Language and thought:Productivity & Regularity, Linguistic Intuition

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Cognitive Psychology PSY 504

Lesson 43

Language and thought

Another important field is Psycholinguistics that studies the importance of languages in

Psychology.

Language

Language is the most impressive of all cognition. The difference between human language and

the natural communication systems of other species is enormous. More than anything else,

language is responsible for the current advanced state of human civilization. It is principal means

by which knowledge is recorded and transmitted across generations. Language is far superior to

animal communication.

Languages also provide people with the principal means of assessing what another person

knows. So, without language human beings would experience countless more misunderstanding

than they currently do. If there were no language people will be bored by technology so, there will

be little technology without language. Therefore without language much of the joy of living would

be lost. Language is very important in every field i.e. Religion, Law and Morality.

Language is a primary source of cognitive psychology. Noam Chomsky made language his basic

subject matter and talked about the importance of language. He also criticized Behaviorists that

gave importance only to the overt behavior and ignored the importance of language.

Productivity & Regularity

Language is not a random combination of words. Balanced against the productivity of language is

its highly regular character. The psycholinguist focuses on two aspects of language: productivity

and regularity.

Productivity refers to the fact that an infinite number of utterances are possible in any language.

Regularity refers to the fact that these utterances are systematic in many ways.

A set of rules that accounts for both productivity and regularity of natural language is called

grammar.

What is Grammar?

A grammar should be able to prescribe or generate all the acceptable sentences of a language

and be able to reject all the unacceptable sentences in the language.

Some violations of grammar are given below;

1. These are rejecting syntactic violations

The girls hits the boys

The girl hit a boys

The boys were hit the girls

These are called syntactic violations. They are fairly meaningful but contain some mistakes in

word combinations or word forms. The correct sentences are

The girls hit the boys.

The girl hits a boy.

The boys hot the girls.

2. Reject semantic violations

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Sincerity frightened the cat

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Cognitive Psychology PSY 504

These are correct syntactically but wrong semantically. In these sentences words are correct in

form and syntactic but their combination is nonsense.

3. Reject phonological violations

Vere is the wase?

We produce V and W same phonologically. These are mistakes V and W have different sounds.

This sentence is correct syntactically and semantically but be mispronounced. The correct

sentence is where is vase?

To account for the regularity of language, linguists need a grammar. The grammar includes

Phonology, Syntax, and Semantics. Phonology means sound, syntax means structure, and

semantics means meaning.

Linguistic Intuition

Another feature that linguists want a grammar to explain is the linguistic intuitions of speakers of

the language. Linguistic intuitions are judgments about the nature of linguistic utterances or about

the relationship between linguistic utterances.

Some examples of linguistic intuition are given in Urdu.

For example,

Larki nay Larkay ko maara

Larkay nay larki say maar khai

Above two sentences are paraphrases Ambiguity: Ambiguity means one word has more

meanings that are confusing. For example, they are cooking apples. This sentence has many

meanings. Some can think it as cooking as food some can think cooking means making salad

etc.

Grammar can specify well-formed sentences, ill-formed ones and why. Explain intuitions that

have about such things as paraphrase and ambiguity.

Competence versus performance

Linguistic competence means a person's abstract knowledge of the language. And linguistic

performance means the actual application of that knowledge in speaking or listening. In Chomsky

views the linguist's task is to develop a theory of competence and the psychologist task is to

develop a theory of performance.

Our everyday use of language does not always correspond to the prepositions of linguistic theory.

We misunderstand the meaning of sentences. We hear sentences that are ambiguous but do not

note their ambiguity. Another complication is that linguistic intuitions are not always clear.

For example, a child talks to his mother and says

Child:

Look Mum fis

Mother:

Fis?

Child:

No, fis.

Mother:

Oh, fish.

Child:

Yes, fis.

This is the fis phenomenon the child knows but can't perform.

Syntactic Formalisms

A great deal of emphasis in linguistics has been given to understanding the syntax of natural

language. One central linguistic concept is phrase structure.

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Cognitive Psychology PSY 504

Phrase Structure

Phase structure analysis is not only significant in linguistics, but is also very important to an

understanding of language processing.

In the above figure the structure of phrase is given as an upside-down tree. In this phase

structure tree sentence (s) points to its subunits nouns phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP), and

each of these units points to its subunits.

Chomsky

Noam Chomsky worked a lot on language. He made some rules of grammar. He says every

sentence has two structures.

Deep Structure

Surface Structure

Then there is Transformational grammar that helps in making sentence.

Deep: The boy reads the book

Surface: The boy +future tense+ read the book. After the transformation the sentence become

"The boy will read the book".

The figure, in below, is showing the Chomsky concept of deep structure and surface structure.

How the sentence start with the base component then deep structure then transformational

component and semantic component after these components there is surface structure and in the

last there is phonological structure.

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Cognitive Psychology PSY 504

Language and Thought

Next question is that what affect the structure of language has on cognition. Language is a source

of thinking. A wide variety of proposals have been put forth as to the connection between

language and thought.

There are many evidences showed the relationship between language and thought; Aristotle

argued that thought determined language 2500 years ago.

Whorf argued in the 20th century Language determines thought. He claimed that language

determines or strongly influences the way a person thinks or perceives the world. This proposal

claims that language and thought are identical. Arabic has a large number of words for Camel.

Eskimos have a large number of words for snow. Their language has any effect on the Eskimos'

perception of snow over and above the effect of experience. The difference between ice and

snow is also clearly understood by Eskimos than any other person.

Chomsky took a modularity position in this debate of language and thoughts. He said language

and thoughts are separate systems that have different process.

One experiment was compared the ability of Dani (people of Indonesia) to learn nonsense names

of focal (basic) colors versus nonfocal colors. English speakers find it easier to learn arbitrary

names for focal colors. Dani subjects also found it easier to learn arbitrary focal colors than

nonfocal colors even they have no names for these colors in their culture.

Natural order

In different languages the sentence order is in these forms

S= subject

O= object

V= verb

SOV

44 percent of worlds language

SVO

35 percent of worlds language

VSO

19 percent of worlds language

VOS

2 percent of worlds language

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