UNIT 3

LANGUAGE & THE BRAIN

HUMAN BRAIN
• It is common knowledge that the brain
controls humans actions, e.g. what the
muscles do in the human body; place of
conscious thought; produce the idea as an
utterance in our language.
• We, however, still do not fully understand
how the brain operates between our
thoughts and our linguistic expression of
them.
• In this unit we will take a very basic look at
the structures in the brain that are
involved in language comprehension and
production.
We’ll briefly :
•discuss the biology of the human brain;
•discuss theories of learning;
•distinguish between different styles of
learning;
•discuss different methods by which the
human brain is studied;
•compare different theories of learning;
•explain briefly the cognitive development of
the human mind, as well as the relationship
between language, speech and thought.
1. Important Issues in Relation to Lang.
& the Brain
a. Comparison
 Let’s make a comparison between the brains of
animals to that of humans to see what enables
humans to learn language.
 Nativists = a human child is born with potential to
acquire language - inherited it from his/her
ancestors. (Nativist theories in Unit 7.)
 Claim: Humans can use lang. probably because
their brains are structured differently from those of
primates, (i.e. chimpanzees).
 These structural differences do not necessarily
prove that the Nativist theory is right.
 Option: We can approach the issue from a
cognitivist angle;
 Suggests that differences in the operation
of the human brain enabled us to evolve
language when other species did not.
• Cognitivism is a learning theory that
focusses on how information is received,
organized, stored and retrieved by the
mind.
• This theory considers the mind as an
information processer, like a computer.
1. Important Issues …… (continued)
b. Localisation - Where is language located in the brain?
Scholars: every normal child successfully acquires an
L1, despite his or her intelligence and learning style.
This suggests, language is an independent faculty,
not part of our general powers of thought and reason.
Evidence for this hypothesis - people still acquired
their L1, despite serious learning difficulties.
Therefore, it’s worth finding out how language relates
to the other operations of the brain.
 Important Issues in Relation to
Lang. & the Brain cont….
c. Lateralisation

•Is there a difference in the way the right

side and the left side of the brain contribute
to language?
•At what age does the difference become
established?
 c. Lateralisation cont…
The human brain is divided into a left and right hemisphere.
Lateralization of brain function means certain mental
processes are mainly specialised to one side or the other.

Specific processes are specialised to one hemisphere.

E.g.: both sides of the brain perform functions related to
language.
But in most people, grammar and vocabulary are localised
to the left side of the brain, while understanding the
emotional content of language is a function of the right
hemisphere.
Questions: Does right and left side of the brain contribute
differently to language?
At what age is the difference established?
Early evidence: damage to left side of the brain impaired
language acquisition and use more than damage to the right.
Where the damage happened before the age of 5, the
sufferer sometimes fully recovered powers of speech.
The results from research into brain injuries led to a theory
that in infancy, the relationship between the two parts of the
brain is flexible enough for language to relocate itself to the
right hemisphere when the left side is injured.
New discussion: Does this period of flexibility of
hemispheres proof a critical period for learning an L1, after
which a child cannot achieve full competence? (We will
look at this aspect of Critical Period Hypoth. in detail in Unit
8 in this study guide.)
 2. Biology of the Brain
In order to understand the processes of language
acquisition, language learning and language use, it
will be good if we have some knowledge of the
biology of the human brain.

SELF-STUDY
 4. Theories of Learning
4.1 Imitation:
Assumption: Children learn lang. by imitating adult speech.
•Ervin-Tripp (1964): found that children’s imitations never
contained new structures, but were either on the same
level with their spontaneous speech or even simpler.
•Other studies - children differ much in the amount that
they imitate. Some imitate frequently, others hardly ever
do.
•Only imitate structures which have already begun to
appear in their spontaneous speech.
•Conclude: imitations offer no mechanisms to acquire new
and more complex structures.
•Mainly, imitation is used to acquire new vocabulary (imitate
new words).
4.2 Reinforcement:
Children might learn language when they are
encouraged positively to use the same utterances that
adults structure and use.
Again, children might be discouraged and corrected
whenever their utterances are different from that of the
adult’s.
This view of learning receives little support because:
Adults do not focus on how children say things as long
as they are comprehensible.
They encourage talk but rarely correct utterances, except
occasionally for truth & pronunciation.
Rare occasions when grammar was corrected were
ineffective.
Child: Leaves is always blue.
Parent: No, my darling, they are GREEN. (Not: Leaves ARE
green)
Reinforcement is, thus, not the method through which
children learn the more complicated structures used by adult
speakers of the language. (See explanation p.63)

4.3 Hypothesis testing:

Children use what people say to form hypotheses about
how ideas are expressed in the target language.
E.g., children might form the hypothesis that the idea of
‘more than one object’ is expressed by the addition of –s
at the end of the name of the specific object.
4.3 Hypothesis testing cont…
For a child, the hypothesis expressed by a rule:
Noun + ‘more than one’ = noun + s
results in plurals like shoes, cats, houses, but also
mans, mouses and tooths.
So, systematic errors like mans and mouses give us
the strongest evidence that children learn language
largely by testing the hypotheses about:
structures and the function of words and structures
by finding out how well listeners understand them
when they use these words and structures.
 5. Styles of Learning

• We will now look at specific styles of

learning which will help us a great deal
when we want to understand the
processes of language acquisition and
language learning.
 5. Styles of Learning
•Referential style
•Holistic/gestalt style
•Inductive style
•Deductive style
•Field independence/field dependence
•Ambiguity tolerance
 Summary: Styles of Learning
5.1 Referential style –
• This is when infants acquire vocabulary.
• This reflects a strategy of naming things.
• Referential infants are said to respond well to
contacts with adults and so build up their
language in a bottom-up way.
• In this way they are relying on single words which
are later-on put together to form sentences.

5.2 Holistic or Gestalt style –

• Some infants manifest a holistic or Gestalt style.
• In this style they acquire chunks of language
which they later deconstruct into single words.
5.3 Inductive style - one takes an example of something and then
generalise it to other things; (e.g. dogs & cats = 4 legged pets with
fur, so all four-legged things can be pets)

5.4 Deductive style - applying language rules that one knows to

situations of use; (Past tense = verb + ed, so past for swim =
swimmed)
Summary: Styles of Learning

5.5 Field independence/field dependence

- Do you remember those pictures in
children’s magazines where you were
asked to look at two pictures that
apparently look the same, and then spot
the differences between them? If you
looked carefully you could soon spot
some of the differences, if not all.
 Summary: Styles of Learning
5.5 Field independence –
reflects an ability to perceive particular relevant
items/factors in a ‘field’ of distracting elements; e.
g.
find the differences between two pictures. (for lang.
learning, ppl. who favour this learning style have
characteristics of being independent, competitive, self-
confident persons)
• This kind of learning seems to be closely
related to classroom learning that involves
analysis, attention to details and
mastering the exercises, drills and other
activities.
 Summary: Styles of Learning
• Field dependence - one is dependent on the total
field so that the parts embedded within the field are
not easily seen; (empathetic, socialized people)
• These people tend to be more socialised, and
tend to get their self-identity from persons
around them.
• They are usually also more empathetic and
perceptive of the feelings of others.
• Because of their empathy, social outreach
and perception of others, they tend to be
successful in learning the communicative
aspects of L2.
 Summary: Styles of Learning
5.6 Ambiguity tolerance –
This has to do with preparedness to accept new ideas
that are different from what you know and believe as
true.
Research has found that:
• language learners with high degree of ambiguity tolerance
are slightly more successful in certain lang. tasks, e.g.
problem-solving and decision-making.
• they are more confident in their decisions, improve
performance, and focus on advantageous results (Arquero et
al., 2017).
• tolerance of ambiguity may be an important factor in L2
learning.
 6. Cognitive Development
Current research reveal that children have complex
cognitive abilities at a very early age.
Thus, learning language is a significant
accomplishment of early childhood.
•Psychologist Lev Vygotsky - child’s sociocultural
environment plays an important role in how they
develop cognitively;
•Language acquisition is a crucial part of cognitive
development;
•after acquiring language, cognitive development
depends on interactions with adults, cultural norms, &
environmental circumstances;
 6. Cognitive Development cont…
• Children use language to control their own
behaviour.
• They start to engage in private speech after
acquiring language skills and learning the rules
of their culture.
• They first talk to themselves out loud, then to
others.
• Changes in cognitive skills are related to
intellectual growth and age.
• All children acquire language in all cultures at
about the same time.
• Language is tool for:
 Communication
 Self Expression
 Learning

Now, the relationship between language speech

& thought
 7. Language, Speech & Thought
Question: Can we separate language, speech and
thought?
There is still no definite answer.

A Russian scientist (1863):

•When a child thinks, he invariably talks at the same
time. Thought in five-year olds is mediated through
words or whispers, surely through movements of the
tongue and lips, which is also very frequently [perhaps
always, but in different degrees] true of the thinking of
adults.
Noam Chomsky
So the obvious hypothesis
is that our language is the
result of the unfolding of a
genetically determined
program.
Language
•Term- “natural language” is a
type of human thought
process which creates & uses
language.
•Derived from Latin lingua, "
language, tongue,"
•Language is humans’ primary
means of communication.
(Spoken, Written & Sign
language)
•Transmitted through learning.
 Speech
• Every speech is a mixture of thought and
language, i.e. idea and expression.
• Recognizing speech begins with the sound
signal and the process of hearing the sound.
• Speech is discovered in terms of the speech
production and speech perception of the sounds
used in spoken language.
• Research: to know how a human listens, they
recognize speech sounds and use this
information to understand spoken language.
 Thought
• Humans construct a common basis of logic or
reason.
• Talking is just an incidental process concerned
strictly with communication.
• Thought is structurally bound to language: "
linguistic order embraces all symbolic processes,
all processes of reference and of logic" (Whorf,
252)
• Language influences both thought and
perception.
 Thought
We can talk about three different
interactions when we investigate the
complex relationships between language
and thinking:
•First, the existence of language as a
cognitive process affects the system of
thinking.
•Second, thinking comes before language,
and the learning of a language interacts with
the conceptual process that is formed
before language use.
 Thinking without language
•Despite language and thought being closely
tied to each other, the expression of thought
is not always achieved with words.
•Thinking continues without verbal language.
E.g., people with aphasia (having trouble
speaking due to brain damage) can have
complex thinking structures despite the
problems in their expressing abilities.
•Research on brain-injured patients shows
that they can express their thoughts in a
non-verbal language.
 Thinking before language
• The best example to understand whether
thought or cognitive processes exist
before language is research on babies’
comprehension of concepts.
• Babies can categorize objects and actions,
understand the cause and effect,
relationship between events, and see the
goals in a movement, and how they may
change with language.
 Thought
• Benjamin Whorf & Sapir studied Native American
languages.
• Whorf’s hypothesises - Thought is strongly based
on language [supported with examples form
Hopi (Native American language)].
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Language determines
the categories and content of thought.
• Therefore, we can argue that the language
we speak not only facilitates thought
communication, but also shapes and
diversifies thinking.
 Thinking with language

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that:

•the grammatical and more verbal structure
of a person's language influences how they
perceive the world.
•language either determines or influences
one's thoughts.
•E.g., different words mean various things in
other languages. Not every word in all
languages has an exact one-to-one
translation in a foreign language.
• Can we understand a concept that does not
exist in our language?
• E.g., the German word “schadenfreude”
consists of the words “schaden (evil)” and
“freude (pleasure), and it means “being
pleased because others experience bad
things.”
• Does it mean that we do not understand this
feeling, or we have not experienced it
because no word in English gives the same
meaning?
 Thought

• Language is a symbolic tool that we use to

communicate our thoughts as well as
represent our cognitive processes.
• Language is the mirror of thinking, and it is
one of the ways in which we communicate
our rich cognitive world.
• We may see the world within the
boundaries of our language, and we think
that way.
• But, we can conclude that language does
The End of Unit 3.