Language and communication Flashcards
Define communication
Relation between signal and response
(Language is a subtype)
What are adaptionist and informational views of communication?
Adaptionist = communication has adaptive benefit
Informational = biological signals carry information to reduce uncertainty
Define signal and response
Signal = something that has evolved to alter behaviour of others
Response = an act which has evolved to be affected by a signal
Define language
Sophisticated symbol-based communication system governed by hierarchical rules, requiring many sophisticated cognitive processes
What are the three rules of language?
1) Open and generative = always evolving new words, signals and meanings
(animals have closed system)
2) Referential and conveys specific meanings = speech, gestures and writing refer to things in the world, symbols can be highly specific or general
3) Hierarchical structure governed by syntactic rules
What are the five components of the universal structure of language?
Syntax - rules and principles that govern the structure of a language (grammar)
Semantics - the meaning of linguistic units like words, signs and gestures (relationship between symbol and what it represents)
Phonology - organisation of speech sounds - phonemes (smallest unit) meaningless sounds which combine to form meaningful units
Pragmatics - context gives language meaning (e.g. homonyms)
Morphology - structure of words and rules of how they are formed - morphemes are smallest meaningful units of language
What does ‘language is modality independent’ mean?
It is not dependent on a single modality (e.g. speech or visual cues)
What makes sign language a language?
It has the same linguistic features as other languages and develops at the same pace in childhood
What is homology
Estimates of shared traits or sequences
What are the three language evolution routes?
Vocal route
Gestural route - more components than primate vocalisations
Multi-modal route (both) - gesture changes perception of speech
What is communicative flexibility?
Learning to produce new sounds and vocally imitating
Animals are excellent vocal learners (whales, birds, bats) and vocal mimicry is excellent in male superb lyrebird (imitates 24 other species for reproductive advantage)
Primates - limited vocal learning, instead use gestures for more complex communication
What is referential communication
Vocalisations refer to objects - semantic communication (not emotion-bound)
e.g. Vervet monkey alarm calls - distinct for leopards, eagles, snakes - trigger different behavioural responses
Playback experiments - playing animal sounds and observing behavioural responses
What are call sequences?
Basic form of syntax - order changes meaning
e.g. Putty-nosed monkey:
Hack - eagles
Pyow - leopards
Pyow-hack - travel
e.g. Bonobos - different calls based on quality of food - one for high, one for low, and a combination for medium (confirmed by playback experiments)
What are audience effects and intentionality?
Intentionally adapt signals according to who they are talking to - not indiscriminate, sensitive to the audience
e.g. Chimpanzees more likely to produce food calls when friend present than non-friend
e.g. Chimpanzees inform each other about danger - more likely to produce alarm calls if they know one chimp cannot see snake
What are ape gestures?(General definition)
Discrete, mechanically ineffective body movement used intentionally to affect knowledge and change behaviour of receiver
Same properties that language has
Who were the apes taught to use spoken language?
Gua - chimpanzee (1930s)
- Enculturated - raised as if human
- Never produced intelligible words
Viki - chimpanzee (1950s)
- Enculturated and given reinforcement training
- After 7 years - only produced 4 words
(Apes not good vocal learners like humans, better at gestures)
Who were the apes taught to use ASL?
Washoe - chimpanzee
- Could produce 150-250 ASL signs and understood 100s
- Used signs with other chimpanzees
- Imitative - little creativity (only example was signing water and bird for swan)
- Dissimilar to children learning ASL
Nim Chimpsky - chimpanzee
- Produced around 350 ASL signs
- Not like language - mainly imitative, imperative and lacked syntax
Slower learner than typical developing child
- Me eat orange
Who was the ape taught to use a lexigram board?
Kanzi - the world’s cleverest bonobo
- Language trained using lexigram board with 348 symbols
- Understood at least 3000 spoken English words
Still limited production and mainly just for imperative demands
What ethical issues were associated with research on apes?
- Kanzi was massively overweight as his trainer fed him human unhealthy foods
- Wrong to raise wild animals as humans
- Not enough scientific justification - exploiting animals for human curiosity
What are limitations of early ape language studies?
- Apes have impressive comprehension, but limited production
- Unlike children - imperative, rewards based, slow acquisition
- Limited combinatorial skills (syntax)
- Enculturation is not natural - extensive human experience means low ecological validity
- Naturalistic studies instead tell us more about the development of language
What is the role and location of Broca’s area?
Role = language production (speech)
Location = inferior frontal gyrus, frontal lobe, left hemisphere
Is Broca’s area uniquely human?
No:
Cantalupo and Hopkins conducted MRI scans of ape brains which showed Brodmann’s area 44 in their left hemisphere (a homolog of Broca’s area)
What is the role and location of Wernicke’s area?
Role = language comprehension
Location = temporoparietal junction of posterior superior temporal lobe, left hemisphere
Evidence for ape Wernicke’s area and similarities between Wernicke’s and Broca’s?
- Spocter found chimpanzees had left hemisphere asymmetries in area TPT (temporo-parietal association cortex)
- Neuron density in TPT correlated with that in Brodmann’s 45, part of Broca’s area
What is the role of gestures in language evolution?(Brain)
Critical to language evolution - handedness shows strong brain asymmetries in areas supporting manual action (tool use and communication)
What research supports the multi-modal nature of language in apes?
Tagliatela scanned chimp brains while they had to ask for food
1/2 just gestured, 1/2 made noise and gestured
Multi-modal chimps had more activity in Broca’s area
What happened during the Primate brain evolution?
Huge brain size expansion as apes developed
Therefore, humans (and great apes) have large brains in comparison to body, and large cortical areas
Brain takes lots of energy
What is the social brain hypothesis? (Dunbar, 1998)
Social complexity drives primate cognition - brain size facilitates social relationships
What is the Cultural intelligence hypothesis? (Shaik et al. 2011)
Co-evolution of cognition and culture (highly cultural correlates to highly smart)
What is the Foraging brain hypothesis?
Diet not sociality better predicts brain size expansion in primates
Foraging fruit and extractive foraging - using tools and foraging requires high intelligence
What has happened to cerebral blood flow rate as genus Homo has evolved?
It has increased
What has happened to brain size between H. erectus (1.5-2 MYA) and H. sapiens (200,000 years ago)?
It has doubled
What was happening while human brain size and cerebral blood flow increased?
A period of dramatic climate change
What evidence points to the likely starting point of language?
First evidence of symbolic artefacts representing the world - date back only 100,000 years
Language is symbolic - associated with symbolic thought (referential)
What did Rizolatti (1992) find out about mirror neurons in rhesus macaques?
Monkey see, monkey do:
- Same brain region activated when monkey goes to eat and when monkey saw others eat - brain area representing observed action in someone else, finding the observed intention in the action
- Mirror neurons are implicated in language, imitation, action, learning, action understanding and empathy
What is the Gestural theory of language evolution? (Corballis, 2010) (MNs)
‘Hand to mouth’ - language evolved from gestures
- MNs are generally active during speech perception
- MNs contribute to complex control systems, but do so in low-level ways - play a role but are not dominant and do not act alone
What is brain laterality?
Asymmetries in brain form and function between the hemispheres
(Not one hemisphere being exclusive to a function, just being dominant)
What is the role of the left hemisphere in language?
Analysis of sequences:
- Comprehension and production of speech and language
- Logic, reasoning and analysis
What is the role of the right hemisphere in language?
Visual-spatial skills
- Processing space and shapes
- Organising a narrative (elements of what we want to say)
- Understanding speech rhythm and intonation (prosody)
- Recognising and expressing emotions in speech
- Music
What did split brain research show about hemispheric lateralisation of language?
Severed corpus callosum (epilepsy treatment)
Left hemisphere used only - could read and verbally communicate
Right hemisphere - could identify visuo-spatial information but not linguistically communicate (could draw with left hand then identify image using whole brain)
Only processing involving left hemisphere could be verbally described
What did Broca find out about Tan?
Found damage to left inferior frontal cortex during a post-mortem of the language-impaired patient (Brodmann 44 and 45)
What is Broca’s aphasia?
Typically due to strokes - can comprehend language, but language production is impaired - speech is non-fluent, laboured and hesitant, can lose ability to name persons or objects
What did Wernicke find?
Found patients with damage to left posterior temporal cortex struggled with language comprehension (Brodmann 22 and others)
What is Wernicke’s aphasia?
Problems in language comprehension - speech is often fluent but meaningless, patients unaware of their deficit, patients cannot repeat words or sentences and cannot recognise speech sounds
Usually not due to partial paralysis (stroke)
What is the Nativist perspective of language learning? (Chomsky)
- Humans are biologically programmed to acquire language
- Born with a ‘language acquisition device’
- Humans are born prepared for a Universal Grammar - an abstract set of rules common to all languages (all languages have similar properties)
- Infants are born with some ‘core knowledge’ about the world - babies can understand complex things at birth - Elizabeth Spelke
What support is there for the Nativist perspective of language learning (Chomsky)
- Children master language quickly and easily, despite little explicit training and difficulty of the task
- Children can invent new languages without any exposure (new sign languages)
- Newborns are sensitive to language - they prefer speech and discriminate the phonemes of all the world’s languages
- Most children pass through a predictable sequence of language learning stages
- Sensitive periods - children have a critical period in their life when language readily develops, after which acquisition is more difficult. Linguistic competence is predicted by age of acquisition, not length of exposure. Peak linguistic proficiency in youngest learners (Alissa Newport). Before age 6, language learning can be equivalent to that of native speakers, after which it starts to decline
What limitations are there for the Nativist perspective of language learning? (Chomsky)
- No ‘Universal Grammar’
- Neuroscience shows distributed nature of language and plasticity of language processing (changeable)
- Nativism often focusses heavily on word learning and syntax, neglecting socio-cognitive aspects
- Overlooks how gene expression is influenced by environment
- Alternative explanations - learn about speech or manual gestures in the womb
What is the Empiricist perspective of language learning? (Skinner, Bruner)
- Focuses on the child’s external world
- Language acquired through learning - imitation and reinforcement
- Language learning depends on domain-general cognitive abilities (general abilities that become specialised to language through learning)
- Children learn to construct the world through their own actions - not just passively learning language - want to make own sentences
What is the Interactionist perspective of language learning? (Vygotsky)
- Children are biologically prepared to acquire new language but maturation and the environment influence its development
- Gradually maturing nervous system shapes occurrence of universal ‘stages’ but still lots of plasticity in language acquisition
- Children are sensitive to clues to language but need social interaction to acquire it
What is the Developmental Systems approach to language learning? (Interactionist perspective)
Epigenetic interaction between genes and environment, cognitive systems shaped through learning and maturation across development
How does speech development differ between humans and primates?
- Infants are sensitive to speech - newborns can discriminate all the world’s speech sounds
- Compared to other species, human infants are extremely vocal
- Other primates are very quiet as infants
- Human infants communicate their core needs and stimulate social interactions
How does speech develop in the first 6 months of life?
Onset of speech-like non-cry sounds:
2 months - cooing (vowel sounds)
3-4 months - proto-phones (early speech sounds)
4-6 months - babbling begins
What is babbling? Is it culturally and species specific?
Babbling = meaningless speech sounds, extendable syllable repetition ‘ma-ma-ma’, ‘da-da-da’
- Babbling is culturally specific and they incorporate sounds from their native language
- Babbling is also evidenced in other species e.g. pygmy marmoset and greater sac-winged bat
- Co-operative breeding and social and vocal complexity link
How can language development be scaffolded?
Scaffolding = caregivers actively supporting language development
- Infant-directed speech - assists language learning during infancy, often combined with pointing - assists word learning
- Short simple sentences
- Exaggerated and slow - elongation of speech sounds
- High pitched and repetitive
- Quantity varies massively across cultures
- Exaggerated facial expressions - stimulate communication and learning
What happens to speech development between 18 months and 5 years?
- Vocab explosion - 18 months
- After learning 50 words, an infant’s vocabulary rapidly increases - about 50-100 words per month
- The more speech addressed to a toddler, the more rapidly they will learn new words
- By 5 years old, child knows 10,000 words
What happens in gesture development?
- Children gesture before they speak
- Children begin using symbolic gestures around 10-12 months
- Gesture development predicts spoken language development
- Age at which child starts pointing predicts vocabulary size
- Children can invent language from scratch - Nicaraguan sign language
Why is pointing considered a cognitive milestone?
‘A uniquely human form of communicating’
‘Arguably the most fundamental type of human gesture’
What is imperative and declarative pointing?
Imperative - pointing to request something (I want that!)
Declarative - pointing to share information and direct attention (Look at that!) (starts at around 12 months)
What did half of the KE family suffer from?
Severe speech and language disorder:
- Speech almost unintelligible, struggle to control lips and tongue
- Fail to produce words or use/understand grammar
- IQ within normal range
What did the pattern of inheritance of the disorder in the KE family show?
Suggested mutation of a single gene
- Autosomal dominant inheritance
What mutation did all affected KE family members have - which gene and which chromosome?
Shared mutation of FOXP2 gene on chromosome 7
- Simon Fisher and colleagues found this in 1998
What are the functions of the FOXP2 gene?
Regulator gene - controls other genes to provide entry points into neural pathways
- Encodes a protein (FOXP2) of 715 amino acids
- Necessary for development of speech and language (regulates other genes to do this)
Does the FOXP2 gene purely have a speech and language function?
No:
- Also present in many animals and birds
- Has functions for the development of lungs and gut, and communication in the form of birdsong
- Also, other genes responsible for speech an language as well
What does the FOXP2 gene suggest about the evolution of language?
- It’s an evolutionary ancient gene - suggests speech and language are built on ancient evolutionary systems
- Only 3 changes in amino acid structure between human and mouse, only 2 between humans and chimpanzees - tiny changes have massive effects for speech and language evolution
- Likely to have been a recent target of selection - rapid evolution
What are neural mechanisms for speech? (General)
- Speech processing is distributed throughout the brain - not as localised as other functions
- Small brain areas are associated with specific semantics of words
What are anatomical mechanisms for speech?
Speech and vocal tract anatomy:
- Evolution of the descended larynx - greater articulatory control higher up for more flexibility in speech reproduction system that is better than of other animals
- Other animals - larynx moves up and down - refutes this
What is vocal control like in primates and what does this say about evolution of speech?
- Primates have less control over vocal anatomy and are limited in ability to produce sounds
- But there is evidence of some vocal control in the ways they articulate their mouths and lips: suggests mechanisms for speech have deep evolutionary roots
- Orangutans - most flexible vocal producers among apes: Bonnie = whistling orangutan
What is the Motor theory of speech perception? (Lieberman)
Perception driven by innate knowledge of production:
- Speech perception is innate
- Speech perception is human-unique (ape language studies possibly refute this)
- Speech perception involves perception of vocal tract gestures (i.e. visual information influences perception)
What is the Auditory theory of speech perception? (Fant, Stevens, Blumstein)
Based primarily on acoustic properties of speech:
- Speech perception is dependent on auditory mechanisms
- Speech perception is not uniquely human
- Speech perception can be shaped through genetics and learning
Is speech perception innate? (Auditory and Motor theory)
Sucking study
Categorical speech perception in infants:
High amplitude sucking study to test discrimination of speech sounds - sucking patterns showed they were able to discriminate
Supports motor theory: perception driven by innate knowledge of production
Supports auditory theory: perception driven by innate auditory perception
Is speech perception human unique? (Auditory and Motor theory)
- Avoidance conditioning study with chinchillas:
- One speech sound paired with safety, one paired with shock - behaviour differed based on different speech sound
- Panzee - chimpanzee - could detect synthetic and degraded speech
- Experience is critical for speech perception
Supports auditory theory: general auditory abilities and experience
Is speech perception based on knowledge of vocal tract gestures? (Articulation) (Auditory and Motor theory)
- McGurk effect - interaction between hearing and vision
- Knowledge of visual mouth movements facilitates speech perception
- ‘Hearing lips and seeing voices (McGurk and MacDonald 1976)
Supports motor theory
Inconsistent with auditory theory but learning could play a role
Does evidence support the three elements of Motor theory?
1) Innate - yes (partly)
2) Human unique - no
3) Involves the perception of vocal tract gestures - yes
Does evidence support the three elements of Auditory theory?
1) Dependent on auditory mechanisms - yes (partly)
2) Not human unique - yes
3) Can be shaped through genetics and learning - yes
What is a gesture?
A movement of a body part, often a limb, to express a thought, meaning or emotion
How do gestures play a key role in communication and thought?
- Speakers in all cultures gesture when they talk
- Mechanically ineffective, communicatively effective
- Gestures are broader than sign language - they support language and can become language
- Even people born blind gesture when they talk (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow 1998)
- Gestures - how culture evolves
What is the integrated system of speech and gesture called?
Multi-modal system
What is an iconic gesture?
Representing something in the world - symbolic depiction:
Attributes of objects, actions or spatial relationships
What is pointing?
Referring someone’s attention to something - requires you to understand the point of the point - shared understanding of what a person is referring to
What is a metaphoric gesture?
Represents an abstract idea or concept
What are emblems?
Conventional gestures that have meaning to a particular community (e.g. thumbs up meaning good)
What are beats?
Maintain the rhythm of speech but do not contain semantic information, just accompany speech
What does the Cube rotation task show about gesture?
Gestures can help a speaker communicate complex information and process it:
- When solving the task, people produce more gestures to themselves when the task is harder (Chu & Kita 2011)
- When describing complex spatial information, people produce more co-speech gestures (Rauscher et al, 1996)
- Gestures improve score
What is the Information packaging hypothesis of gestures? (Kita, 2000)
Gestures help a speaker organise and break down complex visuo-spatial information into smaller packages that can then be verbalised as speech
What evidence supports the Information packaging hypothesis of gestures? (Kita, 2000)
Gestures can improve mathematical problem solving (Novack et al 2014)
Gestures can help with accessing words during speech:
When speakers are blocked from gesturing, speech becomes less fluent (Rauscher et al, 1996)
What is embodied cognition?
Notion that the body influences how we think and communicate
Certain thoughts have origins in the body - particularly our gestures
- Gestures assist speech comprehension, especially for describing complex tasks
- Gestures communicate information not provided in speech - listeners are sensitive to information expressed by gestures
Do apes gesture?
Usually referential scratching of a body part
Typically do not point unless they are enculturated
When does imperative and declarative gesturing develop?
Imperative = 6-12 months
Declarative = 12 months
What evidence supports infant understanding of declarative pointing?
Infants understand that pointing is an informative action - study with 12-14 month olds - declarative pointing
1) Experimenter hid toy in one of two opaque containers
2) Experimenter points to correct container
3) Infant chooses correct container
What are home-signs and how are they developed?
- Deaf children raised within speaking families without exposure to sign language develop ‘home signs’
- Linguistic - not gestural - key signs that resemble beginnings of sign language
- Structured gestures - always object then action
- Home-signs share linguistic structures across cultures
- Not coming from parents’ gestures
- Show linguistic properties but are not full languages
- Developed in isolation - creation of a language requires a community with repeated interactions across individuals and generations (e.g. NSL)
What is Nicaraguan sign language and how did it develop?
- 1980s - community of deaf children in Nicaragua - taught in spoken Spanish despite being deaf
- These children produced home-signs
- At school, started using own home-signs together - invented their own sign language
- Newly arriving cohorts learnt and reshaped the language further
In what ways do sign languages possess linguistic properties?
- They are full languages - there are at least 300 of them
- Sign language structure doesn’t depend on the surrounding spoken language e.g. British Sign Language and American Sign Language are very different
- Sign languages possess linguistic properties as spoken languages do:
- Syntactic structure (sign sentences)
- Morphological structure (the signs themselves)
- Phonological structure (meaningless sub-sign elements like phonemes)
What is the duality of patterning in the structure of language?
Two levels:
Meaningless parts (phonemes) combine to form meaningful units (morphemes and words), forming higher order compositions
What are higher order compositions? (Compositionality and recursion)
Compositionality = rules and meaningful combinations
Recursion = the nesting of rules and meaning (rules are nested in other rules)
What two types of recursion are there? (Examples)
Word recursion - My friend’s brother’s best-friend’s sister’s son’s hamster is sick!
Phrase recursion - Maria, who is my friend, has a bike, which she locked up at the back of the building, because it’s safer there, at least it normally is during term-time (clauses)
What is morphology?
The study of word structure
What is the difference between words and morphemes?
Word = smallest unit of meaning that can be uttered in isolation
Morpheme = smallest unit of meaning but do not necessarily stand alone
- Word may consist of one or more morphemes e.g. walk, walking, walked
What does cultural pressure cause language to be?
Efficient - despite diversity and evolution of languages, there are universal patterns
What is Zipf’s Law of Brevity?
Words that are more frequently used tend to be shorter in length
What evidence supports Zipf’s Law of Brevity?
- Shown for all languages tested so far
- English - most frequently used words are the, and, of, a
- Animal communication - at least 15 species conform to this law (shortest calls in the repertoire are used most frequently)
What is Menzearath’s Law of Compression?
The greater the whole, the smaller the size of the parts
What evidence supports Menzearath’s Law of Compression?
- The more syllables in a word, the smaller the size of the syllables
- More clauses in a sentence - smaller clauses
- Biological principle of communicative efficiency - species with more chromosomes have smaller chromosomes and genes with more exons have exons that are shorter in length
What is fast mapping? (Principle of word learning in children)
- An ability emerging in first year of life
- Rapid word learning with minimal exposure time
- Fast but needs repeated exposure to be maintained
- Make an instant link between word and its meaning, but needs to be repeated and is not very flexible/adaptable
What is slow mapping? (Principle of word learning in children)
- Gradual word learning through exposure to the context of use
- Requires repeated exposure of the word in different contexts to acquire its meaning
What is the Dax experiment of mutual exclusivity?
- The Dax Experiment - mapping novel words to novel objects
- Familiar and novel object - ‘Give me the Dax’ - toddler chooses novel object
What is Mutual exclusivity? (Principle to help children guide their word learning)
Children expect different words to have different meanings e.g. assume an object has only one label
What is Taxonomic assumption? (Principle to help children guide their word learning)
Assuming that a new word refers to objects in the same taxonomic category (family) rather than the same theme
- If they know what it is - go for theme, if they do not know what it is - go for taxonomic category
What is Whole object assumption? (Principle to help children guide their word learning)
Assumption that a word labels the entire object, not parts or characteristics of it
What is Taxonomic assumption? (Principle to help children guide their word learning)
Assuming that a new word refers to objects in the same taxonomic category (family) rather than the same theme
- If they know what it is, go for theme, if they don’t know what it is - go for taxonomic category
What is Shape bias? (Principle to help children guide their word learning)
Applying same name to same-shaped objects (over other features like colour etc)
What are over-regularisation errors in early syntax learning?
Extending regular grammatical patterns to irregular words
- Children correct their mistakes as they are exposed to irregular forms
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or Linguistic Relativity hypothesis?
Speakers of different languages conceptualise and view the world differently
- Benjamin Whorf (1941) - student of Sapir - studying Native American language
- Inuits have 100+ words for snow - do they conceptualise snow differently than English speakers?
Sees language as culturally specific but we find evidence of core properties of language (Goldin Meadow, 2005)
How do anthropological studies support Linguistic Relativity hypothesis?
- Hopi people (NA tribe of Arizona) have a different concept of time than in the West, due to differences in their terminology for time
- Samoa - no word for self
- Anthropologist Everett (2008), the Piraha people of Amazonas, Brazil do not have terms for large numbers - this may restrict their ability to recall large numbers (spatially and temporally) - can they accurately assess quantity? Had very different numerical cognition
- They may have other words they use for these things however
- What is a bias and what is a genuine difference?
- Western languages - egocentric in terms of place, however aboriginal language uses position in relation to the sun
How do colour tests support Linguistic Relativity hypothesis? (Brain damaged patient, infants)
- Robertson et al 1999 - brain-damaged patient who could not name colour labels, this impaired his ability to categorise colours
- However, categorical colour perception is shown in pre-linguistic infants and animals, thus cannot wholly depend on language
How do colour tests support Linguistic Relativity hypothesis? (English and Tarahumana)
Colour discrimination task in English and Tarahumara (Kay and Kempton 1984)
- English - two distinct words for blue and green
- Tarahumara - has one word to mean blue or green
- Subjects asked to discriminate between blue and green
- Results = English speakers exaggerated colour discrimination close to the word boundary whereas Tarahumara did not
- 2nd experiment - subjects judged whether blueness between two discs was larger than the greenness between another - no difference between English and Tarahumara - did not depend on word categories
What are Chomsky and Pinker’s criticisms of of Whorf and Linguistic Relativity hypothesis?
- Pinker (1994) claims Whorf misunderstood Hopi concept of time. Although Hopi language is tenseless they do still have other terms describing time, and conceptualise it similarly
- Chomsky and Pinker accuse the theory as lacking evidence
- Thoughts are translatable: languages use different words to mean the same thing
What is constructivism?
Human emotions are culturally constructed concepts that are socially learned and influenced by language, not innate
(Lisa Feldmann-Barrett)
What did Jackson et al (2019) find from mapping emotion words across 2474 languages?
- Semantic structure of emotion words varied a lot across cultures, and was predicted by geographic proximity of language families
- Evidence of universal structures in the networks of meaning of emotion words
- Universal principles and cultural variation
- The way that you talk about a feeling may be different from the way you actually experience a feeling
Is there linguistic relativity?
- Probably somewhat - language shapes some but not all aspects of thoughts and emotions
- Language influences but is not responsible for cognition and perception
What is human cooperative communication?
- We intentionally share and exchange information, we like to do so, we recognise when someone is intentionally communicating with us
- We monitor our receiver’s responses, and adapt our communication based upon our receiver’s knowledge state
- Speakers cooperate with their listener to ensure their messages are understood - can involve ToM
What is common ground during communication?
- Humans work hard to achieve Common Ground during communication
- Common ground = knowledge/beliefs that are shared between communicators
How is intention to inform communicated? (Ostensive cues)
- Communicators provide special cues to ensure our message is understood so our receiver knows we are intending to inform them
- Ostensive Cues are important in teaching - Csibra and Gergley’s Theory of Natural Pedagogy - gestures, eye gaze, facial expressions
What does Philosopher Paul Grice (1957) say about communicating intention to inform?
- Philosopher Paul Grice (1957) - communicating your intention to inform is part of cooperative communication known as Gricean or Ostensive communication - in order to have culture, we need explicit teaching mechanisms
- Requires signaller and receiver to understand each other’s intentions and beliefs
- Pointing to inform - form of cooperative communication
- If you don’t know someone is trying to inform, pointing does not mean anything
Do chimpanzees understand pointing?
No
Human points to one of two opaque containers with food in - chimps follow the point but choose randomly - they do not see it as being there to inform them. Do not understand cooperative communication.
Can dogs understand pointing and why?
Yes
- Domestication may have made dogs more sensitive to human communicative cues and to develop human-like communication
Includes evolution of more expressive eyebrows (Kaminski et al 2019)
- Dogs are more human orientated and tolerant to outgroups
- Wolves more skilled communicators but with other wolves
- But many aspects of communication and cognition shaped by social experience, not species differences
What were earlier views on bilingualism?
- 1920s - warnings of mental confusion and retardation
- Verbal skills are generally weaker than those for monolingual speakers
- E.g. lower verbal fluency suggests word retrieval is more effortful
What is the bilingual advantage?
- Bilinguals can show better executive control than monolinguals - bringing benefits to social and cognitive functioning
- Executive control: cognitive skills including inhibition, attention, switching, planning and working memory
What is the Joint Activation hypothesis? (Bialystock, 2017)
- Neural evidence of joint activation of both languages during bilingual linguistic processing, even when focussing on one language
- The joint activation of two languages places additional demands upon cognitive processing
- Bilinguals must select the language from competing options, inhibit the other and selectively attend
What are neural correlates of cognitive reorganisation in bilingualism?
- fMRI research shows bilingualism leads to grey matter changes
- Italian-English bilinguals had higher grey matter density in left inferior parietal regions than English monolinguals
What did Peal and Lambert (1962) say about bilingualism?
‘The bilinguals experience with two language systems seems to leave them with a mental flexibility, a superiority in concept formation, a more diversified set of mental abilities’
Assessing bilingualism is difficult - what factors does it depend on?
- How proficient the language user is can hugely vary
- Age and duration of exposure
- Children may be bilingual but not biliterate (majority language vs home heritage language)
- Problem of bias in bilingualism research - same labs do all of the research
- Gunnerud et al, 2020 - bilingual advantage was present, but may be less pronounced when other factors are controlled for
