Let's Talk About Language
Language, which consists of a small number of individually meaningless symbols that can be combined to form an infinite number of meanings, is one of human’s most magical abilities [1]. Philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky even called it “the human essence”. As a result of language, we are able to think and discuss abstract ideas (or read this blog!). As we speak to each other, we make sounds with our mouths and those sounds create air vibrations which travel to other’s eardrums, and then our brains take those vibrations from our eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. But how exactly does this all happen? Can the language we speak shape the way we see the world? Read on to find out!
What is language?
Language is made up of a set of symbols, with rules for combining these symbols to generate an infinite number of meanings. The English language itself has over 500,000 words which can be combined to form an infinite number of sentences [2]. There are several properties that language has. First of all, language is symbolic: we use symbols such as letters, or hand signals to convey meaning. These symbols are arbitrary, for example the word table is not a table itself, rather we have agreed that it represents the idea of a table. Language also needs to have structure or a set of rules which must be followed (e.g. grammar). Language should have meaning in that we can transfer mental representations to each other through language. For example, I can describe a movie I watched last night and you should be able to create a mental representation of that movie, without ever watching it! Language has generativity: the symbols of a language can be combined to make an infinite number of messages. Finally, language shows displacement: we can talk about things, people, and events that are happening in the past or future. All of this might seem a bit complex, but children are typically able to master their own language by the age of 5! [3]. Pretty impressive, right?
How is the brain involved?
Original image created by Patrick J. Lynch and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution
In 1854, anatomist Paul Broca treated a patient called “Tan”. He was known as “Tan” as that was the only word he could produce. Upon his death, Broca performed a post mortem and discovered that Tan had a lesion in the frontal lobe of his left hemisphere. Broca found a similar pattern in his other patients - damage to the frontal left hemisphere resulted in difficulty speaking. This area is now known as Broca’s area! In 1874, Carl Wernicke discovered that damage to the back left hemisphere resulted in difficulty producing and comprehending speech. This area is now known as Wernicke’s area. A bundle of axons and neurons called the articulate fasciculus connects Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Today, neuropsychologists recognise that many other parts of the brain are also involved in using and understanding language. For instance, our visual cortex can see a word written on a page, our motor cortex helps us produce sounds, and our temporal lobe is involved in processing sounds we hear.
Can language shape the way we think?
One question which has interested linguists and psycholinguists is whether the language we speak influences what we think about. For example, if English didn’t have a word for the colour blue, would we be able to conceive what that colour is? This idea is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the linguistic relativity hypothesis, named after linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir and Whorf suggested that different languages have different ways of thinking about the world.
In the 1940s, Whorf began studying the Hopi people, a native American tribe in northeastern Arizona [4]. Whorf claimed that the Hopi language didn’t have any words for time, or ways of indicating the past or the future - and as such, they experienced time in a different way to people who spoke other languages. This idea became very popular but has since been called into question. For example, in the 1980s, linguist Ekkehart Milotki published two books discrediting Whorf’s ideas about the Hopi people [5]. More recently, research has looked at how time is conceived by those who speak Mandarin or English. English speakers typically talk about time horizontally (e.g. looking forward to the weekend, putting the past behind us). Mandarin speakers often use vertical or front/back terms when talking about time (earlier events are said to be ‘up’ and later events are said to be ‘down’). Research between these two languages demonstrated that your native language can play an important role in shaping our thoughts but does not determine entirely how we think! [6].
Another popular method of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been examining the way in which different languages partition colours into different categories. Following this line of thinking, people’s perception of colour would be influenced by the colour terms available in their own language. In 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay argued that there are 11 basic colour categories, and that there is a universal order to these categories (black, white, red, then green or yellow, blue, brown, then pink, purple, orange and grey) [7]. So if a language has just two colour categories, they will be black and white! Although, support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with colours has been mixed. One study found that the Dani (a tribe in New Guinea) were able to learn the English set of colour categories, despite only having two words for colour in their own language [8]. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis debate continues to this day! What do you think?
Check back next time when Lisa will be talking about our brains and tics! In the meantime, check out our Twitter and Facebook pages for all the latest news from our lab!
References
Shaffer, D. R., & Kipp, K. (2013). Developmental psychology: Childhood and adolescence. Cengage Learning.
Passer M.W., & Smith, R. E. (2019) Psychology: The science of mind and behaviour.New York: McGraw-Hill.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2018). An introduction to language. Cengage Learning.
Whorf, B. (1938). Some Verbal Categories of Hopi. Language,14(4), 275-286. doi:10.2307/409181
Malotki, E. (2011). Hopi time: A linguistic analysis of the temporal concepts in the Hopi language (Vol. 20). Walter de Gruyter.
Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and English speakers' conceptions of time. Cognitive psychology, 43(1), 1-22.
Hardin, C. L. (2013). Berlin and Kay theory. Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_62-2
Heider, E. R., & Olivier, D. C. (1972). The structure of the color space in naming and memory for two languages. Cognitive psychology, 3(2), 337-354.
Other resources
Boroditsky, L. (2003). Linguistic relativity. Enclyclopaedia of Cognitive Science, 2, 917-921.
What is language? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWQ1sBFLlEw
How language shapes the way we think? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k&t=108s
