Relationship between Language and the Mind

The main focus of psycholinguistic research in the 1960s was the wish to explore the
psychological reality of grammars produced by linguists, that is, to show that these in some way
mirrored what went on in the speaker’s and hearer’s minds. Linguists are disagreed whether
language is processed in a series of autonomous stages by autonomous components unaffected
by each other, or whether there is interaction between levels of processing. According to Clark
and Clark (1977), psycholinguistics includes the study of children’s acquisition of language.

Language production includes speaking and writing, but research on speaking predominates.
Speaking is one of the most complex cognitive, linguistic and motor skills. We make around
fifteen speech sounds per second, producing two or three words and involving the co-ordinated
use of around a hundred muscles (Levelt 1989). In most cases however, we are far less conscious
of the flow of sound than we are of the meaning we hope to be producing by means of the
sounds. We are more conscious of what we want to say than of the mechanisms involved in
saying it (Carroll 1999).

Planning an utterance involves selecting the information one wishes to share with the
interlocutor (for whatever purpose) and arranging the information in such a way that its topic and
focus are clear to the interlocutor, and so that it will attract their attention. An issue that is
pertinent in language and the mind borders on whether there is a relationship between the
language we speak and the way we think and conceptualize the world. One highly popular idea
holds that the structure of the language we speak does correlate with the way we think. This idea
can be attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), and more recently to Franz Boaz
(1858-1942) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941). The idea is now referred to as the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis, often simply called the Whorfian hypothesis (McGregor 2009). The Sapir-
Whorf Hypothesis makes the strong claim that language conditions our worldview and that
different speakers view the world along the lines laid down by their respective languages (Carrol,
1956). This means that language determines thought; thus different languages necessitate
different thoughts. This hypothesis can be illustrated with some typical Nigerian experiences e.g

(i) The colour system: three basic colours in Yoruba represent several colours in
English-pupa (red, purple, orange and brown); dudu (black, blue and green); funfun
(white and grey).

(ii) The kinship terms: many Nigerian languages have wider meanings for such words as
‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘husband’ and wife than English does.

(iii) The following sentences indicate the way speakers of the languages view their
relationship with the world:
 a.Yoruba

Ebi n pa mi (Compare: otutu n mu mi.)

Hunger [progressive] Cold [progressive] catch me

Kill me [marker] [marker]

b. Aguru na agu m. (Compare: Oyi na tu m)

Hunger [progressive] Cold [PROG] catch me

Beat me [marker]

c. Hausa

Ina jin yunwa. (Compare: Ina jin sanyi

I [progressive] feel I [PROG.] feel cold)

Hunger [marker]

d. English

I am hungry (Compare: I’ve caught cold

OR I feel hungry OR I have (a) cold)

If Whorf is right, it should be difficult to identify colours which a language does not have a name
for. But research has proven that Dani, a Guinea tribe, use only two colour terms (corresponding
to black and white, or, more accurately, dark and light), yet it was found that they could
recognise and distinguish between subtle shades of colours that their language had no names for
(e.g. pale blue vs turquoise). This suggests that the strong form of the hypothesis can’t be
maintained. Other experiments suggest, however, that people remember colours that are coded in
their language more easily than those which are not.

The strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is generally labelled linguistic determinism.
This holds that people from different cultures think differently because of differences in their
languages. A native speaker of Igbo for instance, Whorf claimed, perceives reality differently
from a native speaker of English because she uses a different language. Few sociolinguists would
accept such a strong claim, but most accept the weaker claim of linguistic relativity, that
language influences perceptions, thought, and, at least potentially, behaviour.

The main problem in assessing Whorf’s argument is the danger of inescapable circularity. We
observe that languages differ and conclude that the thought of their speakers also differs. But the
only evidence we have that their thought differs is the language they use. So investigating the
relationship between language and thought is a real challenge because the most obvious way to
access thought is through language. It is difficult to test how language influences ways of
thinking without using language as evidence of thought processes.

Aristotle declares that ‘speech is the representation of the mind’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica 10,
1978). In other words, language is the means of expressing thought. Thought is a complex
phenomenon that encompasses the knowledge that emanates from the mind or brain, either by
reason or sense experience.

Behaviourist and Mentalist Theories of Language of Language Acquisition

A major figure in early scientific psychology was Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), a man trained in
physiology who believed that it was possible to investigate mental events such as sensations,
feelings, and images by using procedures as rigorous as those used in natural sciences. Wundt
believed that the study of language could provide important insights into the nature of the mind.
Blumenthal (1970) refers to Wundt as the master psycholinguist because Wundt wrote
extensively about many different aspects of language. One of his contributions to
psycholinguistics was developing a theory of language production. He regarded the sentence, not
the word, as the primary unit of language and saw the production of speech as the transformation
of a complete thought process into sequentially organized speech segments.

Behaviourist Theory of Language Acquisition

Behaviourists prefer to speak of ‘verbal behaviour”. They believe that the behaviour of speaking
was the consequence of being raised in an environment in which correct language models were
present and in which children’s speech errors were corrected. The behaviourist, B. F. Skinner
argues that in teaching the young child to talk, the formal specifications upon which
reinforcement is contingent are at first greatly relaxed. Any response which vaguely resembles
the standard behaviour of the community is reinforced. When these begin to appear more
frequently, a closer approximation is insisted upon. In this manner, very complex verbal forms
may be reached. According to behaviourists, verbal behaviour could be conditioned by
reinforcement e.g. subtle signs of approval (such as nods) probably influence our choice of
words in conversations. Early linguists tended to emphasize behaviouristic treatments of
language, in which reference to mental states or processes was meticulously avoided.
Behaviourists had a strong commitment to the role of experience in shaping behaviour. Emphasis
was placed on the role of environmental contingencies (such as reinforcement and punishment)
and on the models present in the immediate environment. For them, verbal behaviour can be
explained in terms of environmental contingencies of reinforcement and punishment.

Behaviourists also researched into meaning. A number of behaviouristic accounts of meaning

were developed, most of which emphasized associations among words. They advanced the
theory called associative chain theory, which states that a sentence consists of a chain of
associations between individual words in a sentence. Each word in a sentence serves as a
stimulus for the next word, and thus the entire sentence is produced left to right. Lashley (1951)
argued against such a view, claiming that there is something more to the structure of a sentence
than the associations between adjacent words.

In later years of psycholinguistics, especially in the late 1950s, Noam Chomsky who is generally
regarded as the most influential figure in twentieth-century linguistics, played a powerful role in
how psychologists perceived language. He argued that the behaviourists’ accounts of language
were inadequate (Chomsky 1957, 1959). He supported his argument by advancing the following
sentences:

1. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

2. Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.

3. George picked up the baby.

4. George picked the baby up.

Chomsky suggested that associations between words could not possibly explain the existence
of sentences such as (1). Even though the associations between these words are almost non-
existent, the sentence is syntactically acceptable. But, if the words are presented backward, as
in sentence (2), it is not a sentence at all. It is part of our intuitive knowledge of the language
that sentences (3) and (4) are synonymous, but this simple fact poses problems for the
associative chain theory. Clearly, there is a relationship between pick and up in these
sentences, but the relationship is more complex in (4) than in (3) because the words are
separated. To comprehend the sentence, we must know that these words are part of a
linguistic unit, or constituent. Linguists call separate units, like those in sentence (4),
discontinuous constituents, and their existence suggests that there are long-range
dependencies among words in a sentence. Again a theory that stresses a simple association
between adjacent words is inadequate.

Chomsky has also argued that language acquisition cannot be explained in terms of
children’s language experience. His primary argument is called the poverty of stimulus
argument (Chomsky 1980). This argument states that there is not enough information in the
language samples given to children to fully account for the richness and complexity of
children’s language. Consider the sentences below from Caplan and Chomsky (1990):

5. John believes he is incompetent.

6. John believes him to be incompetent.

7. John wants him to win.

8. John wants Bill to see him.

Our knowledge of the language tells us that the ‘he’ in sentences (5) and the ‘him’ (8) could
refer to John, though they need not. In contrast, the ‘him’ in sentences (6) and (7) cannot
refer to John. It is doubtful that anyone’s parents systematically distinguished between the
‘him’ in sentences (6) and (7) versus the ‘him’ in sentence (8). In fact, most people would not
know how to explain such a difference. Chomsky’s argument is this: the language children
acquire is and subtle, and the sample of speech given to them during the course of language
development anything but complex. Therefore, although parents may assist the child’s
language development in some ways and influence the rate of development somewhat, the
pattern of development is based not on parental speech but on innate knowledge.

Mentalist Theory of Language Acquisition

The mentalist theory of language learning, developed in America by Noam Chomsky first
and later by Eric H. Lenneberg (a neuropsychologist), came up as a reaction against the
behaviouristic language learning theory, and contradicted its precedent at almost every point
of basic structure. The major principle of mentalistic language acquisition theory is that
‘everybody learns a language, not because they are subjected to a similar conditioning
process, but because they possess an inborn capacity which permits them to acquire language
as a normal maturational process’ (D.A. Wilkins, 1972:168). Chomsky (1965) claims that
there are innate properties of language because a child masters his native language in a very
short while in spite of the highly abstract nature of rules. He called this innate knowledge as
Language Acquisition Device (LAD). He insisted every normal human being is born into a
society with a LAD, which embodies the nature and the structure of human language. LAD is
what counts for language acquisition where in environment has got no importance for the
learning process at all. In fact, LAD offers an explanation for why kids develop competence
in learning in a relatively short time, just by being exposed to it, owning to the fact that every
normal human being is born with a LAD. LAD is made up of three features: Creativity,
Hypothesis Making Device (HMD) and Universal Grammar (UG). With HMD the child is
able to process both the imperfect and organized data that invade his or her auditory sense
and make hypotheses concerning what principles might underlie whatever regularities he/she
has observed in the data

The additional notion propounded by Mentalist language learning theory is that the learning
capacity of human being by definition is not only universal but also innate, and this innate
capacity is not something to be obtained socially. In other words, language learning is not
socially-oriented. Then language learning and its environment must be viewed as a
biologically acquired process rather than a result of social learning. In the end, Chomskyan
doctrine came up to support the fact that universals of language were a set of rules
programmed in the brains of only and only human infants.

Chomsky, who is the originator of the mentalist theory of language learning, made a serious
attack on the thesis and concepts established by B. F. Skinner’s behaviourist practice. His
principal criticism of Behaviourist language learning is based on the argument that a
language learning theory in the way behaviouristic psychology processes cannot account for
the development of language and its learning, owing to the following reasons:

1. Language learning is of inborn nature for the most part, and therefore ‘language is not a
habit structure’. In addition, language learning and development are a biological process,
having nothing to do with the results of social learning.

2. Analyzing and generalisations made by children are, in fact, production and application
of rules.

3. LAD is peculiar to human beings who use language, where as other animals do not. Since
all human beings learn their language successfully they have to possess some internal
capacity for language learning that animals do not own. Then this capacity cannot have
been acquired socially, therefore, it must be innate. Thus social factors have virtually no
function at all in learning languages.

4. Children quite often imitate the words and structures of their parents, but in many cases
children’s language indicate departures from the language used by adults.

To some extent, the mentalist theory seems to complement the behaviourist theory, whose
major principles are further clarified and then developed by mentalist theorists. Critics of the
mentalist theory are of the opinion that language acquisition is not totally of inborn nature
nor is it just a matter of biological make up. There is also an undeniable effect in language
learning coming from the social environment since infants grow up biologically in a social
environment from which they cannot be divorced. The presence of a mother and a father
establishes natural social environment. No one can learn to speak if there is no one around
them otherwise language learning will be a total failure.

Mentalists claim that language is internal, abstract and rule-governed. It is an obvious fact
that mentalist language theory is a clear-cut challenge to many claims of Behaviouristic
language use.
Language Impairment/Aphasia

Aphasia is an impairment of language function (as distinct from muscular paralysis of the speech
organs) due to brain damage, often as a result of a stroke, a tumour, or head injury. The original
evidence for Broca’s and Wernicke’s as language centres came from post mortem studies of
aphasic patients. Broca and Wernicke both found associations between certain types of aphasia
and damage to the region of the brains of their patients named after them. Language impairment
or disorder, also known as aphasia, is presumed to have as its cause some form of damage to
some specific site in the hemisphere where language is located. Steinberg (1993) reports that
aphasias are generally classified into two basic groups: Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia.
The groups indicate the respective areas of injury in the brain.

Broca’s Aphasia: In 1861, Paul Broca carried out autopsy on some aphasic patients and
discovered extensive damage in the area now known as Broca’s area. This results in impairments
in speech production. In Broca’s aphasia (also known as Agrammatic aphasia), the person
experiences difficulty in the production of speech and the almost exclusive use of lexical words
at the expense of grammatical morphemes, which are rarely used. Deaf patients with damage to
Broca’s area show similar deficits in sign language namely dysfluency and agrammaticism, but
relatively intact comprehension. This suggests that Broca’s area is specialized for language,
rather than speech. Broca’s aphasia is characterised by meaningful but shortened speech and
also occurs in writing. Grammatical inflections are often lacking, such as the third person present
tense ‘-s’ (John want tea) and the auxiliary ‘be’ (Daddy coming), as are articles, prepositions and
other function words. The speech is similar to that of children at the ‘telegraphic’ stage of speech
production. Broca’s aphasia has also recently been discovered to affect speech comprehension.
For example, a patient could understand the sentence “The mango that the girl is eating is
unripe”, particularly with regard to who is doing the eating. However, when presented with the
sentence “The boy that the girl is looking at is fat”, the patient gets confused because of the
syntactic relations ‘a boy can look at a girl’, and vice versa.

Wernicke’s Aphasia: Damage in the area called Wernicke’s area causes Wernicke’s aphasia or
fluent aphasia. It is characterized by severe difficulties in comprehension, but quite fluent
speech, which is often incomprehensible and may include nonsense words. Wernicke’s aphasia
is characterised by speech, which often resembles what is called nonsense speech or double-talk.
It sounds right and may be grammatical, but meaningless e.g. “I have been checking for last
month’s salary but they have stolen my property and my children. I am happy for them because
they don’t need forgiveness”. Also patients commonly provide substitutes for words on the basis
of similar sounds, associations or other features, e.g. ‘cell’ may elicit ‘shell’, or ‘prison’ or
‘room’. There may be word loss, e.g.: ‘It’s a?’
Conduction Aphasia: Wernicke also described a third type of aphasia called conduction
aphasia, in which the arculate fascilus (connecting Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) suffers
damage. Comprehension and fluency of the speech of conduction aphasics is usually little
affected. However, sufferers experience difficulties in repeating words spoken by another person,
and in motoring their own speech, thus leading to frequent hesitations and pauses. Other forms of
impairment have also been identified. In ‘pure word deafness’, a patient may be able to say the
words of a song correctly, but may not be able to say the words ordinarily. ‘Conduction
aphasia’ is characterized by a poor ability to repeat words despite relatively good
comprehension, e.g. the patient may say ‘puppy’ for ‘purple’. He/she may also have difficulty
with pronouncing a three syllable sentence such as ‘Li is here’ even ‘5-4-3-8-1’ correctly.

Anomic Aphasia

There is no evidence of any specific site for brain damage giving rise to anomic aphasia. This
type of aphasia manifests in a variety of different forms. Some people lose words for only
vegetables or just for inanimate objects. Some recognise nouns, but have difficulty with verbs.
Strangely, this does not necessarily extend to things perceived by other means, for example, by
touch or smell. Anomic aphasia involves problems in finding the proper words for spontaneous
speech, e.g. ‘Give me some uh...uh...uh... thing over there’.

Global aphasia refers to a terrible condition in which many or all aspects of language are
severely affected. Global Aphasia: Global aphasia involves disturbance to all language
functions, to all processing components. Global aphasia typically involves damage to large
portion of frontal and temporal lobes.

Dyslexia is a form of reading or writing disability in which the patient reads or writes backwards
(‘pin’ as ‘nip’) or confuses the orientation of letters (‘b’ for ‘d’, ‘p’ for ‘q’ and ‘u’ for ‘n’).

Lastly, speechlessness is a common symptom of stroke or apoplexy. Along with the inability to
speak, some form of paralysis on the right side of the body often occurs.

Language and the Brain/Language Localization

The brain, which is roughly spherical in shape, is a major constituent of the nervous system. It
features prominently in the study of human anatomy and physiology and receives the greatest
emphasis in the field of neurology. It coordinates (controls, integrates and regulates) all activities
of the senses and of the body. It is the seat of consciousness, sensations, emotions and other
higher mental processes. While the mind represents the vital object of knowledge to the
rationalist philosophers, the brain provides the basis of experience in the view of empiricists. In
psycholinguistics, however, both the mind and brain become relevant factors, which initiate and
regulate the knowledge and use of language.
Basic Structure of the Human Brain

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere;
these are connected by a bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum. Bodily experiences and
control are largely contra-lateral; that is, each hemisphere manages the opposite side of the
body. The outer layer of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is a layer about 2-4 millimetres in
thickness, made up of the cell bodies of several billion cells or neurons. Many cognitive
functions are located in the cortex. The cerebral cortex is deeply folded and fissured, and is
divided into four main lobes (in each hemisphere), the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the occipital
lobe and the temporal lobe. The brain stem controls the automatic functions necessary to keep
the body alive (e.g the beating of the heart), and there is also the cerebellum which helps to
control movement and cognitive processes that require precise timing. The branch of
psycholinguistics concerned with the brain is called neurolinguistics.

It is believed that certain cognitive functions are localized in certain regions of the brain.
Although there are disagreements concerning the precise details and extent, it seems certain that
language is localized to some degree. Thus, in most individuals the left hemisphere is more
dominant in language processing than the right. Most right-handed persons show left hemisphere
domination, as do most left-handers (though the proportion is slightly lower). This is
lateralization.

Two areas in the dominant hemisphere are particularly important in language processing:

Broca’s area, named after Paul Broca, a nineteenth-century French physician and
anthropologist, is a small patch in the anterior (front) part of the temporal lobe of the language-
dominant hemisphere about two centimetres across. If you put your finger to your head just
above the left temple, that’s about where it is. Broca’s area is believed to be associated with
speech production.

Wernicke’s area, named after the German physician Carl Wernicke, is a slightly larger area than
Broca’s, located further towards the posterior (back) of the brain just above and slightly behind
the left ear. Wernicke’s area is believed to be associated with speech comprehension. Broca’s
and Wernicke’s areas are connected by a bundle of nerves called the arculate fasciculus.

Investigators are not in universal agreement as to the extent to which language is localized in the
brain. There is evidence of a fair plasticity in the human brain, whereby one region can take over
the functions of another region that has been damaged. There is also evidence of considerable
variation among individuals.
Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance

Psycholinguists seem to agree that the ultimate goal of psycholinguistics is to produce a theory
that will adequately describe the knowledge that speakers have of their languages, i.e. the ability
of speakers to produce and understand sentences correctly. But the nature of this theory will be
controversial and there are three broad perspectives of this controversy: (a) the theory of
knowledge as competence, (b) the theory of knowledge as performance, and (c) the theory of
knowledge as competence and performance (behaviour). Chomsky’s formulations are conceived
in terms of ‘a’ above. In this regard, he conceives linguistic competence as grammatical
competence. According to him, competence is the knowledge that people have of the grammar of
their language and, as such, it is the goal of linguistics to describe this competence.

However, some psycholinguists and sociolinguists do not agree with Chomsky’s kind of
distinction which reduces competence to just ‘grammatical competence’. They argue that since
the child does not acquire the grammar of his language in isolation from the sociocultural context
of communication, but rather simultaneously acquire rules or systems of grammar and social
rules, describing competence in terms of grammatical competence will fail to represent the true
nature of human language. They then postulate the concept of ‘communicative competence’,
which should account for both the underlying rules of grammar and social rules of language
behaviour.

Skinner (1957), the behaviourist, denies any role to grammar and meaning in language learning
and unlike some other behaviourists like Osgood who recognize only semantics to play an
intermediary role between stimulus and response in language learning, Chomsky places grammar
(or syntax) in a central position in his study of language acquisition.

Linguistic behaviour is concerned with how native speakers acquire and utilize communicative
competence in a language, why certain speakers fail to acquire it and how non-native speakers
can acquire and utilize it. Performance has been described thus:

-observable linguistic behaviour i.e actual performance: features of actual performance include
those pertaining to linguistic knowledge (knowledge of grammatical rules or ‘grammatical
competence’), linguistic ability for use (knowledge of social rules or ‘social competence’ and
linguistic capacity (knowledge of production and reception rules-memory limitations and other
low sensory capacities.

-underlying linguistic behaviour, i.e potential performance: model rule or systems for describing
actual linguistic knowledge+ability+capacity (i.e grammatical competence+ social
competence+sensory capacity)

-actual performance minus grammatical competence