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The transfer of ideas When humans speak to each other, they use their vocal chords to vibrate air molecules in very specific patterns that are then passed into other humans ear canals, eventually banging against the eardrum and being translated into words and concepts. However, speaking alone is not language. Language is our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. Language has been considered the “jewel in the crown of cognition”, and is so fundamental to our experience, that we could hardly be considered human without it.
The Structure of Language For spoken language, there are three distinct building blocks we need: • Phonemes: The smallest distinctive sound unit. For instance, to say the word “bat”, English speakers say b, a, and t. However, Phonemes aren’t the same as letters. In “chat”, the phonemes are ch, a, and t. After studying some 500 languages, scientists have identified 869 phonemes in human speech. English uses about 40 of these, some fewer, some many more. In general, consonant phonemes carry more meaning than vowel phonemes. The treth ef thes stetement shed be evedent frem thes bref demenstretien.
Morphemes: the smallest unit that carries meaning. Morphemes may be a whole word or part of a word (such as a prefix). In English some morphemes are also phonemes: the personal pronoun I and the “s” that denotes plural are some examples. Most morphemes combine two or more phonemes (bat, gentle, pre-). • Grammar: a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. In a given language, semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible meaning.
Fun Language Facts Languages are simplicity built into complexity. In English, we can combine our 40 or so phonemes into over 100,000 morphemes, which either alone or in combination form the 616,500 words currently in the dictionary. With those words, we can form a literally infinite number of sentences that are most likely original, like this one (probably) is. The rate at which we learn our language while growing is astounding. Between your first birthday and the time you graduate high school, you will have learned on average 60,000 words in your native language. This averages to 10 a day! We still don’t know where the 3,500 yearly words come from, when parents and teachers only actively teach you maybe 200 a year.
Learning our first language Babies start without language. Indeed, infant comes from the words in fans, which translates to “not speaking”. Yet by the age of 4 months, babies can recognize different speech sounds, as well as reading lips. They can match faces to appropriate sounds (such as an open mouth making an “ah” sound). At 7 months and beyond, babies gain in their ability to segment spoken sounds into individual words, something quite hard most adults, young and old, to do when approaching a foreign language.
Productive language Beginning around 4 months, babies enter what is called the babbling stage, the stage of development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. They are mostly experimenting with sounds, and not trying to speak the household language. Common sounds babies make come from either bunching the tongue in front of the mouth (da-da, na-na), or opening and closing the lips (ma-ma), which they regularly do when feeding. At this stage, it would be impossible to tell the home language of a baby from its babbling. However, interestingly, deaf infants who see their deaf parents signing begin to “babble” with their hands.
Around their first birthday, most children enter the one-word stage, where children mostly speak in single words. They have learned that words have meaning, and will begin to associate certain words with things. For instance, if repeatedly shown a cat while saying “cat”, later when told to look at the cat, a 1 year old will be able to point out the cat on a page. While they only speak in single words for complete meanings (like saying “Doggy!” to mean “Look at that dog over there!”), families quickly adapt and understand. Children generally quickly learn new words after this, with around 18 months old going from learning a word a week to a word a day.
By their second birthday, most children have transitioned to the two-word stage, where they speak in two word statements. They use what has been termed telegraphic speech, or like a telegram, using mostly nouns and verbs (MESSAGE RECEIVED. SEND MONEY. etc). They may say things like “get ball” or “want juice”. Words make sense and are ordered correctly for the language being spoken (“white house” in English, “casa blanca” in Spanish). After this, language very quickly progresses into complete sentences, and get to the point where early elementary school students can understand and enjoy double meanings.
How do we acquire language? The world’s 7000-ish languages are structurally very diverse. However, famed linguist Noam Chomsky (he’s important) has argued that all languages do share some basic elements that he calls “universal grammar”. All human languages, for example, have nouns, verbs, and adjectives as grammatical building blocks. Chomsky also argues that we are born with a built-in predisposition to learn grammar rules, and that this helps explain why preschoolers pick up language so readily and use grammar so well. It happens so naturally - much like birds learning to fly - that training rarely helps. No matter what our home language, children mostly begin speaking in nouns (kitty, ma-ma, ball) than in verbs or adjectives.
Critical Learning Period Scientists have found a critical learning period for language. Adults lack the same language acquisition and analysis skills that very young children do. Young children learn second languages much easier than adults do as well. In one study with adult Asian immigrants in the United States, all who had been here for at least 10+ years, the participants were asked to analyze whether a statement was grammatically correct or not (“Yesterday the hunter shoots a deer”). Those who had moved to the United States and started learning English at the age of 7 or before did just as well as a native speaker, those who started learning after the age of 7 did worse, with the older learners rapidly doing worse. This applies to sign language as well, with children who were born deaf doing worse with sign language if they didn’t learn it until later in their childhood.
The Brain and Language As mentioned before, there are two parts of the brain associated with language: Broca’s Area (left frontal lobe) and Wernicke’s Area (left temporal lobe). Aphasia, or damage, to these areas create different effects: Broca’s Aphasia causes stunted speech that makes sense, and they can still understand language and sing songs. Wernicke’s Aphasia causes the patient to speak in fluid but nonsensical ways, and also causes problems in comprehending language. MRIs and fMRIs have shown that the brain breaks up different functions of language across the brain. For instance, jokes that play on meaning (why don’t sharks bite lawyers? Professional courtesy) and jokes that play on words (what kind of lights were on Noah’s ark? Flood lights) activate different parts of the brain.
The Brain and Language in a Nutshell Gosh, the brain parts do show up a bunch, huh? What’s important to remember from the brain stuff is this: the brain operates by dividing its mental functions - speaking, perceiving, thinking, remembering - into subfunctions. While reading this or listening to me speak may seem like one solid function, your brain is actually running it in pieces through different neural pathways.
Language and Thought, or vice versa Trying to determine what comes first, our language or our thoughts, is essentially a chicken or an egg scenario. They are intricately entwined. Do we use words to name our thoughts, or are thoughts conceived in words, and are otherwise unthinkable? The idea that we can’t think without words to describe our thoughts is called linguistic determinism, and comes from Benjamin Lee Whorf. This is a bit extreme; we are able to think of things we have no words or (imagine a shade of blue that you can’t name).
That being said, depending what language one thinks in influences the way we speak. For instance, English has a rich vocabulary for self-focused emotions, like anger, while Japanese has a large vocabulary for more interpersonal emotions like sympathy. Many bilinguals report that they have “different senses of self” depending on what language they think in. Indeed, when some bilingual students were given personality tests in two languages, in this case Chinese and English, they gave mostly positive self-statements and moods in English and more equally positive and negative statements in Chinese, as fit those general language cultural values.
Long story short, words do not determine our language, but they definitely affect it. Another example is the isolated Piraha tribespeople in Brazil. They have words for 1 and 2 in their language, but anything higher than 2 is just “many”. Therefore, if shown a row of 7 seeds from a researcher’s pile, they would have a difficult time getting the same number of seeds from their own pile. This applies to color. If shown two different shades of yellow, an English speaker might have difficulty distinguishing them later, as we don’t have common words for different shades of yellow. However, in Papua New Guinea, the Bermino people do, and would have a much easier time separating them.
Finally, thinking in pictures, and mentally rehearsing, has proven to be a very valuable tool. It may be picturing the steps to a dance, or the keys on a piano, but the mental rehearsal is just as valuable as actually doing it, and doesn’t require words at all. Albert Einstein, famous smart guy, once reported that he achieved some of his greatest insights through visual images which he later put into words. Thoughts do not necessarily rely on language, and language does not necessarily rely on thought. It is more that thought influences language, which they influences though, in a mutually beneficial loop.
