Language, Thought and Communication

11 Key excerpts on "Language, Thought and Communication"

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  Psychology Around Us

  • Nancy Ogden, Michael Boyes, Evelyn Field, Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Language evolved as a means for connecting socially and com- municating, and creativity is an inherent part of the adaptive power of language. Language and thought are characteristics that distinguish humans from other creatures. Language enables us to communicate in a precise and often creative way. We also use language to tell stories or jokes. Language has allowed us, as a species, to learn from past generations, originally by oral storytelling and then by written language. Language is a critical component of human behaviour because it greatly facilitates progressive social interactions. Consider the dif- ficulty involved in organizing a large group of people to build a city. Such a feat would be nearly impossible without the use of language. Although language is communicative, sometimes we use language only in our own heads. We often think using words, but many of our thoughts are not shared. Some people write exten- sively but only for themselves, never intending or wanting others to read their written words. Although the processes of language and thought overlap, a clear difference exists between them. In general, psychologists study these processes separately. Human thought is highly complex, varies from individual to individual, and takes on many different forms. The study of thought is a major component of cognitive psychology. As we saw in Chapter 1, the word cognition refers to a variety of mental processes that con- tribute to thinking and knowing. Cognition is involved in learning and memory, as well as in thinking. In this chapter, we will discuss a number of different types of thinking, which can involve accumulating knowledge, solving problems, making decisions, and even thinking about thinking. cognition mental processes of thinking and knowing.

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  Psychology

  • Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould, Adrian Furnham(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  We often think using words, and we do not always share our thoughts with others. Similarly, some people write extensively for their own pleas- ure, never intending or wanting others to read their writ- ten words. Although the processes of language and thought overlap, a clear difference exists between them. In general, psychologists study these processes separately. Human thought is highly complex, varies from individual to individual and takes on many different forms. While much thought involves the use of words, some does not, instead relying on visual imagery or sounds. Consider, for example, what happens when a particular tune is stuck in one ’s head. Even if we cannot remember the lyrics, we can often imagine the music. The study of thought is a major component of cognitive psychology. As we saw in Chapter 1, the word cognition refers to a variety of mental processes that contribute to thinking and know- ing. Cognition is involved in learning and memory, as well as thinking. In this chapter, we will discuss a number of different types of think- ing that can involve accumulating knowledge, solving prob- lems, making decisions and even thinking about thinking. Language LEARNING OBJECTIVE 1 Define language, describe how we learn languages, describe parts of the brain that are involved in language and discuss dif- ferences and problems that can affect people’s language skills. Language is a set of symbols used to com- municate. These symbols can be spoken, signed or written. We use symbols, mainly words, to convey our thoughts and desires to others who share an understanding of the symbols. For instance, we communi- cate with you in this book using the symbols in the English written language. Language can be divided into two main com- ponents: language production and language comprehension. Language production occurs when we generate communicative vocalizations or gestures: that is, when we use the symbols in our shared language to communicate thoughts and ideas.

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  Language and Thought

  • Nick Lund(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The relationship between language and thought Introduction The linguistic relativity hypothesis Thought determines language The interdependence of language and thought Summary Review exercise One feature that sets human communities apart from animal commu-nities 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 9 Introduction 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), as adults much of our thinking seems to involve words and language. Furthermore, we cannot use language without thinking about what we want to say. Thus, in adults at least, language and thought seem closely entwined. There are four main views about the nature of this relationship between language and thought: 1. The language we speak determines or influences the way we think.

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  Experimental Psycholinguistics (PLE: Psycholinguistics)

  An Introduction

  • Sam Glucksberg, Joseph H. Danks(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  7 Language, Thought, and Communication

  Language and thought interact in various ways. What is the relation between language and thought? This question has engaged philosophers, linguists, and psychologists for centuries. There is, of course, no single answer to the question, just as there are no single definitions of the concepts LANGUAGE and THOUGHT . Depending on our conceptions of language and thinking, we can say that language determines thought, that thought determines language, and that thought and language are independent of one another. Any one or all of the statements may be true. In what senses are they true, and how may thought and language interact with one another?

  Language and Thought

  Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of the noted anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, was a fire insurance investigator as well as a linguist. He was struck by the way that labels could influence people’s behavior. Which is more dangerous, a gasoline drum filled with gasoline or an empty one? A number of spectacular fires convinced Whorf that people thought of empty drums as perfectly safe. They acted as though the word empty really meant empty. An “empty1 ’ gasoline drum is one which is empty in only one sense: it once held gasoline but now does not. It still contains invisible but highly volatile fumes. “Empty” drums are in fact more likely to explode than filled ones.

  From observations like this and from his work with American Indian languages, Whorf became convinced that the language we use influences the way we think and act. He extended this notion to include the syntax of the language itself as a major determiner of our conceptual world. Different languages “talk about” the world in different ways, and so impose different conceptions of reality upon different speakers. This has become known as the LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS

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  The Extended Mind

  The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture

  • Robert K. Logan(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  Communication facilitates thinking and thinking facilitates communication. Dialogue and questions pro-voke new thoughts, new ideas, and new forms of language which require new vocabularies, and those new vocabularies then make new thoughts and insights possible. It is a never-ending cycle; the communicative and the cognitive interactions are an example of an autocatalytic system. Vygotsky sees a similar to-ing and fro-ing between thought and lan-guage when he writes: The relation of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a continual back and forth from thought to word and word to thought. In that process the relation of thought to word undergoes changes which themselves may be regarded as development in the functional sense. Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them … (1962, 125) The flow of thought is not accompanied by a simultaneous unfolding of speech. The two processes are not identical, and there is no rigid corre-spondence between the units of speech and thought … (ibid., 149) Only a historical theory of inner speech can deal with this immense and complex problem. The relation between thought and word is a living pro-cess; thought is born through words. A word devoid of thought is a dead thing; and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow. The connec-tion between them, however, is not a performed and constant one. It emerges in the course of development, and itself evolves. (ibid., 153) The Primary Function of Language 105 Another approach to the relationship of language as communication and language as a representation of abstract thought is to consider Gould and Lewontin’s (1979) notions of a spandrel and an exaptation: Under the spandrel principle, you can have a structure that is fit, that works well, that is apt, but was not built by natural selection for its current utility. It may not have been built by natural selection at all.

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  Thinking Critically

  • John Chaffee(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  296 Chapter 6 Language and Thought SUMMARY • Language is a system of symbols for thinking and communicating. • Words and sentences can communicate different meanings: semantic , percep-tual , syntactic , and pragmatic . • Using language effectively involves using the full range of word sense and sen-tence meaning to communicate our thoughts in a rich, evocative way. • Language and thought work together as partners: Clear and precise language leads to clear and precise thinking, and vice versa. Becoming an articulate lan-guage user and thinker involves avoiding vagueness and ambiguity. • Effective language use involves using the language style that is appropriate to the context, including Standard American English, slang, and jargon. • Language is a powerful tool for influencing the thinking and behavior of others. Emotive language and euphemisms are two examples of effective but manipula-tive language uses. • New media have come to play such important roles in our lives that they make using language clearly and effectively even more paramount. CHAPTER 6 Reviewing and Viewing 3. Some critics contend that Twitter has a corrosive effect on interpersonal relationships, with electronic communications replacing personal interactions between people. Do you think that this is a serious concern? Why or why not? 4. In the article “The Surprising Truth About How Twitter Has Changed Your Brain,” Caitlyn Dewey reports that the most current research does not support the idea that Twitter use negatively “rewires” our brains. Yet, many people (such as Nicholas Carr in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”) claim based on personal experience that frequent use of the Internet has shortened our attention spans and limited our ability to engage in deep reflection. What do you think? Have Twitter and Google really had a corrosive effect on our thinking ability? What type of evidence do you find most compelling? Why? 5.

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  Vygotsky and the Promise of Public Education

  • Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  · 3 · WHAT IS THINKING ? Children learn and develop in social interactions with their caregivers and siblings, teachers and peers, and more distant significant others. Social prac- tices include these interactions and the speech patterns that accompany them. Almost everything we do and think and feel is mediated through words that play an increasing role over the course of development. Consider some of the everyday social practices that typically fill the day: talking with family, friends, and colleagues; reading news and weather reports, books, and blogs; and writing lists, letters, notes, and homework. We also calculate budgets and plan for purchases; listen to and play music; and communicate with indi- viduals and participate in communities using computers, tablets, and cell phones. Cultural tools—both technical and psychological tools—mediate experience; they are the means of mediation and they shape the way we do things. The process of mediation is central to all social practices; language, and more specifically, speech is the primary psychological tool. Psychological tools, systems of signs and symbols used for making meaning, play a central role in thinking. The first section of this chapter defines learning and development as medi- ated through cultural tools. The second section describes the primary psycho- logical tool, speech, and three different functions of speech—social, private, 66 vygotsky and the promise of public education and inner speech—along with the unity of speech and thinking in develop- ment. The third section describes the development of concepts, as well as the relationship between everyday concepts and academic concepts. The following questions are offered as a reader’s guide for the chapter.

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  Language Communication and the Brain

  A Neuropsychological Study

  • Mariusz Maruszewski, Grace W. Shugar(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION AND THE BRAIN: THE BROADER CONTEXT §1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS One of man's most distinctive features, specific to his species, is the capacity to communicate through language. Talking and listening, reading and writing, con-stitute the daily universal forms of a normal human being's activity from infancy till death. Moreover, with the progress of civilization, these peculiarly human forms of activity continue to gain in importance, as exemplified in the mounting number of those whose activity—as viewed from the exterior—is almost wholly reducible to acts of speech production and reception. It seems beyond doubt that a constantly increasing part of human wakeful time is devoted to activities associated with verbal communication. Simultaneously we witness efforts to increase maximally the number of collocu-tors, people whom we speak to and write for and, ultimately, all those we listen to and whose writings we read. Technical progress in communication and mass media has led to ongoing verbal intercourse among human beings and groups great distances apart on the earth's surface. These circumstances appear to be of crucial import in the shaping of contemporary life; their significance however is not always fully credited. The process we are considering consists primarily of transmitting diverse kinds of suggestions, recommendations, commands, prohibitions, and instructions; of exchang-ing information about events past, present, and anticipated in the future, which affect the lives and environments of those in communicative contact; of passing forward the products of man's cognition of reality. These kinds of information are required for the smooth flow of the individual person's activity, which has with time grown increasingly complex and at the same time dependent on the intake of various types of information inaccessible to a single individual through his own resources.

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  For the Love of Language

  An Introduction to Linguistics

  • Kate Burridge, Tonya N. Stebbins(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  ‘LANGUAGE IS THE DRESS OF THOUGHT’ LANGUAGE, MIND AND WORLD PART 6 Though the faculty of language may be congenital, all languages are traditional. The words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready-made for us. Max Müller (1873), Lectures on Mr Darwin’s Philosophy of Language 16.0 INTRODUCTION This chapter opens with a reflection on the relationship between language and the mind. When learning a second language, it doesn’t take long for most people to notice that the world is not constructed in precisely the same way in all languages. How does language reflect our understanding of the world? Where do these differences come from? How do they relate to culture? What do they tell us about language and about its human users? Thinking about language and the mind focuses us on our experiences and behaviours as speakers of particular languages. But, the mind is elusive; we cannot answer some of our most basic questions about how language works with a focus on the mind alone. Shifting our focus to language and the brain allows for quite different sorts of questions. How is language stored in our brains? What thinking processes are involved in producing or understanding speech? How can we find out more about the way language is organised in our brains? These questions become especially compelling when we reflect that brain tissue has roughly the same consistency as cold porridge, is around 77 per cent water and corresponds to roughly 2 per cent of our total body weight. Furthermore, the structure of the brain and its relation to language is only now becoming clearer to researchers, as new technologies and methods make it possible to develop more and more detailed records of the brain activity associated with language.

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  The Human Mind through the Lens of Language

  Generative Explorations

  • Nirmalangshu Mukherji(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  There is then a marked phenomenon, with effects in a wide variety of directions, in which human cognitive abilities are crucially linked to linguistic endowment. The presence of language is not restricted to the making of ‘noise’ to convey thoughts obtained independently; language enters into thinking, planning and foresight, social organization, mutual assistance and much more. 89 Language as Mirror of the Mind Hence, these abilities are strictly restricted to the human species. As Penn et al. observe, there is not only absence of evidence of these abilities in non-human organisms, but there is also evidence of absence. We will explore these themes in more detail as we proceed. I have so far urged the case for the language-centred mind without really clarifying the notion of language at issue. I will discuss the issue in some detail later in the work in Chapter 5 when we review the basic properties of the human language system. However, some idea of which aspects or components of human language inspire the notion of the human mind is appropriate at this point to form a preliminary understanding of which conception of mind I am arguing for. It is needed here because, without setting theoretical priorities, it is easy to view human language as an immensely complex phenomenon. Recall the methodological guideline that genuine theoretical understanding seems to be restricted to the study of simple systems; the quality of explanation falls off rapidly as inquiry turns to more complex systems. The history of the more established sciences also suggests that once some observed complexity has been successfully analysed into parts, a study of the original complexity often drops out of that line of research, perhaps forever. Hence, just as the singular phenomenon of language provided the guide through the complexity of cognitive phenomena, we need some singular guidance through the complexity of human language itself.

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  Toward a Theory of Context in Linguistics and Literature

  Proceedings of a Conference of the Kelemen Mikes Hungarian Cultural Society, Maastricht, September 21–25, 1971

  • Addam Makkai(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Thus mathematics became a very important factor in communi-cation theory. Linguistics, of necessity, has played second fiddle in investigations of communication theory which was used for the goals of 'telecommunication', while the findings of telecommunications were applied to linguistics. The char-acter of most research in this respect was determined by extralinguistic factors. What this means is that the sui gene-ris problems of language and thus the internal aspects of linguistics have been pushed into the background. Compare, in this regard, the words of Carroll (1955:111): In recent years, many experimental studies have been devoted to the role of language in communication. These studies have been oriented toward the theory of communication and the measurement of information as developed by Shannon and Wie-ner, rather than toward linguistic science. It is believed that the further study of verbal behavior can proceed soundly only if 56 FERENC FABRICIUS KOVÂCS the role of language structure in communicative behavior is properly taken into account. Psycholinguistics, as this study may be called, should be conceived as being mainly concerned with the way in which the speaker of a language encodes his behavior into linguistic responses, depending on the structure of his language, and, as a hearer, decodes linguistically coded messages into further behavior. The highly advanced state of contemporary linguistic science as well as of psychological learn-ing theory should make possible the integration of results from the two sciences in the study of the individual's acquisi-tion and use of all types of linguistic responses, from the simple to the most complex. It must be emphasized that a terminological ambiguity has had a great part in obscuring the specific linguistic prob-lems of communication. I refer to the ambiguity involving the terms information theory versus communication theory.

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