Psychology
Language and Perception
Language and perception are interconnected in psychology, as language influences how individuals perceive and interpret the world around them. The words and language structures people use can shape their perceptions, influencing their thoughts and behaviors. Additionally, perception can also impact language, as individuals may use language to express their perceptions and experiences.
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8 Key excerpts on "Language and Perception"
eBook - PDF- Paul Boersma, Silke Hamann, Paul Boersma, Silke Hamann(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Phonology and perception: a cognitive scientist’s perspective James L. McClelland As a researcher who has long been interested in the perception, use, and acqui-sition of language, the title of this volume, Phonology in Perception , already piques my interest. Closer examination reveals an exciting development: a diverse group of researchers grounded deeply in the discipline of linguistics are grappling with details of the actual human processing of language, something that would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago. Every chapter speaks to issues of processing and learning about spoken language and refers to data from experimental psycholinguistics. These developments lend hope to the idea that the distinction between linguistic and psychological approaches to language will gradually fade away, replaced by an interdisciplinary investiga-tion of language, encompassing the structure, use and acquisition of language and even language change. The remarks I make below are offered in the spirit of hastening this integration. The authors of the various chapters raise a number of issues and questions, either explicitly or implicitly, that lie at the heart of debates within psychologi-cal as well as linguistic circles.
eBook - PDF- Matthew Traxler, Morton Ann Gernsbacher(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
For talker and listener, speech is a medium, a link in a commonplace causal chain by which pleasantries or philosophies are exchanged, cooperation is negotiated and compliance is compelled. But, does an essay about speech belong in a book about language? To a newcomer, it is self-evident that con-versational partners know what each other says simply by hearing the sounds of spoken words. From this perspective, the fundamentals of speech perception surely lie in psychoacoustics, an essential reduction of speech perception to sensory resolution and auditory categorization. Even so, the newcomer might already notice the difference in auditory quality in the speech of children and adults, or in face to face and in telephone speech, and suspect that the perception of spoken messages entails more than acute hear-ing. To the old hand familiar with cognitive psychology and the historic place of speech within it, the motivation to study speech perception might seem well and truly relieved now that affordable devices transcribe words from sound. On the contrary, this essay like its companions in this volume was produced by a typing hand and not by a dictating voice, despite the mathematical ingenuity of the engineers – far exceeding that of cogni-tive psychologists – who create speech-to-text devices. For the reader of any degree of experience, this part of the Handbook explains why the descriptive and theoretical puzzles provoked by speech perception have proven to be so enduring, psychologically and linguistically, and in doing so claims a role for speech in language. Our characterization of the perception of speech ranges across three of its facets. First, we discuss the historic aim of research on speech, which has been to understand how acoustic properties evoke an impression of linguistic form. This line of research is mature, and a sizeable literature beginning with classical sources presents a consistent expression of competing views and evidence.
- Bimal K. Matilal(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
22 PERCEPTION AND LANGUAGE with what we 'construct' or 'manipulate' out of this 'given'. In a narrower sense, I shall be concerned here with the relation of our perception and thought-construction to our speech or language. And this will take us eventually into a more general discussion on the status of meaning. Ontological issues will arise at every stage of our discussion and will be tackled in a general way. A word to justify the procedure I shall adopt here: My interest for the present is not philological, although I will be dealing with the philosophical theories in their historical perspective. Each philo-sopher I discuss constructed his own philosophical system and tried to explain the basic problems of philosophy with particular reference to that system. But we are concerned here not with the full descrip-tion of those individual systems, but rather with some particular problems which have occurred in their philosophical writings in various forms. Thus I shall outline only as much of these systems as will be necessary to understand the theory under discussion. Let us formulate some important questions in simple language: What is the status of what appears in our cognition? How do we cognize or conceive that there are external objects apart from what appears in our cognition? How is language related to reality? What relation does our language bear to our perceptual cognition? With the possible exception of what we may call our 'bare acquaintance' of the 'given', our cognitive acts always involve some kind of 'construction' or 'manipulation'. This manipulation or construction may have an objective basis, an objective referent to which it is directed, but it certainly eludes a one-to-one correspond-ence with any object in the real or objective world. We cannot really define the 'objective world' because to do so leads inevitably to circularity or mutual dependence. But we can give a prima facie sense to the expression 'objective world'.
eBook - ePub- Eva M. Fernández, Helen Smith Cairns(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
1 Beginning ConceptsThe Creativity of Human Language Language as Distinct from Speech, Thought, and Communication Some Characteristics of the Linguistic System The Distinction between Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar The Universality of Human Language Implications for the Acquisition of Language How Language Pairs Sound and Meaning Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance The Speech Signal and Linguistic Perception Origins of Contemporary Psycholinguistics How This Book Is Organized New Concepts Study QuestionsPsycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study in which the goals are to understand how people acquire language, how people use language to speak and understand one another, and how language is represented and processed in the brain. Psycholinguistics is primarily a sub-discipline of psychology and linguistics, but it is also related to developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, and speech science. The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to some of the central ideas, problems, and discoveries in contemporary psycholinguistics. In this chapter, we explore key concepts about language that serve to distinguish it from related aspects of human behavior and cognition, and we identify the basic characteristics of language as a system. We also provide a brief account of how psycholinguistics emerged as a field of inquiry.The Creativity of Human LanguageA good place to begin is by thinking about some of the unique features of human language. Language is a system that allows people immense creativity
eBook - PDF- Witold Doroszewski, Iain Taylor(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The definition of perception as an act or as a capability covers mean-ings differing from one another in that one concerns an actual activity—an act of perception—and the other a potential activity: the capacity to perceive is a feature of the subject consisting in the fact that it can per-ceive. This is a type of semantic difference perpetuated in language in opposition to formative categories: the participle lecqcy (flying) and the verbal (or one formed from the name of an activity which is formally a noun lot 'flight') adjective lotny 'volatile, light, swift, mobile'. Between the meaning of the noun perception and the corresponding meanings of the verb perceive there is no precise symmetry, insofar as we do not recognize as identical in content the definitions 'intuitive recognition' and 'understand'. The characteristic feature of definitions of philosophic terms usually consists in the fact that they are the products of subjective ways of approaching the semantic content of the term under analysis; the range of applicability must be demarcated by the ways in which a given philosopher uses a given word, and in this way the circle of subjective consciousness will never be broken. The problem lies entirely in the field of semantics, but it is not always possible to say of philosophical semantics that it is a pragmatic science and that its pursuit will lead to definite actions. The documentation of the uses of the verb czuc 'feel' in Polish and of the corresponding forms in other languages may provide more material for reflection on the relation of perceptions to concepts than an introspective, philosophical explana-tion of these terms. Philosophical semantics is not an experimental science, based on research into thought processes as historical-social processes, while linguistic semantics is such a science, or at least ought to be.
eBook - ePubInterpersonal Communication
Competence and Contexts
- Shelley D. Lane(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
“Seeing” is not the same as “perceiving.” A man who regained his sight after thirty years of blindness makes clear the difference between sight and perception: “When I could see again, objects literally hurled themselves at me. One of the things a normal person knows from long habit is what not to look at. Things that don’t matter, or that confuse, are simply shut out of their seeing minds. I had forgotten this, and tried to see everything at once; consequently I saw nothing.” 1 How can we characterize perception? Why It's Important to Study Perception and Communication The study of perception as it relates to communication deserves merit because the relationship between the two is reciprocal and because we often communicate on the basis of different perceptions. Understanding how perception affects communication can motivate us to communicate competently. Reciprocal Relationship What would you think if a significant other suggested that you “lose a few pounds”? Would you perceive a message designed to help you, or would you perceive a message designed to criticize you? How would you respond to this message? Whether you say, “I know you’re just trying to help” or “You should talk; you don’t look so hot yourself!”will depend on how you perceive the message. This is an illustration of how communication influences perception and perception influences communication. Our perception of reality is created, in part, through communication. For example, suppose a trusted friend tells you about a professor who assigns too much work and treats students unfairly. You may avoid enrolling in this professor’s classes if you believe your friend’s characterization. Although you never personally interact with the professor, you perceive that he or she is unreasonable, and this idea becomes a part of your reality. In fact, you communicate this perception when someone asks what you know about this professor
eBook - ePub- Peter J. Hills, Michael Pake(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- For Dummies(Publisher)
pre-operational stage). At this level children who’re able to verbalise relationships between two things (such as ‘bigger than’) can solve problems that involve such relationships. In contrast, children who can’t verbalise the relationship can’t solve the problem. Thus, the necessary cognitive ability requires the language.General cognitive development and language ability are developing at the same time, however, and so separating the two is difficult. Saying this, Piaget believed that language develops because of cognitive development, suggesting a cyclical relationship between language and cognition.One useful method for assessing how language affects thought is to test people who don’t have language. New-born infants haven’t developed language yet and so are ideal participants.Research on children has tended to explore colour perception and categorical perception (refer to the two preceding sections). Many studies show that children find it harder to discriminate between colours for which they don’t have verbal labels. In addition, categorical perception boundaries aren’t so readily identifiable in children.Although some developmental changes in the perception of colour may exist, the focal colours (the 11 basic colour terms of English, including red and blue; see Chapter 5 ) do appear to be learnt earlier without words.Covering other cognitive abilities
Here we provide more evidence of how language affects thought.The way people label objects affects the accuracy with which they’re recognised. In one experiment, participants were presented with a series of fairly ambiguous objects that had been labelled or not. Labelling aided memory for the ambiguous objects, suggesting that language helps memory.When presented with a series of shapes to remember, if participants verbally label based on distinctive labels (for example, crescent), they’re more likely to remember them than if participants verbally label based on common shared labels (for example, square). This is consistent with the weak form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, because the language used has affected memory (refer to the earlier section ‘Connecting language to thought
eBook - ePub- Nick Lund(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
2 The relationship between language and thought DOI: 10.4324/9780203695012-2 Introduction The linguistic relativity hypothesis Thought determines language The interdependence of language and thought Summary Review exerciseIntroduction
One feature that sets human communities apart from animal communities is the use of language. Language is a vital part of every human culture and is a powerful social tool that we master at an early age. A second feature of humans is our ability to solve complex and/or abstract problems. Although some animals are capable of solving simple problems none are capable of solving the problems involved in something like space exploration or even in the designing of a psychology experiment. For centuries philosophers have questioned whether these two abilities are related and, if so, what the nature of the relationship between language and thought is. At the beginning of the last century psychologists joined this debate and it is a topic that is currently generating a lot of research.Another factor in the study of language and thought is the role of culture. When we study a language from another country we realise that it is not just the words and grammar that are different but the customs and traditions as well. Even the ideas of that culture and the way of dealing with life can be different. If people speaking different languages have different customs and ideas it raises the following question: do different languages lead to different ways of thinking?Although there is some debate about the extent of language in thinking (see, for example, Carruthers, 1996
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