Some psycholinguistic aspects of knowing a language

“Please stop barking, I want to sleep”, you tell the neighbour’s dog and it says, “All right, I am sorry” and becomes silent. Wouldn’t this be nice? Yes, but alas, it will not happen since we know that dogs cannot talk. But let us stop for a second: don’t we all know an intelligent

dog somewhere that “nearly speaks”? A dog which perfectly understands what we say and stops barking? And then, is it actually true that only humans have language?

If you think about it, the achievement of some animals is truly astonishing: there are counting horses and parrots, talking apes, or dolphins communicating through a wall. However, if you examine how non-human species communicate naturally, you will find that their com-munication is limited both in form and content. Bees can perform a dance which signals the direction and distance of the food source, but they cannot ‘dance out’ if the direction of the food is “up” from where they are, let alone say things such as, “What a beautiful Sunday we had yesterday!”, “Let’s go on strike!” or, “Do you like our new hive?”. Vervet monkeys have over thirty vocalizations and, for example, different call sets for “snake” and other types of danger, but that is all. But what if the problem is just a missing language? Perhaps we should teach the most intelligent of them? So apes, which share over 80% of their genes with humans, have also been taught human languages. When scientists realized that apes could not talk only because apes were not ‘built for speech’, they started to use sign language with them. That turned out to be a success. But this still leaves us with the question: what makes sign language (or Latin or Swahili or anything that counts as a language) a language? What is it that dif-ferentiates a language from gestures, mimics, vocalizations and dances? A few examples will show it to us.

In the 1960s Washoe, a female chimpanzee, learned American Sign Language (ASL) fairly naturally. She grew up in the Gardner family’s home. Just like humans, she accepted to use arbitrary (see 1.1.) signs to replace real-world things. Like people, she realized the signs were

‘names’ for things (SEMANTICITY), even for those that were not present (DISPLACEMENT). So Washoe could talk about things not present, something that animals usually cannot do. She was also able to make up new combinations of signs such as “Roger Washoe Tickle”, so she used language CREATIVEly – just like people. What she did not produce was word order, some-thing that human babies seem to know without any teaching. This is called STRUCTURE DE

-PENDENCE, or sensitivity for structure. This was a problem, too, for another chimp called Nim Chimpsky (named after Noam Chomsky). Nim produced sentences such as “eat drink eat drink”, “grape eat Nim eat”, “eat Nim eat Nim” and “Nim eat Nim eat”, where words are basically thrown together randomly. An English-speaking child, on the contrary, says structured sentences as early as in its two-word stage. In utterances such as “see ball”, “get ball” or “want baby” (Scovel, 1998:15-16), the human child spontaneously creates two cate-gories of words and places the two catecate-gories in a certain order (see, getor wantfirst and ball or babysecond). Likewise, in “Mummy come” or “Adam put” (Aitchison, 1976:46), two cat-egories are created and ordered (Mummy or Adam first, come or put second). True: an ape is able to learn word order (at least, one chimp named Sarah was), but only when it is trained rigorously (that is, constantly rewarded for good forms). Some scientists say there is conti-nuity between the ways animals and humans communicate, but others think that is true only to yells, groans, cries and other non-linguistic vocalizations that we kept from our past in addition tolanguage. It seems that there is discontinuity: that animal communication is different in many respects from human language. All in all, it seems that no animal can be led to use language as humans do, especially if we consider structure essential to language.

13.2.1. Talking animals?

Linguists and psycholinguists do consider structure essential to language, and study child lan-guage development with regard to it. ‘Structure’ often means grammaticality of sentences, that is, that the syntax is ‘right’. This syntax-centred approach is characteristic of the 1970s and 80s and comes from the syntactic focus in generative grammar. In the child language ex-ample above, the first set (“see ball”) illustrates verb-object ordering, and the second set (“Mummy come”) subject-verb ordering. Structure is also addressed in semantic models.

These operate with concepts such as agent (the participant which carries out the action) or action word, instead of subject or verb. According to a semantic model, the child language examples show an action word-affected thing set and an agent-action word set. It is not de-cided if knowing and acquiring a language is semantics-based or syntax-based, but it is obvi-ously structured.

13.2.2. Innate or learned?

The question, then, is: what makes humans different from animals in their sensitivity to structure? Is it a gift of nature, is it born with them, in other words, is it INNATE(see 4.2.) – or perhaps is it learned? Again, scientists do not agree on the answer. There was a time when people thought babies were born with a “clean slate” of mind (tabula rasa) and everything had to be learned through imitation, including language. This is clearly not true: for example, children cannot learn goedfrom adults, yet they often say this for the past tense of go. We saw that animals will not talk in the same way as people do, even when they are trained, whereas all normal children grow up talking without special attention paid to it (even in cultures which discourage child – adult communication). But does this prove that we have a

‘language gene’? It does not. We all walk and yet we do not want proof for a ‘walking gene’.

So we need to look for other arguments. Those who are against the innateness of language think that language develops in parallel with other cognitive abilities and is not separate from them. This approach cannot really explain how mentally retarded children can have per-fectly good language. Do you think, for example, that it is easier to learn a language than to open a door with a key, or to find the matching shoe for your right foot? For Rebecca, a woman with an IQ index of 60, it was. Yet Rebecca was a complete person when she listened to stories, and was so fluent and composed she would not be spotted as mentally defective when she acted in a theatre group (Sacks 1970/ 1998). Rebecca’s linguistic abilities were ob-viously much better than her other cognitive abilities, which also means her language abilities must be independent from her cognitive abilities. From the many opposing hypotheses, we shall now see a few arguments for the innateness of language capacities.

Nativists think that innate capacities are present right at birth. To demonstrate this, they gave several-hour-old babies a dummy connected to a computer. In this kind of research the rate at which infants suck at the dummy generally shows how interested they are in what they hear or see. The babies’ sucking has told us interesting things. For example, that they can rec-ognize human voice, their parents’ voices, their mother tongue, and can even tell apart a list of content words (such as dog, walk, nice) from a list of function words (such as to, the, him)! Adjusting the rate of sucking, babies will select from three tape-recorded tales the one

they heard every day for weeks before they were born. Infants have a natural orientation to-ward language. Within two or three years after being born, babies produce structured utter-ances, and all go through more or less the same stages of development with respect to the structures they use. For example, children learning English start forming why-questions with-out auxiliaries (Where Daddy go?), and then they add the auxiliary to the main verb (Where you will go?), and finally they change the order of subject and auxiliary (Where will you go?). Another proof is that children ignore structures before they are ‘ready’ for them. No mat-ter how many times an adult repeats the correct past tense form of holdfor the child (Did you say the teacher held the baby rabbits?or Did you say she held them tightly?), she keeps using holdedin her answers (She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.or No, she holded them loosely.) (Cazden in Aitchison, 1976:75). Moreover, the structures children use get more and more complicated although children usually receive feedback only on the content and not on the form of what they say. This means adults tend to correct young children only if the thing they say is untrue, but not when it is ungrammatical. So, although language itself is clearly learned, and not exclusively inherited, nativists say that its foundations are innate.

An important argument for the innateness of language seems to be the fact that language must be learned early in life; that is, there are biological constraints on language acquisition.

This is because language is nested in the brain, and as the brain matures it seems to lose its flexibility for language. The hypothesis will be introduced in the next section; now we shall look at where language is located.

13.2.3. The nest in the brain

Perhaps you think it is funny that language ‘sits’ in an area of the brain? Because, for the most important parts, it does. You have a very good chance that it is around your left ear.

The brain looks like half a walnut: it has two parts. The right and left parts are called hemi-spheres, and one of them, usually the left, is dominant. This functional separation is called

LATERALIZATION. Left cerebral dominance means the left hemisphere takes the lead in con-trolling brain processes. About 80-95% of people have a left cerebral dominance, which means that language is perceived and produced in the left hemisphere. People with left cerebral dominance usually (though not always) prefer using their right hand, foot and eye.

For most of us, language is located in the left hemisphere around the left ear. Two areas re-lated to speech in the left hemisphere are named after the neurologists who studied them: one is called BROCA’S AREA(above and in front of the left ear) and the other is called WERNICKE’S AREA(around and under the left ear). We learned these things from studying APHASIA, that is, speech disturbance due to injury or other kind of damage in the brain. Broca’s aphasiacs basically have fluency problems because Broca’s area is involved in organizing the movements of the vocal organs during speech. The other, Wernicke’s area, in involved in speech percep-tion; aphasiacs of this kind talk a lot but have comprehension problems and their speech does not make much sense.

13.2.3. The nest in the brain

Biology also plays a major role in language acquisition, which is the topic of the next section.

Babies’ brains are extremely flexible and can recover at an amazing speed in the case of dam-age. As humans grow up, their brains mature and slowly lose this flexibility.

In this section, we have looked at language as an exclusively human capability. First we com-pared animal communication to human language and identified several features which sep-arated the two. We found that people have a unique sensitivity to structure, which is born with them (innate). Young children’s early speech development also shows uniform features.

Finally, we looked at where language is located in the brain (lateralization, Broca’s and Wer-nicke’s aphasias) and learned that a young baby’s brain is flexible enough to take over func-tions from damaged areas.