BCS 111 Lecture 8.1

What’s the role of language in our cognition?

• Effective communication

• Survival: signaling food resource and danger

• Socialization

• Passing down the knowledge

• Verbalizing emotions and thoughts

Language and cognitive functions

• Labeling of objects – recognition

• Categorization

• Long-term memory

• Working memory – phonological loop

• …etc.

Chomsky

• Nativism

• Universal Grammar

Skinner

• Behaviorism

• Reinforcement and conditioning

• Stimulus-response

• Behavioral studies of verbal behavior

More about Koko the Gorilla (1971-2018)

• Use of sign language (~1000 signs)

• Claimed to be able to understand a large number of spoken words

Another famous ape: Kanzi

• Use of lexigrams (symbol-meaning pairings)

• Learned it by observation

Clever Hans effect

Watch out for experimenter’s cues!

• When experimenter cues affects animal communication

At least two major features that differentiate human language from animal communication

• Productivity of utterances – unlimited in human

• Displacement: ability to talk about space and time freely

  • Human language: future, past, here, there

  • Animal: very limited

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

-

Linguistic determinism

The form of our language determines our cognition: how we think, remember and perceive

Linguistic relativism

Different languages generate different cognitive structures (e.g. categorization, description of objects, etc.)

Strong version (linguistic determinism)

Language determines thought and every aspect of our cognition.

Weaker version (linguistic relativism)

Language affects only perception/categorization.

Weakest version (linguistic
relativism)

The influence of language is “task- dependent” (tasks requiring language)

Language and thought

One interesting experiment:
1. Show the original pic to the participant
2. Each person gets a different label for the pic
3. After some time, ask them to draw the pic again
4. The drawing heavily influenced by the verbal descripton!!

Recap: Structural equivalence: Kosslyn et al.(1983)

Complex description → slower

• Effect of language on structural complexity

• Supports linguistic relativism!

Assess intelligence without language?

Our IQ tests rely heavily on language!!

• Hard to assess our IQ w/o language!

Testing Sapir-Whorf : Pirahã language

• Three words for counting: One, two, many

• Sense of quantity influenced by their language

(cont)

• Subjects respond by showing a matching number of balloons

• Sense of quantity influenced by their language: evidence for relativism: the larger the quantify, the larger the error rate

Another evidence for relativism

How language influences categorization: a color may be categorized differently by speakers of different languages!