essay on language and psychology

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Essays on Reference, Language, and Mind

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy

Professor of Philosophy

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Keith Donnellan is one of the major figures in 20th-century philosophy of language, a key part of the highly influential generation of scholars that included Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, and David Kaplan. Like many of these philosophers, his primary contributions were published in article form rather than books. This volume presents a highly focused collection of articles by Donnellan. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the philosophy of language and mind went through a paradigm shift, with the then-dominant Fregean theory losing ground to the “direct reference” theory sometimes referred to as the direct reference revolution. Donnellan played a key role in this shift, focusing on the relation of semantic reference, a touchstone in the philosophy of language and the relation of “thinking about”—a touchstone in the philosophy of mind. The debates around the direct reference theory ended up forming the agenda of the philosophy of language and related fields for decades to come, and Donnellan's contributions were always considered essential. His ideas spawned a scholarly debate that continues to the present day. This volume collects his key contributions dating from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, along with a substantive introduction by the editor, which disseminates the work to a new audience and for posterity.

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language​

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Psycholinguistics: An Essay

Psycholinguistics: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 30, 2017 • ( 1 )

A BRIEF HISTORY

Interest in the mind and language both date back for millennia, with a documented history of language study going back 2,500 years and spread across many cultures (including India, China, Mesopotamia, and Greece). Documented interest in the mind and knowledge—the foundations of what we consider to be psychology—also dates back, in one form or another, at least as early as language study, and perhaps earlier. However, modern versions of both linguistics and psychology are much more recent, with modern psychology tracing back to Wilhelm Wundt’s lab in Leipzig in the late 1800s and modern linguistics tracing back to roughly the same time. Both fields have undergone some revolutions in even that relatively short time, with both fields experiencing some major shifts in the mid1900s that are still felt today.

From the beginning of psychology, there has been an interest in language. Wilhelm Wundt, for example, published a book on language ( die Sprache ) in 1900. This book, with 1,367 pages by its 1913 edition, covered a number of topics that are still very much relevant in current psycholinguistics, including child language acquisition, sign language, language perception, and grammatical structure. The interest between the domains of language and psychology was mutual and, as Blumenthal (1987) discussed, many linguists of the day were also interested in Wundt’s work and attended his lectures at the University of Leipzig, including several influential language researchers such as Leonard Bloomfield, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Edward Boas. For example, Bloomfield’s approach to analyzing the structure of language is important to almost all modern theories of grammar. De Saussure made a critical distinction that is still part of how language researchers think about language: langue , which is the knowledge of a language system that exists collectively among speakers of a language, and parole, which is the use of that system.

While Wundt was an experimentalist, he also acknowledged the importance of internal mental states and viewed language as importantly reflecting mental representations. He viewed the sentence as a key unit of language, and sought to show how universal characteristics of human information processing, like attention and memory, would influence its production and comprehension. This is really not so different from what modern psycholinguistic researchers are doing, though the route from Wundt’s experiments to the present day is not entirely direct.

Wundt was not the only researcher at that time interested in language, of course, and in fact there was some conflict between Wundt’s approach and others, including approaches that disagreed with the idea of a unified mental representation and other types of “introspective” approaches. In fact, at the turn of the century there were quite a number of competing perspectives on psychology, which led one linguist of the day, Bernard Delburck, to suggest that linguists might do better to part ways with psychology. This is largely what happened, and for the next 30 to 40 years linguistics focused instead on the formal aspects of language—sound systems, grammatical structures, word formation rules—without much reference to the mental processing needed for their actual use. This approach still forms a core aspect of linguistic study today.

Although Wundt’s work clearly foreshadows modern views and topics on psycholinguistics, his influence declined following the First World War. Bloomfield, once a proponent of Wundt’s approach, had turned to behaviourism instead by 1933 when he published one of his major contributions to linguistics, a book simply called Language . In psychology, behaviourism was a movement in which the study of mental states was more or less rejected, and the idea that one could account for human behaviour in terms of mental states or representation was discounted. In linguistic terms, this meant a stronger focus on descriptive accounts of language rather than studying language as a window onto human mind. Perhaps the most famous attempt to account for language processing in a behaviourist tradition comes from B.F. Skinner’s 1957 Verbal Behaviour in which language is not a complex mental construct with rules and representations, but instead is reduced to, well, verbal behaviour. As such, it can be explained, according to Skinner, in terms of the same conditioning theory that applied to other behaviours, such as classical and operant conditioning, in which links between stimuli and outcomes are formed and shaped by experience. For example, a child saying “I want milk” may result in the child receiving a glass of milk, and this reinforces (or conditions) the use of this verbal behaviour.

The trouble was that there are a number of aspects of language that cannot be explained by classical and operant conditioning. In a famous critique of Skinner’s book, Noam Chomsky (1957) successfully argued against verbal behaviourism with several key points. Crucially, as we shall see in chapter 2, language is recursive and can produce an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of systematic rules and representations. The complexities of language that these rules create are difficult (if not impossible) to account for in simple stimulus–response terms. As part of his arguments, Chomsky reintroduced the idea of mental representations back to the study of language. He also drew an important distinction between the knowledge that one has about a language, called “competence” and the use of the language, “performance” (similar to the distinction of langue and parole drawn by Ferdinand de Saussure roughly 60 years earlier). Chomsky’s influence on modern linguistics and psycholinguistics is profound, and his focus on competence (as opposed to performance) drew linguistics heavily in this direction. On the other hand, psychology continued to be quite interested in the concept of language performance. Nonetheless, several of Chomsky’s proposals about the nature of syntactic structure, and in particular his work on transformation grammar, prompted experimentation by psychologists in the 1960s to see whether the linguistic processes proposed were psychological processes. For example, one could reasonably ask whether structures that were proposed to be more complex linguistically would cause longer processing times. The results were mixed—research showed that there was an important relationship between linguistic structure and psychological processing, but didn’t support the particular relationship proposed by transformational grammar, despite initial successes. Also, it became increasingly clear that this distinction between competence and performance was not trivial, and that the competence theories proposed by linguists could not simply be transferred to performance. Another difficulty was that linguistic theories were changing rapidly and that made it more difficult for psychologists to test them.

As a result, there was relatively little interaction between the study of psychology and linguistics for the next couple of decades. Psychologists were still interested in language—very much so—but focused more on issues of performance, such as the processes by which syntactic structures are constructed in real time, how ambiguities in language are resolved, and how word knowledge is accessed upon encountering a word. Linguists were still interested in language as a mental phenomenon, but focused on issues of competence—what knowledge of a language entails, and formulating theories that could apply to all languages, regardless of the apparent differences among them.

The separation between these two fields was not to last. Starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a renewed interest in psycholinguistics as a joint venture between linguists and psychologists, and these days many researchers have been trained in both disciplines (as well as other fields). Substantial advances in related disciplines, including neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive science have given researchers interested in language processing a huge new set of resources, both in terms of knowledge and tools. We now have researchers working on computational models of language processing, informed by current knowledge about how the brain works. We have researchers working at the intersection of language and other cognitive abilities, including not just working memory, but things like scene perception and reasoning.

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is concerned with the relationship between language and the mind. This distinguishes it from sociolinguistics, on the one hand, where the focus is on the social dimension of language, and stylistics, on the other, where it is on the expressive functions of language. Psycholinguistics explores the psychological processes involved in using language. It asks how we store words and syntactic structures in the brain, what processes of memory are involved, and how we understand and produce speech. These are all of considerable practical importance when it comes to understanding language disorders. But above all, psycholinguists are interested in the acquisition of language: with how children learn.

Many linguists feel that if we can understand the internal mechanism which enables children to learn language so quickly we shall have penetrated one of the deepest secrets of the mind. To what extent are humans programmed from birth to acquire language? Is there such a thing as a language gene? Or is it simply that we have a general cognitive, or mental, ability that enables us to pick up language quickly? All of these issues are part of an ongoing debate within linguistics. Currently, the genetic view of language ability holds the field. Book by the psycholinguist Steven Pinker , entitled The Language Instinct (1995), makes a strong case for considering the elements of linguistic knowledge to be innate. This fits in very neatly with the Chomskyan concept of universal grammar: the idea that there is a common underlying structure to every language, the knowledge of which we are born with.

Psycholinguistics, then, is at the theoretical cutting edge of linguistics and, as such, is pretty heady stuff. So the question is, how can we begin studying it? First of all, we can be encouraged by the fact that much of the recent literature on the subject is very accessible. There is a strong tradition within linguistics of popularising the results of research in ways that demand little previous knowledge. The work of Pinker , mentioned above, and, in particular, Jean Aitchison , provide excellent ways into the subject. In these works one can find discussions of the various methods by which psycholinguists gather their evidence and how they set about analysing it. Secondly, as with sociolinguistics, one can carry out simple observational tasks oneself.

The most effective way to do this is to observe and monitor the speech of one or two young children over a period of time. You need to have in mind, of course, what you are looking for and the purpose of the activity. Your initial concern is to identify distinctive usages, either in sounds, syntax, or word meanings. You will be surprised in doing so how much of children’s speech you have hitherto taken for granted. The next stage is to establish what kind of rule your informants are following in producing these usages. Psycholinguistics proceeds on the principle that children’s use of language is rule-governed. You could start with observing how children form the plural and the past tense. These probably comprise the most conspicuous ‘errors’ in childhood speech. Young children will frequently say tooths and mouses , instead of teeth and mice , and holded and finded , instead of held and found . These are examples of over-generalisation  the extension of a rule beyond its proper limits. In these cases the child knows the regular rule for forming the plural and the past tense but doesn’t know that these particular words are irregular. Having established the presence of this phenomenon, you can then test to see whether all irregular forms are regularised or only some, and how long it takes a child when corrected to acquire the correct form. It’s on the basis of experiments like these that psycholinguists form hypotheses about how children memorise forms and self-correct.

Over-generalisation is a frequent phenomenon in language development. It can be found not only in syntactic usage but also in word meanings. Many young children will sometimes refer to all animals as dogs or call all vehicles cars , and perhaps more disconcertingly, all men, dad . Discovering the limits of these words, what they do, and do not, apply to, is a useful way of penetrating the child’s semantic system. It can take time, for example, for children to learn that words can refer to separate things. When a child refers to milk , for instance, does s/he mean the whole process of pouring it into a mug and placing it down, or does it have the restricted meaning we are used to? Children also under-generalise; indeed, undergeneralisation is probably a more frequent phenomenon than its counterpart. A child may often only be able to use words in a particular context. It’s not uncommon for children to call their own shoes shoes but not know what someone else’s are called.

An initial way into psycholinguistics is to carry out some field research of your own into the acquisition of language, using a couple of basic concepts as your guides. On the basis of this, you can speculate about the kinds of lexical, syntactic, and semantic knowledge which your informants possess. If you do this it will enrich your understanding of the linguistic literature which you read. You will also find that it adds to your knowledge of how language changes; because all of us under- and over-generalise. Over-generalisation is one of the processes behind the loss of inflections from Anglo-Saxon times; we used to have many more irregular forms then than we do now. The morphology of modern English has developed as a consequence of generalising particular ways of forming the plural and past tense into regular paradigms. And it is also a key process in dialectal change. People who say I loves him are generalising the rule for the third person singular to cover all forms of the present tense. And in using a word like deer with its modern meaning we are under-generalising it: its Anglo-Saxon original, deor , meant an animal.

Having begun in a fairly simple way you can extend the process and consider more complex aspects of language acquisition: the formation of the negative, for instance. It takes some time for children to acquire the specific rule about attaching the negative to the auxiliary verb. Initially they will tend to put it at the beginning of the word string: no Jenny have it . Later the child decides to put the negative after the first noun phrase: cat no drink ; he no throw it . The interesting thing about these rules is that the child cannot have acquired them from listening to adult discourse. They have been generated from scratch. And yet they are commonly followed by most children. Are they then a representation of some internal grammar in the child’s brain? Does the child start out with a set of possibilities for the formation of the negative and narrow them down as s/he encounters confirmation or disconfirmation from the speech of others? Questions like these form the basis of much psycholinguistic enquiry. It’s impossible to see directly into the brain so all we have is the second-hand evidence of language to work on. Over the years psycholinguists have amassed a good deal of observational data and case history analysis, all of which you can work through in time, but it is no substitute at the outset for making your own observations, and for using your linguistic knowledge to speculate about how we manage what is, arguably, the most amazing learning feat of our lives.

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Please look at the paper https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10936-020-09701-y , it may answer many of the questions raised by you. Pramod Kumar Agrawal

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Language and Emotion: Introduction to the Special Issue

• COMMENTARY / OPINIONS
• Published: 25 May 2021
• Volume 2 , pages 91–98, ( 2021 )

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• Kristen A. Lindquist   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5368-9302 1  

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What is the relationship between language and emotion? The work that fills the pages of this special issue draws from interdisciplinary domains to weigh in on the relationship between language and emotion in semantics, cross-linguistic experience, development, emotion perception, emotion experience and regulation, and neural representation. These important new findings chart an exciting path forward for future basic and translational work in affective science.

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What does language have to do with emotion? Estimates place the origin of spoken language around 50,000–150,000 years ago, a period  that coincides with the speciation of Homo sapiens (Botha & Knight, 2009 ; Perreault & Mathew, 2012 ). Estimates on the origin of emotion in our evolutionary past are less clear.  Although even the earliest nervous systems mitigated threats and acquired rewards, some scholars argue that the experience of discrete and conscious emotions only emerged with brain structures and functions unique to H. sapiens (Barrett, 2017 ; Ledoux, 2019 ). Indeed, some scholars hypothesize that the evolutionary pressures and adaptations that may have led to spoken language (caregiving, living in large social groups; de Boer, 2011 ; Dunbar, 2011 ; Falk, 2011 ) may be the same that scaffolded the development of discrete and conscious emotions in H. sapiens (Barrett, 2017 ; Ledoux, 2019 ). Correspondingly, H. sapiens’ ability to make discrete meaning of their affective states and to communicate about those states to others could itself have conferred evolutionary fitness (Bliss-Moreau, 2017 ). When taken together, these anthropological findings suggest that the relationship between language and emotion may be as deep as the origin of our species. They also suggest that the answer to the question “what does language have to do with emotion?” requires a truly interdisciplinary lens that blends questions and tools from fields as far-ranging as biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience. Addressing this question is the purpose of this special issue of Affective Science.

In recent decades, there has been a veritable explosion of interdisciplinary research on language and emotion within modern affective science. For instance, linguistics research shows that almost all aspects of human spoken language communicate emotion, including prosody, phonetics, semantics, grammar, discourse, and conversation (Majid, 2012 ). Computational tools applied to natural human language reveal affective meanings that predict outcomes ranging from health and well-being to political behavior (see Jackson et al., 2020 ). Anthropological and linguistic research demonstrates differences in the meaning of emotion words around the world (Jackson et al., 2019 ; Lutz, 1988 ; Wierzbicka, 1992 ), which could contribute to obsverved cross-cultural differences in emotional experiences (Mesquita et al., 2016 ) and emotional expressions (Jack et al., 2016 ) and have implications for cross-cultural communication and diplomacy (see Barrett, 2017 ). Research in developmental psychology demonstrates that caregiver’s use of emotion words in conversation with infants longitudinally predicts emotion understanding and self-regulatory abilities in later childhood (see Shablack & Lindquist, 2019 ). In adults, psychological, physiological, and neuroscience research show that accessing emotion words alters emotion perception, self-reported experiences of emotion, the physiology and brain activity associated with emotion, and emotion regulation (Lindquist et al., 2016 ; Torre & Lieberman, 2018 ). It is thus no surprise that being able to specifically describe one’s emotional states predicts a range of physical and mental health outcomes (Kashdan et al., 2015 ) and that expressive writing can have a therapeutic effect (Pennebaker, 1997 ).

It was this burst of far-reaching and interesting recent findings that led us to propose a special issue on language and emotion at Affective Science . This special issue is the first of its kind at our still nascent journal, and I am grateful to the scholars who submitted 50 proposals for consideration in early 2020, the editorial team that helped evaluate them, and the authors, reviewers, and copyeditors of the 11 articles that now appear herein (all of whom accomplished this feat during the trials of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic). The result is an issue that builds on foundational knowledge about the relationship between language and emotion with a set of interdisciplinary tools that weigh in on new questions about this topic. The papers herein address the role of affect in semantics; the role of bilingualism in pain, emotional experiences, and emotion regulation; the role of language in the development of emotion knowledge; the role of labeling in emotion regulation; the role of language in the visual perception of emotion on faces; and the shared functional neuroanatomy of language and emotion. In this brief introduction to the special issue, I discuss why these findings are so fascinating and important by situating them in the existing literature and looking to still-unanswered questions. I close by looking forward to the future of research on language and emotion and the bright future of affective science.

What Is the Role of Emotion in Semantics?

Perhaps one of the most essential questions about the relationship between language and emotion revolves around the information that language conveys about emotion. Spoken language expresses experiences, which means that studying language can shine light on the nature of emotions. Indeed, language communicates emotion via almost every aspect (Majid, 2012 ). Computational linguistics approaches can now use tools from computer science and mathematics to summarize huge databases of spoken language to reveal the semantic meanings conveyed by language on an unprecedented scale (see Jackson et al., 2020 ). Perhaps most interesting among those endeavors is the ability to use the structure of spoken language to ask questions about how humans understand emotion concepts in particular and concepts in general (i.e., semantics).

Especially when analyzed at scale, linguistic databases offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore human mental life. For instance, we (Jackson et al., 2019 ) recently used a computational linguistics approach to examine humans’ understanding of 24 emotion concepts (e.g., “anger,” “sadness,” “fear,” “love,” “grief,” “joy”) across 2,474 languages spanning the globe. We used colexification—a phenomenon in which multiple concepts within a language are named by the same word—as an index of semantic similarity between concepts within a language family. We subsequently constructed networks representing universal and language-specific representations of emotion semantics—that is, which emotion concepts were understood as similar and which were understood as different within a language family. We observed significant cross-linguistic variability in the semantic structure of emotion across the 19 language families in our database. Interestingly, cross-linguistic similarity in emotion semantics was predicted by geographic proximity between language families, suggesting the potential role of cultural contact in shaping a language family’s understanding of emotions. Notably, we also observed a universal semantic structure for emotion concepts; emotion similarity was predicted by the affective dimensions of valence and arousal.

In this issue, DiNatale et al. ( in press ) used computational linguistics to show that valence and arousal do not just undergird the meaning of emotion concepts; these affective dimensions may undergird all linguistic concepts. Osgood ( 1952 ) classically demonstrated that valence, arousal, and dominance predict the extent to which people judge concepts as semantically similar. DiNatale et al. ( in press ) used a computational linguistics approach to show, for the first time at scale, that colexifications of roughly 40,000 concepts in 2,456 languages are predicted by the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. This study exemplifies how computational tools and large corpora of text can be used to delve deeper into the relationship between language and emotion. More specifically, it provides strong empirical evidence at scale that affect underlies word meaning around the globe and that colexificationis a useful index of semantic similarity. These findings are fascinating in that they suggest that knowing what something is may fundamentally depend on knowing its impact on one’s emotions.

How Does Speaking Multiple Languages Alter Emotion?

Computational linguistics of course builds on linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cross-cultural psychology, and other social sciences that use ethnography and cross-cultural comparisons to understand cross-linguistic differences and similarities in emotion. Classic accounts of the 19th and 20th centuries (Darwin, 1872/ 1965 ; Levy, 1984 ; Lutz, 1988 ; Mead, 1930 ) documented cross-cultural differences and similarities in emotion concepts (see Russell, 1991 for a review). Similarly, qualitative comparisons between languages (Wierzbicka, 1992 ) documented both variability in the semantic meaning of emotion concepts across lexicons and core commonalities.

More recently, cross-cultural psychology has addressed cross-cultural similarities and differences in the experience, perception, regulation, and expression of emotions (Chentsova-Dutton, 2020 ; Kitayama & Markus, 1994 ; Mesquita et al., 2016 ; Mesquita & Boiger, 2014 ; Scherer, 1997 ; Tsai, 2007 ). Although this work studies people from different cultures (who largely speak different languages), relatively little has explicitly addressed the role of language in emotion. Pavlenko’s ( 2008 ) work on bilingualism and emotion examines how access to different languages can subserve cross-cultural differences in emotion but much more work is needed in our increasingly bicultural world.

Two papers in this special issue specifically address how bilingualism alters affective states. Gianola et al. ( in press ) examined how bilingualism can impact the intensity of pain by assessing bilingual Latinx participants’ experience of pain when reporting in Spanish versus English. They found that participants reported more intense thermal pain when reporting in the language consistent with their dominant cultural identity (Spanish vs. English). This effect was mediated by skin conductance responses during pain, such that speaking in Spanish resulted in greater skin conductance and greater intensity pain for Latinx participants.

Zhou et al. ( in press ) investigated in this issue how both culture and language impact the pattern of daily self-reported emotional experiences in Chinese–English bilinguals. They show that the patterns of Chinese and English monolinguals’ emotion self-reports are distinct, but that Chinese–English bilinguals’ self-reported emotion patterns are a blend of their monolingual counterparts’ patterns. Answering the survey in Chinese versus English exacerbated the difference between the emotion patterns of Chinese bilinguals and English monolinguals; this effect was also influenced by the extent of exposure to speakers’ non-native culture. Collectively, these findings are beginning to show that language is not merely a form of communication, but that speaking different languages may differentially impact the experience of affective states.

How Does Learning About Emotion Words Alter the Development of Emotion?

Different languages may impact emotion because they encode different emotion concepts. Learning a language helps speakers acquire the emotion concepts relevant to their culture. Indeed, developmental psychology research demonstrates that early discourse with adults helps children to acquire and develop a complex understanding of the emotion concepts encoded in their language (see Shablack & Lindquist, 2019 ). For instance, early findings showed that parents’ use of language about emotions in child-directed speech longitudinally predicted children’s understanding of other’s emotions at 36 months (Dunn et al., 1991 ). Other work found that language abilities, more generally, predicted emotion understanding (Pons et al., 2003 ). Widen and Russell ( 2003 , 2008 ) showed that young (aged 2–7) children’s ability to perceive emotions on faces correlated with the number of emotion category labels that those children produced in spoken discourse. These findings furthermore showed that children’s understanding of the meaning of labels such as “anger,” “sadness,” “fear,” and “disgust” started quite broadly in terms of valence but that it narrowed over time to be more discrete and categorical. More recently, Nook et al. ( 2020 ) demonstrated a developmental shift in the structure of emotion knowledge, such that children’s understanding of linguistic emotion categories starts unidimensionally in terms of valence but becomes more multidimensional from childhood to adolescence.

What still remains unknown is how infants and children learn to map emotion labels to emotional behaviors and sensations in the world, and how their understanding of emotions ultimately becomes adult-like through experience and learning. Although such label-concept mapping has been well studied in object perception, it is relatively unstudied in emotion (see Hoemann et al., 2020 ). In this issue, Ruba et al. ( in press ) weighed in on this question by examining how 1-year-olds learn to map novel labels to facial expressions. They found that 18-month-olds are readily able to match labels to human facial muscle movements but that vocabulary size and stimulus complexity predict 14-month-olds’ ability to do so. What is perhaps most interesting about these findings is not that 18-month-olds can map labels to facial muscle movements, but that variation in linguistic abilities and stimulus complexity predicts 14-month-olds’ ability to do so. These findings are consistent with other research showing that receptive vocabulary also predicts 14-month-olds’ ability to categorize physical objects in a more complex abstract, goal-directed, and situated manner (e.g., that blocks can be categorized by both shape or material; Ellis & Oakes, 2006 ) Taken together, these findings may suggest that emotion categories are more akin to abstract categories that are a product of social learning than concrete categories that exist in the physical world.

In this special issue, Grosse et al. ( in press ) also provide important new evidence on how children aged 4–11 learn to use words to communicate about emotion. They reveal that children’s use of a range of emotion labels to describe vignettes increases with age, but that children fail to show an adult-like understanding of emotion labels even by age 11. Critically, they build upon the prior developmental work by showing that the more children hear certain labels for emotion in adults’ child-directed discourse, the earlier and more frequently children use those labels to describe emotional situations. Collectively, the work of Ruba et al. ( in press ) and Grosse et al. ( in press ) is beginning to show exactly how exposure to language about emotion contributes to more complex emotional abilities from infancy onward.

How Does Language Alter Emotion Perception?

The research makes increasingly clear that language represents semantic content related to emotion, impacts the emotional reports—and perhaps even physiological intensity of --affective experiences for bilingual individuals, and influences emotion perception and understanding during early development. These findings may still leave open the possibility that language has a relatively superficial effect on emotion, insofar as it only impacts emotion after the fact during communication. Yet a body of growing research suggests that momentary access to emotion words may also impact the content of individuals’ emotional perceptions (Lindquist et al., 2016 ). Studies that use cognitive techniques such as semantic satiation or priming to increase or decrease accessibility to the meaning of emotion category labels demonstrate respective impairments or facilitation in participants’ ability to perceive emotion on other’s faces; these effects occur even in tasks that do not explicitly require verbal labeling during responding. For instance, in the first study to this effect, we (Lindquist et al., 2006 ) used semantic satiation—in which participants repeat a word relevant to an upcoming perceptual judgment (e.g., “anger”) out loud 30 times—to temporarily impair participants’ access to the semantic meaning of emotion category labels. Participants then made a perceptual judgment about whether two facial portrayals of the named emotion category (e.g., anger) matched one another or not. We found that participants were slower and less accurate to perceptually match the two angry faces on satiation but not control trials (in which they had repeated the word out loud only 3 times). Multiple studies have since replicated and extended this effect. For instance, we have shown that semantic satiation impairs an emotional facial portrayals’ ability to perceptually prime itself in the subsequent moments (Gendron et al., 2012 ) and that individuals with semantic dementia, who have permanently reduced access to the meaning of words following neurodegeneration, can no longer freely sort facial portrayals of emotion into six discrete categories of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral (Lindquist et al., 2014 ). In contrast, studies found that priming emotion labels facilitates and biases the perception of emotional facial portrayals. For instance, verbalizing the emotional meaning of facial muscle movements with an emotion label (e.g., “anger”) biases perceptual memory of the face towards a more prototypical representation of the facial muscle movements associated with that category (Halberstadt et al., 2009 ). Access to emotion category labels also speeds and sensitizes perceptions of facial portrayals of emotion towards a more accurate representation of the observed face (Nook et al., 2015 ). Moreover, learning novel emotion category labels induces categorical perception of unfamiliar facial behaviors (Fugate et al., 2010 ) and helps individuals to acquire and update their perceptual categories of emotional facial behaviors (Doyle & Lindquist, 2018 ).

Collectively, these findings lead to the hypothesis that emotion category labels serve as a form of context that helps disambiguate the meaning of others’ affective behaviors (Barrett et al., 2007 ; Lindquist et al., 2015 ; Lindquist & Gendron, 2013 ). Two papers in this special issue are the first to my knowledge to show that emotion category labels are superior to other forms of context when participants are perceiving emotion in facial portrayals. Lecker and Aviezer ( in press ) presented a study that extends their prior work demonstrating that body postures serve as a form of context for understanding the meaning of emotional facial portrayals. They found that labeling face–body pairs with emotion category labels boosts the effect of the body on facial emotion perception when compared to trials in which participants use a nonverbal response option; these findings suggest that emotion concepts are likely used to make meaning of both facial and body cues as instances of emotion categories, and that body cues may evoke contextual effects on the perception of facial emotion, in part, because they prime emotion concepts. Indeed, one interpretation of the effect of other forms of context on perception of facial emotion is that these contexts prime emotion categories. To test this hypothesis, we (Doyle et al., in press ) explicitly compared the effect of visual scenes versus emotion category labels as primes for perceptions of facial emotion. Mirroring the findings of Lecker and Aviezer ( in press ), we found that priming the words “sadness” and “disgust” facilitates the perception of those emotions in facial portrayals to a greater extent than do visual scenes conveying sad versus disgusting contexts (e.g., a funeral, cockroaches on food). We further demonstrate that basic-level categories such as “sadness” and “disgust” more effectively prime facial emotion perception than subordinate-level categories such as “misery” or “repulsion,” consistent with the notion that basic-level categories are those that most efficiently guide categorization (Rosch, 1973 ).

Finally, in this issue Schwering et al. ( in press ) extended these “language as context” findings by showing how exposure to emotion words via fiction reading may help individuals to build the cache of emotion concepts that in turn guide emotion perception. Through a large-scale corpus analysis, the authors demonstrate that fiction specifically contains linguistic information related to the contents of other’s minds; exposure to fiction, in turn, predicts participants’ ability to perceive emotion in facial portrayals. These findings mirror the developmental evidence that exposure to emotion words in childhood predicts emotion understanding (Dunn et al., 1991 ; Grosse et al., in press ) and suggest that exposure to emotion words via fiction may continue to facilitate greater emotion perception ability across the lifespan.

How Does Language Alter Emotion Experience and Regulation?

Finally, there is growing evidence that language not only alters emotion perception on others’ faces, but that it also alters how a person experiences and regulates emotional sensations within their own bodies. Like the perception findings, these findings suggest that the effect of language on emotion goes beyond mere communication insofar as access to emotion labels during emotional experience impacts behavioral, physiological, and neural correlates of emotion and emotion regulation. Some research suggests that labeling one’s affective state solidifies it, causing participants to experience a more ambiguous affective state as a discrete and specific instance of an emotion category. For instance, we (Lindquist & Barrett, 2008 ) found that priming participants with the linguistic emotion category “fear” (vs. “anger” or a neutral control prime) prior to an unpleasant experience made participants exhibit greater risk aversion, which is prototypically associated with experiences of fear but not anger. Similarly, Kassam and Mendes ( 2013 ) demonstrated that asking participants to label (vs. not label) their experience of anger during an unpleasant interview may have solidified participants’ experience of anger. Participants who labeled versus did not label their feelings had increased cardiac output and vasoconstriction, which are both associated with experiences of anger.

It may be that accessing emotion labels allows a person to conceptualize their affective state in a discrete and context-appropriate manner and that doing so confers benefits for well-being. Indeed, an abundance of findings shows that individuals who use emotion labels in a discrete and specific manner (i.e., those who are high in “emotional granularity” also known as “emotion differentiation”; e.g., Barrett, 2004 ; Barrett et al., 2001 ; see Kashdan et al., 2015 for a review) experience less psychopathology (Demiralp et al., 2012 ), experience better outcomes following psychotherapy (e.g., length of time to relapse in substance use disorder; Anand et al., 2017 ), and engage in less interpersonal aggression (Pond et al., 2012 ). Moreover, individuals who are high in granularity exhibit brain electrophysiology associated with greater semantic retrieval and cognitive control during emotional experiences (Lee et al., 2017 ) and use more specific (Barrett et al., 2001 ) and effective (Kalokerinos et al., 2019 ) emotion regulation strategies during intense instances of negative emotion.

Studies that explicitly manipulate the presence versus absence of emotion labels and examine the effect on the neural correlates of emotion corroborate the notion that access to emotion labels facilitates the regulation of affective states. Early neuroimaging studies (Hariri et al., 2000 ; Lieberman et al., 2007 ) demonstrated that labeling facial expressions with emotion words reduced amygdala activity to those stimuli, an effect that is mediated by connectivity between prefrontal brain regions involved in semantic retrieval and the amygdala (Torrisi et al., 2013 ). Our recent meta-analysis (Brooks et al., 2017 ) revealed that even the incidental presence of emotion labels across 386 neuroimaging studies of emotion (i.e., as response options or instructions in emotional tasks) results in increased activation of regions involved in semantic retrieval and decreases in amygdala activation.

These findings collectively explain why labeling one’s affective state reduces the intensity of emotional experiences (Lieberman et al., 2011 ) and why expressive writing can be therapeutic (Pennebaker, 1997 ), but much remains to be understood about the complex relationship between language, emotion experience, and emotion regulation. Two papers in this special issue delve deeper into these questions. Nook et al. ( in press ) showed that labeling one’s emotional state prior to engaging in explicit goal-directed emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal and mindfulness solidifies that emotion, such that it becomes more difficult to subsequently regulate. These findings are important in terms of the role of language in emotion construction and explicit regulation; whereas accessing emotion labels may lead to more discrete and situationally relevant affective states, the downside might be that it becomes harder to “re-think” or transcend these more discrete states after the fact. In contrast, Vives et al. ( in press ) asked bilingual participants to engage in affect labeling, an implicit non-goal directed form of emotion regulation. They replicate classic affect labeling findings (Hariri et al., 2000 ; Lieberman et al., 2007 ) but show that affect labeling in one’s second language has an inert effect on amygdala activity. These findings converge with evidence that first languages are more affectively impactful than second languages (Harris et al., 2003 ) and suggest some primacy for the language in which one first learned about emotions in modulating the intensity or quality of affective states.

Finally, the findings of Vives et al. ( in press ) raise questions about how to best understand the neural interaction of language and emotion. One major question is whether language is separate from and merely interactive with emotional states, or whether the semantic representations supported by language ultimately help constitute discrete emotional states by transforming general affective sensations into instances of specific emotion categories; this is a question that has both theoretical and practical implications. As we (Satpute & Lindquist, in press ) discuss in our theoretical review, neuroscience research may uniquely weigh in on this question by addressing how brain regions associated with representing semantic knowledge about emotion categories dynamically interact with and alter activity within brain regions associated with representing affective sensations.

Looking Forward

As this brief look at the literature shows, there is still much—from a basic science lens—to understand about how language and emotion interact. Language and emotion may have interacted in the minds of H. sapiens for millennia, yet we have only scratched the surface of empirically examining their complex relationship and its implications for human behavior. Papers in this special issue are especially pushing the dial on our knowledge by further examining this question in terms of semantics, cross-linguistic experience, development, emotion perception, emotion experience and regulation, and the neural representation of emotion.

In addition, translational questions about the relationship between language and emotion remain wide open. There is early evidence that language has an important impact on emotion in psychotherapy (Kircanski et al., 2012 ) and education (Brackett et al., 2019 ). Computing (Ong et al., 2019 ) is increasingly seeking to understand the impact of language and emotion. Finally, a better understanding of the relationship between language and emotion can weigh in on an understanding of the human condition, more generally (Jackson et al., 2020 ). These are ultimately interdisciplinary questions that we as affective scientists are especially well poised to address, and I look forward to what we continue to learn as affective science continues to expand.

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Lindquist, K.A. Language and Emotion: Introduction to the Special Issue. Affec Sci 2 , 91–98 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00049-7

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Thinking and Intelligence

Language and thinking, learning objectives.

• Explain the relationship between language and thinking

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 15th 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 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??

Figure 1. These two works of art depict saudade. (a) Saudade de Nápoles, which is translated into “missing Naples,” was painted by Bertha Worms in 1895. (b) Almeida Júnior painted Saudade in 1899.

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).

Language does not completely determine our thoughts—our thoughts are far too flexible for that—but habitual uses of language can influence our habit of thought and action. For instance, some linguistic practice seems to be associated even with cultural values and social institution. Pronoun drop is the case in point. Pronouns such as “I” and “you” are used to represent the speaker and listener of a speech in English. In an English sentence, these pronouns cannot be dropped if they are used as the subject of a sentence. So, for instance, “I went to the movie last night” is fine, but “Went to the movie last night” is not in standard English. However, in other languages such as Japanese, pronouns can be, and in fact often are, dropped from sentences. It turned out that people living in those countries where pronoun drop languages are spoken tend to have more collectivistic values (e.g., employees having greater loyalty toward their employers) than those who use non–pronoun drop languages such as English (Kashima & Kashima, 1998). It was argued that the explicit reference to “you” and “I” may remind speakers the distinction between the self and other, and the differentiation between individuals. Such a linguistic practice may act as a constant reminder of the cultural value, which, in turn, may encourage people to perform the linguistic practice.

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)

Link to Learning

Learn more about language, language acquisition, and especially the connection between language and thought in the following CrashCourse video:

You can view the transcript for “Language: Crash Course Psychology #16” here (opens in new window) .

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• Paragraph on pronoun drop. Authored by : Yoshihisa Kashima . Provided by : University of Melbourne. Located at : http://nobaproject.com/textbooks/wendy-king-introduction-to-psychology-the-full-noba-collection/modules/language-and-language-use . Project : The Noba Project. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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Observation

The littlest linguists: new research on language development.

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How do children learn language, and how is language related to other cognitive and social skills? For decades, the specialized field of developmental psycholinguistics has studied how children acquire language—or multiple languages—taking into account biological, neurological, and social factors that influence linguistic developments and, in turn, can play a role in how children learn and socialize. Here’s a look at recent research (2020–2021) on language development published in Psychological Science . 

Preverbal Infants Discover Statistical Word Patterns at Similar Rates as Adults: Evidence From Neural Entrainment

Dawoon Choi, Laura J. Batterink, Alexis K. Black, Ken A. Paller, and Janet F. Werker (2020)

One of the first challenges faced by infants during language acquisition is identifying word boundaries in continuous speech. This neurological research suggests that even preverbal infants can learn statistical patterns in language, indicating that they may have the ability to segment words within continuous speech.

Using electroencephalogram measures to track infants’ ability to segment words, Choi and colleagues found that 6-month-olds’ neural processing increasingly synchronized with the newly learned words embedded in speech over the learning period in one session in the laboratory. Specifically, patterns of electrical activity in their brains increasingly aligned with sensory regularities associated with word boundaries. This synchronization was comparable to that seen among adults and predicted future ability to discriminate words.

These findings indicate that infants and adults may follow similar learning trajectories when tracking probabilities in speech, with both groups showing a logarithmic (rather than linear) increase in the synchronization of neural processing with frequent words. Moreover, speech segmentation appears to use neural mechanisms that emerge early in life and are maintained throughout adulthood.

Parents Fine-Tune Their Speech to Children’s Vocabulary Knowledge

Ashley Leung, Alexandra Tunkel, and Daniel Yurovsky (2021)

Children can acquire language rapidly, possibly because their caregivers use language in ways that support such development. Specifically, caregivers’ language is often fine-tuned to children’s current linguistic knowledge and vocabulary, providing an optimal level of complexity to support language learning. In their new research, Leung and colleagues add to the body of knowledge involving how caregivers foster children’s language acquisition.

The researchers asked individual parents to play a game with their child (age 2–2.5 years) in which they guided their child to select a target animal from a set. Without prompting, the parents provided more informative references for animals they thought their children did not know. For example, if a parent thought their child did not know the word “leopard,” they might use adjectives (“the spotted, yellow leopard”) or comparisons (“the one like a cat”). This indicates that parents adjust their references to account for their children’s language knowledge and vocabulary—not in a simplifying way but in a way that could increase the children’s vocabulary. Parents also appeared to learn about their children’s knowledge throughout the game and to adjust their references accordingly.

Infant and Adult Brains Are Coupled to the Dynamics of Natural Communication

Elise A. Piazza, Liat Hasenfratz, Uri Hasson, and Casey Lew-Williams (2020)

This research tracked real-time brain activation during infant–adult interactions, providing an innovative measure of social interaction at an early age. When communicating with infants, adults appear to be sensitive to subtle cues that can modify their brain responses and behaviors to improve alignment with, and maximize information transfer to, the infants.

Piazza and colleagues used functional near-infrared spectroscopy—a noninvasive measure of blood oxygenation resulting from neural activity that is minimally affected by movements and thus allows participants to freely interact and move—to measure the brain activation of infants (9–15 months old) and adults while they communicated and played with each other. An adult experimenter either engaged directly with an infant by playing with toys, singing nursery rhymes, and reading a story or performed those same tasks while turned away from the child and toward another adult in the room.

Results indicated that when the adult interacted with the child (but not with the other adult), the activations of many prefrontal cortex (PFC) channels and some parietal channels were intercorrelated, indicating neural coupling of the adult’s and child’s brains. Both infant and adult PFC activation preceded moments of mutual gaze and increased before the infant smiled, with the infant’s PFC response preceding the adult’s. Infant PFC activity also preceded an increase in the pitch variability of the adult’s speech, although no changes occurred in the adult’s PFC, indicating that the adult’s speech influenced the infant but probably did not influence neural coupling between the child and the adult.

Theory-of-Mind Development in Young Deaf Children With Early Hearing Provisions

Chi-Lin Yu, Christopher M. Stanzione, Henry M. Wellman, and Amy R. Lederberg (2020)

Language and communication are important for social and cognitive development. Although deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children born to deaf parents can communicate with their caregivers using sign language, most DHH children are born to hearing parents who do not have experience with sign language. These children may have difficulty with early communication and experience developmental delays. For instance, the development of theory of mind—the understanding of others’ mental states—is usually delayed in DHH children born to hearing parents.

Yu and colleagues studied how providing DHH children with hearing devices early in life (before 2 years of age) might enrich their early communication experiences and benefit their language development, supporting the typical development of other capabilities—in particular, theory of mind. The researchers show that 3- to 6-year-old DHH children who began using cochlear implants or hearing aids earlier had more advanced language abilities, leading to better theory-of-mind growth, than children who started using hearing provisions later. These findings highlight the relationships among hearing, language, and theory of mind.

The Bilingual Advantage in Children’s Executive Functioning Is Not Related to Language Status: A Meta-Analytic Review

Cassandra J. Lowe, Isu Cho, Samantha F. Goldsmith, and J. Bruce Morton (2021)

Acommon idea is that bilingual children, who grow up speaking two languages fluently, perform better than monolingual children in diverse executive-functioning domains (e.g., attention, working memory, decision making). This meta-analysis calls that idea into question.

Lowe and colleagues synthesized data from studies that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual participants between the ages of 3 and 17 years in executive-functioning domains (1,194 effect sizes). They found only a small effect of bilingualism on participants’ executive functioning, which was largely explained by factors such as publication bias. After accounting for these factors, bilingualism had no distinguishable effect. The results of this large meta-analysis thus suggest that bilingual and monolingual children tend to perform at the same level in executive-functioning tasks. Bilingualism does not appear to boost performance in executive functions that serve learning, thinking, reasoning, or problem solving.

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Elika Bergelson’s Quest Into Infants’ Language Development 

Elika Bergelson, an associate developmental psychology professor at Harvard University, is known for her work on language acquisition, cognitive development, and word learning in infants. Her key research focuses on how infants learn language from the world around them. 

Teaching: Ethical Research to Help Romania’s Abandoned Children 

An early intervention experiment in Bucharest can introduce students to the importance of responsive caregiving during human development.

Silver Linings in the Demographic Revolution 

Podcast: In her final column as APS President, Alison Gopnik makes the case for more effectively and creatively caring for vulnerable humans at either end of life.

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Psychology Discussion

Essay on language: definition, structure and characteristics.

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In this essay we will discuss about Language. After reading this essay you will learn about: 1. Definition of Language 2. Structure of Language 3. Characteristics.

Essay # Definition of Language:

The term language is derived from the Latin word language which means tongue. While the need to express one’s desires, interests, feelings and emotions is inborn, the ability to communicate with others through language is learned or acquired. Acquisition of language begins with the initial cries, grunts, grons, and gasps of the neonate.

With growth of age babbling starts. All these are transformed in to the use of single words, two words and then to three words sentences and finally into well formed sentences. Words are symbols of reality and they are used to symbolize concepts and manipulate knowledge concerning reality.

A language ordinarily is an elaborate system of specialized verbal symbol generally accepted and used in the transmission of meaning. The human child acquires a great amount of reception learning through language itself.

Language also helps greatly in learning in the transmission of cultures traditions, love, sympathy attitudes and aspirations of social beings. Mowrer (1954) emphasizing the importance of language has thus remarked “Language makes it possible for its users to have various experience, to learn through and from the learning of others and this I see is the essence of education.”

It is through language that cultures and traditions are passed on to the next generation, to the children and to students. The never ending transmission of culture and heritage from generation to generation is done basically through language and without language, the cultural stream cannot flow properly.

Bruner (1964) has referred to language as a Cultural technique upon which the phylogenetic and Ontogentic development of human intelligence depends. Besides Communicating one’s own feeling and experience with another person other aims of language are to learn to gain knowledge, to fulfill various needs and above all to relationship with others.

Brownfled, McCarthy and Vincent holds that speech is a type of activity through which man builds his world, becomes sociable and helps others. Language makes a man polished and by and large, language helps in the healthy development of personality.

According to Encyclopedia America, Language is a faculty and ability possessed by normal human beings and by other species of using a spoken and written references to represent mental phenomena or events. According to Soffettic language refers to “The systematized set of vocal habits by means of which the members of a human society interact in terms of their culture.”

Sapir (1921) is of view that “language is a purely human method of communication through a system of voluntarily produced symbols” Ruddell (1974) defines language as a system represented by sound symbols with conventional meanings hared by members of a linguistic group.” The importance of language cannot be undermined in the society.

The acquisition of words is essential for abstraction, concept formation, all higher learning, cognitive growth processes. In simple terms language may be said to be a means of communication through conventional symbols.

Language has three major dimensions such as:

(1) Content, which refers to the meaning of any written or spoken language.

(2) Form, which is the particular symbol used to represent the Content, the sound the word and the grammar.

(3) Use-which is referred to the social inter-change or exchange between two people.

Essay # Structure of Language :

The structure of language has three aspects:

(1) Phonemes

(2) Horphems

(3) Syntex.

1. Phonemes:

Phonemes refers to the basic source used in any language. The letters of the alphabets in English language have 26 Corresponding basic sounds in speech i.e. one letter for each distinguishable speech sound.

2. Morphems:

When Phonemes are combined into large units, they are called morphemes. Thus, Morphemes are smallest meaningful spoken units. A morphem is a language unit that cannot be broken down further without loosing or altering its meaning. A single morphem may consist of any syllable or several syllables.

The rules for combining morpheme (words) into grammatically correct sentences are called syntex. Syntex is based on linguistic analysis of sentence formation. The ultimate purpose of syntex is to understand how the meaning of sentences is conveyed by the speaker to the listener.

Each language has its own rules governing the combination of phonemes, permitting some combinations and prohibiting others. In order to understand any language one has to understand both meaning and structure.

Essay # Characteristics of Language :

A language has the following characteristics:

1. Language is a human attribute.

2. It is partly acquired, but largely instinctive.

3. It is verbal, symbolic and primarily oral in nature.

4. Language is a systematic and patterned behaviour having definite structure and form. The speaker cannot indiscriminately change the sequence of words.

5. Language has individual and social significance since it is a primary tool of communication.

6. Language is a system actualized as sounds or phonemes.

7. Language has melody, rhythm, pitch, stress and junctare.

8. The relationship between symbol and meaning is conventional arbitrary, learned and traditional.

9. Language is a open system allowing the speaker to say new utterances that may never have been said before.

Some features of children’s experience are vital to the learning of the structure of language. These features are initiation, comprehension and production. The relationship between these three processes are of major importance than their individual contributions.

1. Initiation:

A child repeats utterances produced by his parents. He imitates the pronunciation of his parents or baby seater or aaya and readily accepts the speech pattern and pronunciation made by persons in his immediate environment. Electronic medias like Radio. Television etc. play important role here.

2. Comprehension:

This includes the correct association of meaning with word by symbols, the selection of the correct meaning suggested by the context, the organisation and retention of meanings, the ability to reason smaller idea segment and the ability to group the meaning of a larger unitary idea.

3. Production:

It refers to utterances which are of initiation, which are grammatical and internally principled and which bear some relation to nonlinguistic features of the environment so that they are comprehensible to a listener. Initiation is found to be easier then comprehension which is again easier than production.

The former two are necessary conditions of the later. While initiation involves a perceptual motor skill only and hence easiest, comprehension and production both require awareness of meaning. Further production demands utterances while comprehension simply requires pointing.

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Determinism Freewill Issues and debates Essay 16 Mark Model Answer AQA Psychology New Spec

Subject: Psychology

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

23 August 2024

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A grade answer written by a teacher in line with AQA mark schemes, specification and approved textbooks.

AO1 = biological, environmental and psychic determinism, scientific emphasis on causality and hard determinism, soft determinism, free will.

AO3 = Balance of strengths and limitations relating to research studies, practical and ethical implications

Approximately one page long to reflect the amount a student can write under exam conditions.

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Issues and Debates Essays AQA Psychology A-Level Bundle

16 mark answers for the entire unit. All answers are based on the AQA specification, mark schemes and textbooks. Answers include AO1 (description) AO2 (application to units studied in the course) and AO3 (evaluation). References to methodological criticisms, issues and debates and practical applications are made where appropriate. All answers are A grade and can be differentiated to meet different abilities. Answers are approximately one page long to reflect the amount a student can write under exam conditions.

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