Linguistics and the Human Brain

Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain

• Pinker, a cognitive scientist, views language not as an isolated subject but as a lens into the human mind.
• Language is a defining human characteristic, facilitating cooperation and knowledge exchange.
• Language's evolution, brain mechanisms, and practical applications are crucial scientific questions.
• Language's inherent complexity and ability to express a vast array of thoughts are remarkable.
• The Tower of Babel story symbolizes how language enables human progress.
• Complex language exists across all studied societies, indicating a universal human capacity.
• 6,000+ languages emphasize language's diversity and complexity.

Language vs. Other Related Concepts

• Language differs from written language, which emerged much later. Alphabetic writing is considered a single invention.
• Descriptive grammar (how people speak) versus prescriptive grammar (rules for proper speech) are distinguished.
• Prescriptive grammatical rules often lack logic and historical grounding (e.g., splitting infinitives, double negatives). Historical context of language and dialect variations explain apparently illogical rules.
• Dialects like African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have sophisticated grammatical structures.

Language, Thought, and the Brain

• Thought exists beyond the confines of language.  Infants (and other mammals) communicate without language.
• Visual thinking and other non-linguistic cognitive processes demonstrate thought independently of language.
• Long-term memory primarily stores the gist/meaning of language, not the precise wording.
• Understanding language necessitates a rapid, subconscious non-linguistic processing.

Components of Language: Words

• Meaning is arbitrary, a learned association between symbol and concept (e.g., "duck").
• The human mental lexicon is large—high school graduates roughly have 60,000 words, potentially acquired at a rate of one per two hours from toddlerhood.
• This capacity highlights the remarkable memory for the meanings and sounds of arbitrary words.

Grammar and Creativity

• Chomsky's work emphasizes language's creative nature, the ability to produce and understand novel sentences.
• Language involves an internalized grammar or set of rules for assembling elements into new combinations rather than just memorizing sentences.
• Sentences are not simply chains of words, but have hierarchical structural organization
• Grammar underlies the vast number of potentially expressible thoughts.

Phrase Structure Rules

• Phrase-structure rules allow for expressing new meanings through familiar words/phrases.
• The combinatorial power of grammar produces an effectively infinite number of meaningful sentences.
• Grammatical structure, such as that observed in an incredibly long sentence provides a means of rendering sentences more difficult to comprehend.

Language Acquisition in Children

• Children naturally develop their own grammatical rules.
• Children express/apply grammatical rules even with phrases never explicitly heard from adults
• Child language errors, like overgeneralizing past tense rules, highlight instinctive rule learning.
• The Wug Test demonstrates children's intuitive grasp of grammatical rules in a controlled setting.

Universal Grammar

• Chomsky's "Poverty of the Stimulus" argument suggests the existence of an innate "universal grammar," a pre-programmed set of rules that guide language acquisition. This innate understanding of structure is evidenced through the child’s abilities.
• Universal grammar facilitates learning despite limited and incomplete data in the input to the child.

Language Variation and Comprehension Difficulties

• Language variations (like accents) arise from blending or adapting language rules.
• Difficulty in speech recognition/understanding for computers because of variability in pronunciation and the lack of segmentation between words. Word boundaries aren’t observable in the speech wave itself.
• Wordplay can exploit this absence.

Pragmatics and Language Context

• Pragmatics focuses on understanding language within context.
• The cooperative principle (conversational partners convey meaning truthfully and clearly) underpins effective communication.
• Language is not just words and rules but is frequently affected by context, relationships, and intentions.
• Language is deeply intertwined with human relationships and social norms.

Language, the Brain, and Computers

• Even basic sentences have implicit meaning based on context and common sense.
• Human language comprehension often surpasses current computer translation systems.
• Co-articulation and the lack of segmentation in speech are fundamental obstacles to automated speech recognition.

Broad Implications of Language Studies

• Language study helps us understand the human mind, human evolution, social behaviors and interactions, and the unique characteristics that define humans.
• Language and cognition intertwine, offering insight into the human experience.
• Language studies have practical applications (e.g., computer science, linguistics, law, etc.)