7.3 : Langue
- Page ID
- 190236
Objectifs d'apprentissage
- Définir la langue et démontrer la familiarité avec les composantes de la langue
- Comprendre l'évolution de l'utilisation du langage
- Expliquer la relation entre le langage et la pensée
La langue est un système de communication qui consiste à utiliser des mots et des règles systématiques pour organiser ces mots afin de transmettre des informations d'une personne à une autre. Bien que la langue soit une forme de communication, toutes les communications ne sont pas des langues. De nombreuses espèces communiquent entre elles par leurs postures, leurs mouvements, leurs odeurs ou leurs vocalisations. Cette communication est cruciale pour les espèces qui ont besoin d'interagir et de développer des relations sociales avec leurs congénères. Cependant, de nombreuses personnes ont affirmé que c'est le langage qui rend les humains uniques parmi toutes les espèces animales (Corballis et Suddendorf, 2007 ; Tomasello et Rakoczy, 2003). Cette section se concentrera sur ce qui distingue la langue en tant que forme particulière de communication, sur la façon dont l'utilisation de la langue se développe et sur la manière dont le langage affecte notre façon de penser.
Composantes du langage
La langue, qu'elle soit parlée, signée ou écrite, comporte des éléments spécifiques : un lexique et une grammaire. Le lexique fait référence aux mots d'une langue donnée. Ainsi, le lexique est le vocabulaire d'une langue. La grammaire fait référence à l'ensemble de règles utilisées pour transmettre du sens à l'aide du lexique (Fernández et Cairns, 2011). Par exemple, la grammaire anglaise veut que la plupart des verbes reçoivent un « -ed » à la fin pour indiquer le passé.
Les mots sont formés en combinant les différents phonèmes qui composent la langue. Un phonème (par exemple, les sons « ah » contre « eh ») est une unité sonore de base d'une langue donnée, et différentes langues ont des ensembles de phonèmes différents. Les phonèmes sont combinés pour former des morphèmes, qui sont les plus petites unités du langage qui transmettent un certain type de signification (par exemple, « je » est à la fois un phonème et un morphème). Nous utilisons la sémantique et la syntaxe pour construire le langage. La sémantique et la syntaxe font partie de la grammaire d'une langue. La sémantique fait référence au processus par lequel nous dérivons du sens des morphèmes et des mots. La syntaxe fait référence à la façon dont les mots sont organisés en phrases (Chomsky, 1965 ; Fernández et Cairns, 2011).
Nous appliquons les règles de grammaire pour organiser le lexique de manière originale et créative, ce qui nous permet de communiquer des informations sur des concepts concrets et abstraits. Nous pouvons parler de notre environnement immédiat et observable ainsi que de la surface de planètes invisibles. Nous pouvons partager nos pensées les plus intimes, nos plans pour l'avenir et débattre de la valeur d'une formation universitaire. Nous pouvons fournir des instructions détaillées pour préparer un repas, réparer une voiture ou allumer un feu. La flexibilité qu'offre la langue pour relayer des types d'informations très différents est une propriété qui rend le langage si distinct en tant que mode de communication entre humains.
Language Development
Given the remarkable complexity of a language, one might expect that mastering a language would be an especially arduous task; indeed, for those of us trying to learn a second language as adults, this might seem to be true. However, young children master language very quickly with relative ease. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. Noam Chomsky (1965) criticized this behaviorist approach, asserting instead that the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are biologically determined. The use of language develops in the absence of formal instruction and appears to follow a very similar pattern in children from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. It would seem, therefore, that we are born with a biological predisposition to acquire a language (Chomsky, 1965; Fernández & Cairns, 2011). Moreover, it appears that there is a critical period for language acquisition, such that this proficiency at acquiring language is maximal early in life; generally, as people age, the ease with which they acquire and master new languages diminishes (Johnson & Newport, 1989; Lenneberg, 1967; Singleton, 1995).
Children begin to learn about language from a very early age (See Table \(\PageIndex{1}\) below). In fact, it appears that this is occurring even before we are born. Newborns show preference for their mother’s voice and appear to be able to discriminate between the language spoken by their mother and other languages. Babies are also attuned to the languages being used around them and show preferences for videos of faces that are moving in synchrony with the audio of spoken language versus videos that do not synchronize with the audio (Blossom & Morgan, 2006; Pickens, 1994; Spelke & Cortelyou, 1981).
| Stage | Age | Developmental Language and Communication |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0–3 months | Reflexive communication |
| 2 | 3–8 months | Reflexive communication; interest in others |
| 3 | 8–13 months | Intentional communication; sociability |
| 4 | 12–18 months | First words |
| 5 | 18–24 months | Simple sentences of two words |
| 6 | 2–3 years | Sentences of three or more words |
| 7 | 3–5 years | Complex sentences; has conversations |
DIG DEEPER: The Case of Genie
In the fall of 1970, a social worker in the Los Angeles area found a \(13\)-year-old girl who was being raised in extremely neglectful and abusive conditions. The girl, who came to be known as Genie, had lived most of her life tied to a potty chair or confined to a crib in a small room that was kept closed with the curtains drawn. For a little over a decade, Genie had virtually no social interaction and no access to the outside world. As a result of these conditions, Genie was unable to stand up, chew solid food, or speak (Fromkin, Krashen, Curtiss, Rigler, & Rigler, 1974; Rymer, 1993). The police took Genie into protective custody.
Genie’s abilities improved dramatically following her removal from her abusive environment, and early on, it appeared she was acquiring language—much later than would be predicted by critical period hypotheses that had been posited at the time (Fromkin et al., 1974). Genie managed to amass an impressive vocabulary in a relatively short amount of time. However, she never developed a mastery of the grammatical aspects of language (Curtiss, 1981). Perhaps being deprived of the opportunity to learn language during a critical period impeded Genie’s ability to fully acquire and use language.
You may recall that each language has its own set of phonemes that are used to generate morphemes, words, and so on. Babies can discriminate among the sounds that make up a language (for example, they can tell the difference between the “s” in vision and the “ss” in fission); early on, they can differentiate between the sounds of all human languages, even those that do not occur in the languages that are used in their environments. However, by the time that they are about 1 year old, they can only discriminate among those phonemes that are used in the language or languages in their environments (Jensen, 2011; Werker & Lalonde, 1988; Werker & Tees, 1984).
After the first few months of life, babies enter what is known as the babbling stage, during which time they tend to produce single syllables that are repeated over and over. As time passes, more variations appear in the syllables that they produce. During this time, it is unlikely that the babies are trying to communicate; they are just as likely to babble when they are alone as when they are with their caregivers (Fernández & Cairns, 2011). Interestingly, babies who are raised in environments in which sign language is used will also begin to show babbling in the gestures of their hands during this stage (Petitto, Holowka, Sergio, Levy, & Ostry, 2004).
Generally, a child’s first word is uttered sometime between the ages of 1 year to 18 months, and for the next few months, the child will remain in the “one word” stage of language development. During this time, children know a number of words, but they only produce one-word utterances. The child’s early vocabulary is limited to familiar objects or events, often nouns. Although children in this stage only make one-word utterances, these words often carry larger meaning (Fernández & Cairns, 2011). So, for example, a child saying “cookie” could be identifying a cookie or asking for a cookie.
As a child’s lexicon grows, she begins to utter simple sentences and to acquire new vocabulary at a very rapid pace. In addition, children begin to demonstrate a clear understanding of the specific rules that apply to their language(s). Even the mistakes that children sometimes make provide evidence of just how much they understand about those rules. This is sometimes seen in the form of overgeneralization. In this context, overgeneralization refers to an extension of a language rule to an exception to the rule. For example, in English, it is usually the case that an “s” is added to the end of a word to indicate plurality. For example, we speak of one dog versus two dogs. Young children will overgeneralize this rule to cases that are exceptions to the “add an s to the end of the word” rule and say things like “those two gooses” or “three mouses.” Clearly, the rules of the language are understood, even if the exceptions to the rules are still being learned (Moskowitz, 1978).
Language and Thought
When we speak one language, we agree that words are representations of ideas, people, places, and events. The given language that children learn is connected to their culture and surroundings. But can words themselves shape the way we think about things? Psychologists have long investigated the question of whether language shapes thoughts and actions, or whether our thoughts and beliefs shape our language. Two researchers, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, began this investigation in the 1940s. They wanted to understand how the language habits of a community encourage members of that community to interpret language in a particular manner (Sapir, 1941/1964). Sapir and Whorf proposed that language determines thought, suggesting, for example, that a person whose community language did not have past-tense verbs would be challenged to think about the past (Whorf, 1956). Researchers have since identified this view as too absolute, pointing out a lack of empiricism behind what Sapir and Whorf proposed (Abler, 2013; Boroditsky, 2011; van Troyer, 1994). Today, psychologists continue to study and debate the relationship between language and thought.
WHAT DO YOU THINK: The Meaning of Language
Think about what you know of other languages; perhaps you even speak multiple languages. Imagine for a moment that your closest friend fluently speaks more than one language. Do you think that friend thinks differently, depending on which language is being spoken? You may know a few words that are not translatable from their original language into English. For example, the Portuguese word saudade originated during the \(15^{th}\) century, when Portuguese sailors left home to explore the seas and travel to Africa or Asia. Those left behind described the emptiness and fondness they felt as saudade (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)). The word came to express many meanings, including loss, nostalgia, yearning, warm memories, and hope. There is no single word in English that includes all of those emotions in a single description. Do words such as saudade indicate that different languages produce different patterns of thought in people? What do you think??
Language may indeed influence the way that we think, an idea known as linguistic determinism. One recent demonstration of this phenomenon involved differences in the way that English and Mandarin Chinese speakers talk and think about time. English speakers tend to talk about time using terms that describe changes along a horizontal dimension, for example, saying something like “I’m running behind schedule” or “Don’t get ahead of yourself.” While Mandarin Chinese speakers also describe time in horizontal terms, it is not uncommon to also use terms associated with a vertical arrangement. For example, the past might be described as being “up” and the future as being “down.” It turns out that these differences in language translate into differences in performance on cognitive tests designed to measure how quickly an individual can recognize temporal relationships. Specifically, when given a series of tasks with vertical priming, Mandarin Chinese speakers were faster at recognizing temporal relationships between months. Indeed, Boroditsky (2001) sees these results as suggesting that “habits in language encourage habits in thought” (p. 12).
One group of researchers who wanted to investigate how language influences thought compared how English speakers and the Dani people of Papua New Guinea think and speak about color. The Dani have two words for color: one word for light and one word for dark. In contrast, the English language has 11 color words. Researchers hypothesized that the number of color terms could limit the ways that the Dani people conceptualized color. However, the Dani were able to distinguish colors with the same ability as English speakers, despite having fewer words at their disposal (Berlin & Kay, 1969). A recent review of research aimed at determining how language might affect something like color perception suggests that language can influence perceptual phenomena, especially in the left hemisphere of the brain. You may recall from earlier chapters that the left hemisphere is associated with language for most people. However, the right (less linguistic hemisphere) of the brain is less affected by linguistic influences on perception (Regier & Kay, 2009)
Summary
Language is a communication system that has both a lexicon and a system of grammar. Language acquisition occurs naturally and effortlessly during the early stages of life, and this acquisition occurs in a predictable sequence for individuals around the world. Language has a strong influence on thought, and the concept of how language may influence cognition remains an area of study and debate in psychology.
Glossary
- grammar
- set of rules that are used to convey meaning through the use of a lexicon
- language
- communication system that involves using words to transmit information from one individual to another
- lexicon
- the words of a given language
- morpheme
- smallest unit of language that conveys some type of meaning
- overgeneralization
- extension of a rule that exists in a given language to an exception to the rule
- phoneme
- basic sound unit of a given language
- semantics
- process by which we derive meaning from morphemes and words
- syntax
- manner by which words are organized into sentences