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Study Guide

This study guide is focused on answering five main questions:

What is language?
What are some ways other species communicate?
How does human communication compare to animal communication?
What are some ways that scientists conduct research about language?
What has that research told us?

As you read the following sections, think carefully about your experience as a language user. Have you ever considered the vast complexity of language? Think about how you organize your thoughts when constructing a sentence. Have you ever had difficulty expressing a thought or understanding someone? What process do you go through, mentally, when you are in these types of circumstances? How do you think your thoughts are related to electrical and chemical processes in your brain? How do you think language has benefited humans from an evolutionary standpoint? What sorts of questions does this research raise for you? How would you design an experiment to investigate your questions?

What is language?

Even the term language encompasses a vast array of ideas, making the process of defining language highly complex. Is language just the ability to string together words to create coherent thoughts? Is it being able to read, write, speak and listen? What processes are going on in your brain as you engage in any outward manifestations of language? How do you connect words together to make cogent thoughts? In order to get a better understanding of language, we will break the concept into chunks, and see how those chunks are connected. Before reading the next section, write down all of the things you associate with language.

Discussing how bees communicate.
Credit: James Nieh, UCSD

The study of language is known as linguistics. Linguists are interested in a variety of questions related to speech, thought, understanding, communication, neuroscience and cognition.

1. Sounds: Phonetics and Phonology

We will start with the mechanics of speech and language. One part of language is the sounds that accompany words. Each letter is associated with at least one sound, and a whole language is made up of patterns of sounds strung together. Sounds are studied through phonetics (the study of the physical aspects of speech, including how sounds are produced and detected) and phonology (the study of the patterns of sounds in human languages).

2. Word and Language Structure: Syntax and Morphology

Language is organized into conceptual patterns in order to facilitate communication. Speakers of the same language generally follow an intricate set of instructions for constructing sentences and conveying thoughts. The specific order and tense of words allows a streamlined, intricate level of understanding.

Consider the following group of words: I running thief please chase me am him help after the.

What information can you gather about the situation? Can you write a coherent sentence using those words? For example, the use of morphology (the study of the smallest meaningful units of language) tells you that the suffix –ing, when attached to the verb run, means that the action is taking place now. Chances are, your knowledge and experience with syntax (the rules governing language structure) will help you organize the words into a sensible sentence. Without syntax, the words are disconnected and it is difficult to extract the fundamental meaning of the language. “I am running after the thief! Please help me chase him!”

3. The Contextual Meaning of Language: Semantics and Pragmatics

Consider the following statement: “Is that cool?”

The meaning of the statement is dependent on the context. The speaker might be asking about the temperature of the pie she is about to eat. Or, maybe she is asking her brother if she can borrow his bike. Perhaps she is asking her friend if her new shirt is socially acceptable. Semantics deals with meaning, and pragmatics deals with how meaning depends on social situations.

4. Language and the brain: neurological linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics

The brain is responsible for all of the aforementioned aspects of language. The study of language extends to the brain and how it processes and creates language. What areas of the brain are active during different linguistic activities? How do children learn how to process and use language? How is learning a primary language different from learning a secondary language? How does the brain coordinate thought with speech, and what is happening in the brain when an individual develops a speech disorder? Neurological linguists study the physiological aspects of language and the brain. Cognitive linguistics is the study of the logical processing of language within the brain, and Psycholinguistics bridges the physiological actions of the brain with the logical processing of language.

These are some of the facets of language. How did your list compare to this Study Guide discussion? Is there anything missing from the study guide that you think is an important aspect of language? What new ideas did you learn about the study of language?

More information about linguistics.

Many animals use vocalizations to communicate with each other.
Credit: S. Seethaler, UCSD

What are some ways other species communicate?

What does your cat do when he wants to be fed? How does your dog let you know he needs to be let outside? How does that line of ants know exactly where you dropped some crumbs? Other species use language in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Many insects and other animals communicate through a passive coloration display. Cuttlefish and squid communicate by changing the color and texture of their skin. Ants and naked mole rats are known to communicate through chemical signals. Fireflies use flash patterns to communicate, while many bees and some birds are among those who communicate through dance. Countless animals, including species of birds, frogs, and whales communicate using sound. In fact, most animals seem to have some way of communicating with others of their species and/or with their predators. So exactly how is human language so different than that of these other organisms?

More information about animal communication.

How does human communication compare to animal communication?

Clearly, other animals communicate. The video of Kanzi, a bonobo, shows Kanzi listening to communication and responding through sign language. After watching the video, think about some differences in the ways that you use language and the ways that Kanzi uses language. Write your responses down, and compare them to the answers below. Were there things you noticed that the discussion missed? Did the discussion include anything you missed?

1. Humans have the ability to control their breath, tongue movements and lips.

2. Humans have the ability to use grammar and syntax.
In every language, humans have the ability to construct thoughts of varying lengths and almost infinite complexity, in order to convey precisely what they wish to communicate. Although some primates are able to construct sentences of varying lengths and some complexity, their language constructions do not nearly approach the complexity of human language. Starlings, those small, flocking, dark, highly vociferous birds are able to recognize “grammatical” patterns in songs, when they are conditioned to certain such patterns. Early evidence suggests, however, they are unable to recognize such patterns in new stimuli, indicating that they do not have the human ability to transfer grammatical rules to novel situations.

3. Humans have the innate ability to learn to distinguish words and phrases.
Infants, when presented with meaningless, endless strings of syllables, are able to recognize patterns within them. If you look at the soundwave associated with a word or a phrase, it is difficult to discern visually and audially where the words begin and end. There may be pauses within a word and no pauses between words, just because of our patterns of speech flow and language. How, therefore, do infants recognize a word from a non-word?

Infants are very adept at picking out repeated patterns within strings of sounds. The following strand of sounds was played aloud for infants. The infants were able to identify repeated groups of sounds, and responded to those same repeated groups of sounds within another string of utterances. This indicates that human infants are very good at recognizing patterns, and may use sound patterns to start decoding language.

Try it! Identify the repeated groups of sounds within the following string of sounds. Each group should be at least 6 letters long.

pabikulatidorepabikutalikulatidopabikulilitalatidotupabiku

See images and sounds from a waveform analysis.

4. Humans have gigantic vocabularies.
Of the over 600,000 words in the English language, people tend to have a working vocabulary of 40,000 – 50,000 words, with up to 80,000 words they are familiar with, even if they do not regularly use them. How is this enormous vocabulary possible? Researchers theorize that humans “chunk”, or organize, words into meaningful groups, which increases their ability to understand more concepts. For example, what “chunks” would you put the following words into?

blue happy cat car angry yellow pet green truck hamster sad van red fish color envious

You might have put one word into two or more different “chunks.” These overlapping chunks allow you to see words in different contexts.

5. Humans understand contextualized meanings in language – even if they seem nonsensical.
As described earlier in the section about semantics and pragmatics, this ability allows you to hear a phrase like “That milk seemed funny to me,” and understand from the context that the word “funny” refers to strangeness, rather than hilarity.

More information about the uniqueness of human language, in Zoogoer.

More information about the uniqueness of human language, in Science NetLinks.

What are some ways that scientists conduct research about language, and what has that research told us?

Read about the following studies and research findings. Take notes about the research as you read each point, so that you can investigate this topic further in the Explore this Topic section

2. Things that are automatic, like numbers that are overpracticed, are conserved in Broca’s disorder, indicating that there are other mechanisms involved in language production.

3. From studying infants who have suffered strokes that damaged Broca’s area, scientists know that regions of the brain that are not usually involved in language production can become involved in language, if the damage takes place early in development. For more information about this ongoing research, visit the unit on development with UCSD’s Joan Stiles.

4. Parts of the brain may be recruited for a variety of tasks. Researchers studied brain scans of expert chess players as they played the end part of a chess game. Certain regions of the brain showed increased activity only in expert chess players. However, even in these chess experts, these parts of the brain are also used for other applications. This indicates that the brain is quite adaptable to the tasks imposed upon it.

5. Scientists studied brain activity when subjects were listening to environmental sounds (cows mooing, car brakes, etc), and when the subjects heard the word associated with such sounds (“cow,” “brakes,” etc). The researchers found that the brain areas which were active in each case were the same or similar, indicating that the brain processes environmental sounds in much the same way as it processes language associated with those sounds.

6. The McGurk Effect explains that our brains tend to integrate visual and auditory clues automatically, meaning that our ears can be fooled by what our eyes see.
Click here for a demonstration and an explanation of this effect.

7. When a family showed an inherited tendency for deafness, scientist Marie-Claire King studied them to find if they had a mutation in a gene for hearing. However, when this gene was investigated, it turned out that the gene mutation really affected the cytoskeletal structure—the protein scaffolding that gives a cell its shape. Since hair cells vital for hearing are delicate, they need extremely solid cytoskeletal structures. Therefore, because a gene for cytoskeletal proteins was defective, the hair cells were damaged, destroying the ability to hear.
More information about genes and deafness.
More information about Marie-Claire King, a remarkable scientist.

8. Scientists studied the KE family, a family in England in which half of the members have a language disorder. The scientists wanted to find out if they possessed a defect in the “language gene.” What they found was they had a disorder in the gene for the Foxp2 protein. This protein controls when different genes are turned on and off. This protein is extremely important in creating the basal ganglia, which is a brain area involved in motor activity, motion, planning and sequential behavior. The basal ganglia are important for controlling the motion of the lips and the tongue, which are vital for producing language. Since the family had a genetic mutation that prevented the Fox2p protein from being produced, their language was strongly affected. However, other aspects of normal language were unaffected.
More information on this study.

These diverse findings lead researchers to view language as an integration of many different parts. Many scientists believe that the connections within the brain are the most important factors in creating language. The language ability requires the coordination of many different parts of the brain through intricate intra-and inter-cellular pathways.