparently universal—when speaking to young children or infants;
characterized by higher pitch, changes in voice volume, use of simpler
sentences, emphasis of the here and now, and use of emotion to communicate
their messages.
cognition: mental processes involved in acquiring, processing, and
storing knowledge.
cognitive psychology: the
science of how people think, learn, remember, and perceive.
concept hierarchy: arrangement of related concepts in a particular
way, with some being general and others specific.
concept: a mental grouping of objects, events, or
people.
confirmation bias: the
tendency to selectively attend to information that supports one’s general
beliefs while ignoring information or evidence that contradicts one’s beliefs.
cooing: the first sounds
humans make other than crying, consisting almost exclusively of vowels; occurs
during first 6 months of life.
critical thinking: process
by which one analyzes, evaluates, and forms ideas.
deductive reasoning:
reasoning from general statements of what is known to specific conclusions.
grammar: the entire set of
rules for combining symbols and sounds to speak and write a particular
language.
heuristics: mental shortcuts; methods for making complex and
uncertain decisions and judgments.
human language: a communication
system specific to Homo Sapiens; it
is open and symbolic, has rules of grammar, and allows its users to express
abstract and distant ideas.
idioms: expressions
unique to a particular language; usually their meaning cannot be determined by
decoding the individual meanings of the words.
inductive reasoning:
reasoning to general conclusions from specific evidence.
language acquisition device (LAD): an innate, biologically based
capacity to acquire language, proposed by Noam Chomsky as part of his nativist
view of language.
linguistic determinism
hypothesis: the proposition
that our language determines our way of thinking and our perceptions of the
world; the view taken by Sapir and Whorf.
mental representation: a
structure in our mind—such as an idea or image—that stands for something else,
such as the external object or thing sensed in the past or future, not the
present.
mental rotation: process of imagining
an object turning in three-dimensional space.
metacognitive thinking: process that includes the
ability to think and then to reflect on one’s own thinking.
nativist view of language: the idea that we discover language
rather than learn it; that language development is inborn.
one-word utterances: single words, such as “mama,”
“dada,” “more,” or “no!”; occurs around 12 months of age.
protolanguage: very
rudimentary language, also known as pre-language.
prototypes: the best-fitting examples of a category.
reasoning: the process of drawing
inferences or conclusions from principles and evidence.
representativeness heuristic: a strategy we use to estimate
the probability of one event based on how typical it is of another event.
scientific thinking:
process using the cognitive skills required to generate, test, and revise
theories.
sentence phase: stage when children begin speaking in fully
grammatical sentences; usually age 2 ½ to 3.
syntax: the rules for
arranging words and symbols to form sentences or parts of sentences in a
particular language.
two-word utterances: phrases
children put together, starting around 18 months, such as “my ball,” “mo wawa,”
or “go way” ([go away)].
visual imagery: visual representations
created by the brain after the original stimulus is no longer present.
MAKING
THE CONNECTIONS
Theories of
Language Acquisition: Sociocultural Theories
CONNECTION: One reason newborn infants are capable of imitating
behavior immediately after birth is humans and other animals have “mirror
neurons.” These were first detected after a chance observation in laboratory
monkeys. (See Chapter 3 and Chapter 8.)
- Discussion: This is a good time to discuss
material from Chapter 5 and imitations as discussed in Piaget’s work.
Remind students about the different types of imitation and how Piaget
argues that imitation is the purest form of accommodation. That is, it is
a key factor in the development of thought.
- Discussion:
This is also a good time to discuss the adaptive value of imitation in
humans. For example, when a infant imitates an adult gesture or behavior,
do parents find it endearing? You can also point out the strong survival
value of imitation. If a parent doesn’t eat something or avoids another
stimuli, it may be adaptive to just model the behavior.
Visual Representation
CONNECTION: The occipital lobes and parietal lobes of the brain develop
before the temporal and frontal lobes. This pattern of growth partly explains
why we see before we can talk. (See Chapter 5.)
- Discussion:
You may also want to reiterate the concept of developmental timing
here. Also discuss Turkewitz’s work
on the lateralization of the 2 hemispheres. Showing that the timing of the
development of the brain is in part due to species-typical genes
interacting with species-typical environment. Also, reiterate that the key
to timing is that some capabilities will show deficits so that other
skills can come on line.
- Discussion:
This is a great time to also discuss how evolution would have selected
vision to develop before speech. Not only has vision presumably been a
trait for phylogenetically longer in humans, it also may have greater
adaptive value. Ask students what they think the adaptive mechanism for
both skills is and why evolution might select one to develop faster than
the other.
Verbal Representation
CONNECTION: Parallel networks of concepts help us establish, maintain,
and retrieve memories. (See Chapter 7.)
MAKING CONNECTIONS IN LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT: Learning a Second Language
- Discussion: This is a great time to point out to
students the disparity between research and curriculum. As many students
will be taking a Spanish class in the next 4 years, they will no doubt
bring it up anyway.
- Discussion: There is a study by Johnson and Newport (1989), who tested 46 native Chinese or
Korean speakers, and much like the research in the text, they too found
that age of acquisition was related to age of arrival in the U.S.
Second
Language Learning and the Brain
·
Researchers
have found that people who are fluent in two languages are capable of more
efficient cognitive processing than those who speak only one language.
Second Language Acquisition and
Metacognition
o
Discussion: Ask if there are any bilingual
students in the room. Ask them if they think more in one language than another.
You may also want to point out that early plasticity in the brain may also
account for these differences.
NATURE-NURTURE
POINTERS
The Evolution of
Language in Humans
Nature-Nurture
Pointer: The development
of language, the evolution of the brain, and the development of culture are all
connected.
·
Discussion: Students may also want to discuss the
foils record here. Although brains do not fossilize, the imprint of the brain
does leave marks on fossilized skulls, which allows for an educated post hoc
interpretation of what areas of the brain have grown in size over time.
·
Discussion: Ask students about the relation of tool
use and thinking/language. Point out
that tool use itself does not make one smart; for example, using a computer
doesn’t make them “smart,” but inventing one is a different story.
Nature, Nurture, and Language
Learning
o
Discussion:
This is basically the idea that we learn by instinct. That is, that whether it
is called a language acquisition device, or a homunculus, or something else,
the evidence indicates that we are a species that is “wired” to acquire
language. Point out to students that research indicates whether they are rich,
poor, industrialized, non-industrialized, rural, or urban, overwhelmingly, most
human children pass through the same sequence in a predictable manner. It would
only be in less than about 2% of the population that you see a delay or
significant deficit. And in these cases there is typically an overall
developmental delay or disease that has led to the delay.
Visual Representation.
Nature-Nurture Pointer: High levels of testosterone, in men and
women, are associated with the ability to perform spatial and mental rotation
tasks.
- Discussion: You may want to discuss the role of evolution in selecting a male
bias in spatial thinking. Evolutionary psychology would suggest that the
male advantage in spatial thinking comes from hunter-gatherer days when
males would need to travel great distances and to hunt, skills that would
require good mental rotation and spatial orientation.
Breaking New Ground: Non-Rational Judgments
Rational Choice Theory
- It was thought that when given a choice between two
or more options, humans would choose the one that is most likely to help
them achieve their particular goals – that is, the rational choice.
Economists called this rational
choice theory (Scott, 2000). They based this theory on principles of
behaviorism; that is, that people base decisions on a cost-benefit analysis.
Evidence Against Rational
Choice Theory
- In the 1970s, Tversky and Kahneman began to challenge
rational choice theory with their research on human judgment and decision making.
Tversky explained that people are generally rational in their judgments;
that is, they take into account differences in base rates.
- In 1974 they published a paper that summarized the
results of 13 of their studies on “judgments under uncertainty” (Tversky
& Kahneman, 1974). In it, they presented several principles that would
change the fields of psychology, economics, and even philosophy. We have
already discussed two of them: the availability and representativeness
heuristics.
- Additional
research by Kahneman and Tversky revealed other areas in which people are
less than rational in their decision making and judgments. For example, if
people were rational, they would realize that the odds of two events can
never be higher than the odds of one of those events alone. This is the conjunction fallacy, which occurs when people say the
combination of two events is more likely than either event alone.
- These findings and others like them point to the
conclusion that people sometimes ignore base rates, sometimes are biased
by stereotypes, and sometimes use shortcuts to arrive quickly, but not
completely rationally, at their decisions and conclusions. In short,
Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that people bypass fully rational
decision making and make use of automatic shortcuts in their reasoning and
judgments.
How These Findings Changed
People’s Minds
- To some psychologists, these conclusions about less
than rational reasoning were not surprising – after all, psychologists
know as well as anyone about irrational thought and biased behavior. Yet
to others, the findings were nothing short of revolutionary.
- In 2002 Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics
(Tversky had died in 1996). The Nobel committee stated that their work had
revolutionized the study of intrinsic motivation and human thinking.
INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTION
Additional Discussion Topics
- Animal language.
This is a great time to ask students what they think about animal
language. You may want to show a clip of the bee waggle dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ijI-g4jHg.
Ask students what they feel are potential barriers to studying animal
cognition and language. Ask if they think their dog is thinking.
Communicating with other dogs? Engaging in reflective thinking? Problem solving
and reasoning? Do they think that
we are currently underestimating other species’ abilities in thinking and
overestimating our own? Another great clip on this can be seen in the work
of Susan Savage-Rumbaugh talking
about her work with bonobos and language: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html.
- Benefits of heuristics: You may want to spend some time going
over the representativeness heuristic and availability heuristics. Remind
students that all heuristics are fallible but they allow us to make snap
judgments quickly, and what we sacrifice for accuracy is the ability to
make quick general appraisals. Point out the adaptive value of these
devices. Both have strong survival implications.
- Language and thinking: This is a good time to also point out
that language and memory go hand in hand. Also tie in for students the
relationship between thought and language being the representation of
things symbolically. Point out that Piaget and Vygotsky both argued that
language is required for higher order thinking. Ask students if they think
metacognition, for example, would be possible without language.
- Evolutionary approaches: Ask students which approach to
language acquisition do they think best explains universal grammar. They
should answer “natavist.” Discuss evolutionary pressures that could
pressure language to be selected for.
- Feral children:
Discuss the case of Genie. Show part or all of the BBC’s series on Genie.
You may also want to mention the case of Itard’s Victor, the first
documented feral child. These cases
support the critical period and also illustrate the link between thought
and language.
Activities
- Assign students to watch The Mockingbird Don’t
Sing, released in 2001, a movie based on the case of Genie.
Have them write a paragraph on the interaction of species-typical genes in
a species-atypical environment. Make sure they grasp that species-typical
genes require a species-typical environment to develop in a species-typical
manner.
- Have students type a paragraph on the role of
pragmatics, the linguistic rule of who can say what to whom, and an
example from their lives when the rule was violated. You can then read
some examples in class and discuss the importance of rules in language.
- Have students do some brief Internet research on
Steven Pinker and write a brief paragraph on the natavist perspective and
on Pinker’s own perspective.
- Ask students to engage in a metacognitive exercise.
Ask them to think about their study habits from the last test. Did they
work? What could they do differently to improve performance? This will not
only demonstrate what metacognition is but also prove useful in their
studying for the next exam.
Suggested Films
1.
An interview with Stephen Pinker: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3554279466299738997&hl=en
2.
Very funny interview with Steven Pinker
(warning: it does involve swearing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H7utm3eco4&feature=related
3. Bee waggle dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ijI-g4jHg
4.
Funny clip of Ali G interviewing Noam
Chomsky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIM1_xOSro
5.
John Abbott discussing critical periods
in language acquisition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0yGZnJqMXY’
6. Streaming
video of Steven Pinker, “The Blank Slate”: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/23/
7. Pinker
discussing human thinking: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_language_and_thought.html
8. Murray
Gell-Mann discusses the relationships between human languages: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of_language.html
9. NOVA
clip on mirror neurons: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html
10. A brief
trailer of Itard’s Victor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO-YzvI8Ybg
11. A 6-part
series from the BBC on Genie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipt0pjz0mwg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nha-lGE_wjo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxUBkKNOz_k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcEEvNFNETM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsRr9COItp0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NGUP_JSRic&feature=related
12. NOVA
special on birdsong learning (45 minutes):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0304/01.html
13. The Mockingbird
Don’t Sing, released in 2001. This is based on the case of Genie.
Suggested Websites
1. CNN clip on the word spurt: http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/family/08/02/toddler.talk.ap/index.html
2. An
interview with Dr. Laura Petitto: http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/oela/summit/Petitto.htm
3. BBC
article on deaf babies’ babbling: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3894007.stm
4. European
Science Foundation article on brain involvement in babbling: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/297/5586/1515
5. Article
on bilingualism: http://www.early-advantage.com/Articles/Learningtoread.aspx
6. Psi
Chi article by Rovee-Collier on infant memory: http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_104.asp
7. A
transcript of Steven Pinker discussing the evolution of the human mind: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/2/l_072_03.html
Suggested Readings
Chomsky, N. (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and
the Mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Curtiss, S. (1977). Genie: A
Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern Day `Wild Child'. New York: Academic Press.
Dunbar,
R. I. M. (2001). Brains on two legs: Group size and the evolution of
intelligence. In F. B. M. deWaal
(Ed.)., Tree of Origin:
What Primate Behavior Can Tell us About Human Social Evolution (pp.
173-191). Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Hoff,
E. (2006). How social contexts support and shape language development. Developmental
Review, 26, 55-88.
Holowka, S. & Petitto, L. A. (2002). Left hemisphere cerebral
specialization for babies while babbling. Science,
297 (5586), 1515.
Johnson, J.S. & Newport, E.L. (1989).
Critical period effects in second
language learning: the influence of
maturational
state on the acquisition of English as a second
language. Cognitive
Psychology 21: 60-99.
Kim,
K.H.S., Relkin, N.R., Lee, K.M., & Hirsch, J. (1997). Distinct cortical
areas associated with native and second languages. Nature, 388, 171-174.
Lenneberg, E. (1967). The Biological Foundations of Language.
New York:
Wiley.
Newport,
E.L. (2003). Language development, critical periods in. In L. Nadel (Ed.), Encyclopedia
of Cognitive Science, Vol. 2, (pp. 733-740). London: Nature Group Press.
Petitto, L. A. (2000). On the biological foundations of human language.
In H. Lane
& K. Emmorey (Eds.) The Signs
of Language Revisited (pp.
447-471). Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Petitto, L. A. & Holowka, S. (2002). Evaluating attributions of
delay and confusion in young bilinguals: Special insights from infants acquiring a signed and a spoken language.
Sign Language Studies, 3 (1), 4-33.
Pinker,
S. (2005). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics.
Skinner,
B.F. (1957). Verbal Behavior.
New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Sternberg,
R.J. (Ed.) (2004). Definitions and Conceptions of Giftedness. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Corwin Press.
Turkewittz, G. & Devenny, D.A. (1993). Developmental Time and Timing.
New York:
Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.