Language, thought and communication Flashcards
What is communication?
Passing information from one person (or animal) to another.
What is language?
A system of communication used by a specific group of people.
What has research found about animals?
Research has found that animals use communication.
What has the research on communication revealed about language in animals?
Although research has found that animals use communication, they do not use language like humans do.
What are animals unable to do?
They are unable to use complex thought.
What is thought?
The mental activity of thinking, which involves reasoning and considering, and that produces ideas and opinions.
What conclusion has been drawn from the fact that animals use communication but do not use language?
This may mean that these two skills are somehow connected.
What are the two different ideas regarding the relationship between language and thought that we need to know?
- Piaget’s theory.
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
How did Piaget help us in understanding how humans develop cognitively?
He believed that cognitive development leads to the growth of language. This means that we can only use language at a level that matches our cognitive development.
What are the four stages, according to Piaget’s theory, that children develop language in?
- Sensorimotor.
- Preoperational.
- Concrete operational.
- Formal operational.
What are features of the sensorimotor stage?
In the sensorimotor stage, babies are discovering what their bodies can do, and this includes the ability to make sounds. Babies then learn to copy the sounds they hear others making.
What are features of the preoperational stage?
Children are egocentric and focused on themselves. They use language to voice their internal thoughts, rather than to communicate with other people.
What are features of the concrete operational stage?
The ability to use language has developed a lot but it is only used to talk about actual, concrete things.
What are features of the formal operational stage?
Language can be used to talk about abstract, theoretical ideas.
What did Piaget believe about the concept of these stages?
Piaget believed that while all children move through these stages, some people do not get to the formal operational stage.
What is an advantage of Piaget’s theory?
Piaget did many of his observations on his own. When the participants in his research were his own children, they were unlikely to realise that they were being observed. This means that their behaviour was probably natural.
What are disadvantages of Piaget’s theory?
- His research would be more reliable if he had carried out his observations with another researcher, so that they could compare the results afterwards to check if they were similar and had inter-observer reliability.
- When Piaget’s participants were his own children, hey may have allowed his personal biases to affect his judgement. This lack of objectivity would affect the validity of his findings.
- Because Piaget’s sample was very small, and much of his research was based on observing his own children, his findings cannot be generalised because they cannot be said to apply to all children.
What is other research to support other theories about language and thought?
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
What was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis developed on?
It was developed from the ideas of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.
What does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis state?
The hypothesis states that our thoughts and behaviours are affected and formed by the language that we speak.
Due to this hypothesis, what is said about language and culture?
This means that cultures with different languages and vocabulary will also have different ways of thinking and understanding things.
What is culture?
A group of people who share similar customs, beliefs, and behaviour.
What will language therefore lead us to do?
- Lead us to focus on certain ways of seeing and understanding things.
- Make some ways of thinking easier and more likely than others.
- Lead to memory bias, where the ability to recall or retrieve certain information is increased or decreased.
How did Sapir and Whorf provide evidence for their ideas?
By studying indigenous (native) languages. Whorf compared Native American languages with English. He used the Hopi’s use of different types of words for time and the Eskimo’s large number of words for snow to support his claim.
What does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggest about language?
It suggests that the language we speak may lead us to focus on certain ways of seeing and understanding things.
What is observed even within the same language?
Even within the same language, there are cultural and generational differences in the way words tare understood.
What is an example of the differences in the way that words are understood?
Phones and cameras are very different now compares with those in previous generations, and this will affect how people will think of them.
What does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggest about thinking?
It also suggests that some ways of thinking are easier and more common than others.
What is an example of finding a certain way of thinking easier and more common than others?
You are probably more familiar with recent meanings for ‘orange’ and ‘cloud’ than those from an older generation. this makes it more likely that descriptions of these words will have been affected by the connections that now link the meanings of the words.
What are disadvantages of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
- Eskimos have about the same number of words for snow as English speakers do and Whorf had never even met anyone from the Hopi tribe.
- Books and instruction manuals can be translated into a completely different language without developing a whole new meaning for the reader.
- People who grew up without a language, or who lose the ability to speak (such as stroke victims) are still able to think.
What is also some support for the Sapir-Whorf theory?
- Variation in recognition of colours.
- Variation in recall of events.
What does the Sapir-Whorf theory hypothesis suggest about the variation in recognition of others?
It suggests that the language we speak can lead us to focus on certain ways of seeing things and make some ways of thinking more likely than others.
What is an example of how our language affects us (North Americans)?
Many languages do not have separate words for blue and green. The Tarahumara, Native Americans from north-western Mexico, have one word for both. Researchers found that English speakers perceived bigger differences between shades of blues and greens than Tarahumara speakers did.
What is an example of how our language affects us (Russians)?
The Russian language has different words for lighter blues and darker blues. Researchers found that Russian speakers were quicker than English speakers to recognise the difference between two shades of blue when one was perceived as lighter and one was perceived as darker.
What does the Sapir-Whorf theory hypothesis suggest about the variation in the recall of events?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that our ability to recall certain information is affected by the language we speak.
What is an example of how our recall of events vary?
Researchers studied how English speakers and Spanish speakers described intended and accidental actions. Participants were asked about things like seeing someone accidentally bump into and knock a vase to the floor.
What did participants say when the action was intended?
All the participants identified the person doing it.
What did the participants say when the action was accidental?
The English speakers identified the person more often than the Spanish speakers did.
Therefore, what was found in terms of accidental and intended actions along with their identification?
When the participants’ recall of the intended actions was tested, the English speakers and Spanish speakers both recalled the people involved. However, the English speakers had much better recall of who was involved in the accidental actions.
How are animal and human communication different?
Although animals do not use language to communicate as humans do, they do use vocalisation (communication with sound) in a variety of forms, from the singing of birds and chirping of insects to the growling of lions and other big cats.
How are animal and human communication similar?
Many of the messages being conveyed by these vocalisations are similar to those humans might communicate - expressing interest in a mate, showing alarm, or letting others know that they need to back off. Research has also found many similarities between human non-verbal communication and that used by some animals, especially primates. Similarities include the use of facial expressions to show emotion, using body posture to show dominance and submission, and the use of touch for bonding and reassurance.
What is posture?
The positioning of the body, often regarded as a non-verbal communication signal.
What is touch?
A form of non-verbal communication in which information is conveyed by physical contact between people.
What is a feature of animal communication in relation to human communication?
Even though research has found animal communication to be more complex and elaborate than it might first appear, animals use communication for far fewer purposes than humans.
What are the main reasons that animals communicate with one another?
- Survival.
- Reproduction.
- Territory.
- Food.
What are we referring to when we say survival?
Animal use of communication is linked in a variety of ways to survival. Animals call to their young who have wondered off, they use alarm calls threat signals (such as bared teeth, making fur stand up to look bigger, and growling) to warn others to back off.
What are we referring to when we say reproduction?
Displays involving colour are used by a number of species (such as peacocks) to attract a mate and ensure reproduction, and ultimately survival. Other animals use colour to frighten or warn off predators.
What are we referring to when we say food?
Researchers studying rhesus monkeys found that when they made unbroken eye contact with them, the monkeys would start to behave aggressively. They concluded that the monkeys use eye contact to show their dominance and that they became aggressive because they saw the researchers’ behaviour as threatening.
What is territory?
An area defended by an animal or group of animals against others.
What are we referring to when we say territory?
Karl von Frisch discovered that bees tell each other where to find food using dance-like movements. Ants communicate with each other using different chemical smells called pheromones. Pheromones can be used for a variety of messages, including the location of food.
What is the aim of Von Frisch’s bee study?
To investigate how bees communicate the location of a food source to each other.
What is the study design of Von Frisch’s bee study?
A field experiment carried out in the real-life environment of the participants (the bees in this case). The researcher still manipulates the independent variable, but there is limited control of extraneous variables.
What is the method of Von Frisch’s bee study?
Food sources for a hive of bees were created by placing glass containers of sugar-water at different locations.
A hive with glass sides was used so that the bee’s behaviour could be easily observed.
When the bees visited the containers of sugar-water to feed, they were marked with tiny spots of different coloured paints. This made the bees easy to identify when they returned to the hive.
The researcher observed and recorded the movements that the bees made when they returned to the hive after collecting the food.
What are the results of Von Frisch’s bee study?
The bees were observed making different movements that seemed to depend on how far away the food source was from the hive.
When the food source was no further than 100 metres from the hive, the bees did a round dance by turning rapidly in circles to the right and then the left.
When the sugar-water was moved further away, the bees performed a tail-wagging or waggle dance. The bees moved forward in a straight line, wagging their abdomens from side to side, before turning in a circle towards the left. This was followed by the bees moving straight forward again before turning in a circle towards the right. This pattern was then repeated a number of times.
What was the conclusion of Von Frisch’s bee study?
Von Frisch concluded that bees use a variety of different movements to communicate to each other the distance and the direction of food sources.
What are some advantages of Von Frisch’s bee study?
- Von Frisch’s research was some of the earliest into animal communication and encouraged others to carry out research in this area of study.
- Other researchers have repeated this study and found the same results. This consistency allows us to be more certain that the results are trustworthy and that the original study was reliable.
What are some disadvantages of Von Frisch’s bee study?
- Gathering sugar-water from glass containers is not natural, everyday behaviour for bees. Therefore, it can be argued that the study lacks ecological validity. However, when researchers put the sugar solution on flowers instead, the bees acted in the same way.
- Bees do not generally live in glass hives and this may also have affected their natural behaviour. However, research that has used wooden hives and other methods (such as video cameras) to observe the bees, has had the same results.
- Other researchers have suggested that in order for bees to find food, they also use cognitive maps based on their memory of landmarks.
How have the ideas of human and animal communication having different properties come about?
A linguist looking at the differences between animal communication and human languages developed the idea of language having certain properties.
What are these properties known as?
These properties are known as the design features of lanuage.
What are design features of a language?
Productivity and displacement are two design features of language.
What is observed to have been said about design features?
All communication has some design features, but only human language is believed to have all of them.
What is productivity?
Productivity is the ability to create an unlimited number of different messages.
What does productivity allow in terms of language?
It allows language to be used creatively and is not found in animal communication.
What did Von Frisch find out about productivity?
Although Von Frisch found that bees could vary the messages conveyed by their dancing, there are limits to what they can say.
How do we know that there are limits in bee communication in terms of their productivity?
They do not appear to have movements that mean up or down.
What is displacement?
Displacement is the ability to communicate about things that are not present or events that will happen in the future. It allows language to be used for planning ahead and discussing future events.
Is displacement seen in animals?
Although displacement is rarely seen in animal communication, Von Frisch’s research provides one example of when it is. Bees demonstrate displacement by communicating about a food source that is some distance from the hive where they are dancing.
Are planning behaviours communicated ideas?
No.
How do we know that planning behaviours are likely not communicated ideas?
Planning behaviours in animals, such as squirrels storing nuts for winter, are likely to be instinctive or innate, rather than communicated ideas
Who is Koko?
Koko is a female gorilla who has been taught sign language. She is believed to understand around one thousand signs and two thousand spoken words.
