Language
Language is what sets human beings apart from the rest of the animal world. While it is true that animals communicate with each other through sounds and gestures, and can even communicate with humans, they do not embody the same brain mechanisms and cognitive processes that give humans the ability to create and speak language. Certain properties define language, and there are different levels that elaborate the complexity of language. The discipline of cognitive psychology examines the role language plays in the processes of human brain function.
Definition of Language
Merriam-Webster defines language as “…a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings” (2010, para. 1). The properties of language are: Communicative, arbitrary, structured, generative, and dynamic (Willmingham, 2004). The communicative property of language allows communication between individuals. Animals are communicative in that they are able to signal others to alert them to the presence of food or danger. The arbitrary property of language pertains to the relationship between the elements of language and their meaning (Willmingham, 2004). The meaning of a sound or symbol is arbitrary; there is no specific reason why a word means something, it just does. “Hey you” could be an accusation, a greeting, or an attempt to get someone’s attention. Animal communication is also arbitrary; the bark of a dog could mean “what is that noise?” or it could also mean “I am bored, come play with me.” Animal communication may also be dynamic because new sounds can be added but each utterance is singular, and has only one meaning (Willmingham, 2004). Language is dynamic because the rules of grammar are always changing with the addition of new words.
Where human language differs from animal communication is in the structure and generativity of language. “Language is structured, meaning that the pattern of symbols is not arbitrary” (Willmingham, 2004, p. 411). The placement of words within a sentence is what gives the sentence meaning. “Will I now do homework?” asks a question, whereas “I will now do homework” makes a statement. The generative property of language means that new words can be added or combined to form a limitless number of meanings (Willmingham, 2004). Just as language is dynamic, and some languages die out and new ones are created, humans generate new meanings to words in existing languages.
Levels of Language
The four levels of language are: phonemes, words, sentences, and texts. A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech made up of individual sounds that “…roughly correspond to letters of the alphabet…” (Willmingham, 2004, p. 413). Phonemes also help to distinguish words from one another (Britannica, 2010). About 46 phonemes exist in the English language, though the exact number varies according to experts. There are variations of phonemes that are so close in sound that they are hardly distinguishable; these variations are called allophones (Willmingham, 2004). The different phonemes form together in various combinations to create words, of which there are around 600,000 in the English language. Phonemes must be presented in a structured format so that they make sense. For example, many words begin with stop consonants (p,b,d) which cause air to be stopped in the vocal tract; and words beginning with two stop consonants are against the rules in English (Willmingham, 2004). Sentences are strings of words put together to form a grammatically understandable statement. Sentences are a complex part of language as far as how humans generally perceive grammar. Acceptable sentence structure is different from one language to the next, but cognitive psychologists agree there must be some form of a universal grammar in the structure of sentences. As words are streams of phonemes, and sentences are strings of words, so are texts strings of sentences combined to produce paragraphs. And just like the previous levels of language, texts rely on a structured set of rules to make sense. A person can string together many sentences, but if the context in each sentence do not relate to one another, the text is incomprehensible.
Processing in Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology focuses on “…language acquisition, language comprehension, language production, and psychology of reading” (Scholarpedia, 2010, para. 16). Cognitive psychologists study language, encoding and with access to the lexicon. The lexicon is the database of meanings of the sounds, gestures, and marks used in language. Willmingham defines lexicon as: “The mental dictionary, which has information stored about all the words a person knows. The lexicon stores the pronunciation, spelling, parts of speech of each word and has a pointer to another location in which the meaning is stored” (2004, p. 514). The brain hears the phoneme stream in speech, and compares the pronunciations with words in the lexicon. When the match is found for the phoneme stream, the cognitive system identifies the word, the spelling, and the meaning.
Other studies in the process of language include parsing and representation, which are sentence-level processes, concepts, gist, inference, and semantic assumptions, which are general processes (Scholarpedia, 2010). Scientists have also developed computational models for studying lexical systems, parsing systems, representation systems, and reading aloud. Advancements in technology and neuroscience have provided cognitive imaging as a means to study language processes, and the dysfunctions associated with language.
Conclusion
The use of different sounds and gestures to communicate thoughts to others, and have them understand the meanings, is the basic idea of language. Language is a complex cognitive process that is made up of different properties and levels, and that is unique to humans. While humans have the same abilities of communication as every other animal, the human brain evolved the ability to produce language, a separate form of communication. Language is communicative, arbitrary, structured, generative, and dynamic. Phonemes are the sounds that make up words, words combine to form sentences, and strings of sentences create texts. All four levels of language depend on a set of grammar rules and structure that give meaning to all the sounds and words. Pronunciation and spelling of words are stored in the lexicon, where the words are matched with meaning. Cognitive psychologists study the language processes with imaging techniques and computational models that aid in understanding the different systems associated with the lexicon, encoding, parsing, representation, and other general processes.
Encyclopedia Britannica (2010). Phoneme. Retrieved on June 7, 2010 from
http://www.reference.com/browse/phoneme
Merriam-Webster (2010). Language. Retrieved on June 4, 2010 from
http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/language
Scholarpedia (2010). Cognitive psychology. Retrieved on June 4, 2010 from
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Cognitive_psychology
Wilminham, D. T. (2004). Cognition: The thinking animal. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson/Allyn & Bacon
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