For centuries, we tried to figure out
what this thing called "language" does - and
how it relates to human thought.
Plato tried to analyze our language to
arrive at essential concepts that would
refer to the imminent reality of pure
forms, while many medieval thinkers
supposed that the grammar of language
opens the human intellect to some
metaphysical truth.
Realizing that ordinary language does
not adequately reflect human thought,
Leibniz wanted to construct a
systematically rigid "calculus of thought"
(as he called the project) and many
thinkers like Gottlob Frege and Bertrand
Russell followed this idea with the
construction of the so-called "ideal
language" - they tried to analyze the
underlying logical structure of our
thought through language. However, the
philosophies of the late Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Paul Grice showed that the
relation between thought and language is
deeply hidden in the way that we use
language, since it's predominantly
determined with situational context and
conventions surrounding language. This is
where psycholinguistics - or simply the
"psychology of language" - emerged as an
independent study of the interrelation
between linguistic factors and
psychological aspects. It concerns itself
with psychological and neurobiological
factors that enable humans to acquire,
use, comprehend and produce language, so
it's about the mechanisms, in which
languages are processed and represented
in the mind and brain. One of the
questions that psycholinguists try to
answer, is how we learn language.
Historically, perhaps the most well known
account of the acquisition of language
can be found in the writings of Saint
Augustine.
"When grown-ups named some object and at
the same time turned towards it, I
perceived this and I grasped that the thing
was signified by the sound they uttered,
since they managed to point it out.
In this way, little by little, I learned to
understand what things the words which I
heard uttered in the respective places
in various sentences, signified. And once
I got my tongue around these signs, I
used them to express my wishes. Although
fairly intuitive, this idea was seriously
challenged by a thought experiment,
expressed in a popular anecdote about
the first European colonizers in
Australia pointing and an animal that
they have never seen before and the
Australian natives replying with
"kangaroo", which supposedly means I don't
know but the colonizers took it to be
the name of the animal. This anecdote,
however, was completely made up to prove a
point, but the original thought
experiment was presented by Willard Van
Orman Quine, who wants us to imagine a
linguist discover a new tribe with a
previously unheard-of language. He tries
to carefully observe the tribesmen use
the language, and as a rabbit jumps from
the bushes, they cry out "gavagai!" It's
tempting to guess that the word simply
refers to the rabbit, but as the linguist
soon finds out, it could mean anything:
Animal, furr, dinner, mine, cute, small, look,
forest-God.
No matter how long the linguist observes
the tribesmen use their language, every
translation that he will construct will
simply be an hypothesis, open to revision.
This situation is analogous to a child
trying to learn the language of his
parents - the process will be long and
messy and often unreliable. This idea
paved the way to a serious skeptical
attack on the assumption that we can
ever know that the meanings we ascribe
to the words we use don't radically
defer from the meanings other people
ascribe to them. This sort of sceptical
challenge is often referred to as Wittgenstein's paradox. This is a serious
challenge to the view that language must
be learned, which was especially popular
before 1960 and was represented by Jean
Piaget, the empiricist Rudolf Carnap and
the behaviorism school, which put forth
the view that language is a behavior
shaped by conditioned response. After
1960 an important breaking point emerged
when Noam Chomsky, highly critical of
behaviorist and Mentalist theories of
language, posited that humans possess a
special innate ability for language and
that complex syntactic features, such as
recursion, are hardwired in the brain.
In this view it's highly probable that we
can learn the language of our parents
properly and without any serious
discrepancy in the meanings that we
associate to the words we use. Since our
so-called "language instincts" brings our
attention to the same features of the
world that our parents found relevant
enough to name them. It's worth mentioning
that the field of linguistics and
psycholinguistics nowadays has been
defined by reactions to Chomsky -
Pro and Contra. It's an interesting and
exciting field of inquiry, promising to
unveil a great mystery: how words map our
mental associations to the world. And how
we can communicate those ideas to people
around us. It's an important question,
because in order to investigate the
world, we have to communicate.
Both science and humanities grow to be
collaborative efforts. This was a very
short introduction to psycholinguistics
by Bebeflapula. I kindly invite you to
check out my videos on the philosophy of
language, where I present the historical
discussion around those same topics. Thank you for your attention, I really
hope this was informative.
