The greatest accomplishment of man is the ability to have a complex thougths and communicate them through language. Thinking includes a wide range of mental activities such as to imagine or represent objects and events that are not physically present. The building blocks of thoughts are called concepts.
What is the nature of concepts?
To have a concept of something is to know its common properties. A knowledge of these common properties has an enormous impact on how we deal with objects around us. Concepts of activities like eating, concepts of states like being young; of abstract things like beauty, or number concept like 4, are some examples.
While some properties will be common to all instances of the concepts, others will be characteristic only of the more typical instances. The relation between concepts is represented in a hierarchy of concepts.
How are concepts acquired by children and adults?
Children aqquire concepts by their first use of words.
1. Children begin to name things at about one year. At this period they already have concepts about their parents and household pets before they know the names of them. They relate the knowledge to words that adults use.
2. A 2-year old child may often pick out only one or two properties of a concept when a whole cluster of properties is relevant. Example: When he hears the name "doggie" in the presence of a dog, he focuses on the fact that is has four legs and moves. He hypothesizes these two features and applies the term to cat and cows. This means that he overextends the meaning to other animals. Overextension decreases as the child adds more properties to the word's meaning.
3. Adults also use hypothesis testing when acquiring new concepts.
How are thoughts communicated?
Thoughts are expressed in sentences. Such thoughts often take the form of propositions with each proposition containing a subject and predicate.
Simple thoughts can be combines into simple ones. We extract propositions from a sentence by breaking the sentence into phrases, with each phrase corresponding to either the subject or the predicate.
How do we produce and interpret speech sounds?
In speaking we use the lips, tongue, mouth, and vocal cords to produce sounds. The words of a sentence are built from units called phonemes and morphemes. A phoneme is a category of speech sounds, while a morphene is the smallest linguistic unit that carries meaning. Children seem to come into the world preset to learn phonemes but it takes them several years to learn the rules for combining phonemes into words.
How do children learn to form sentences?
Children go through several stages. They begin with one-word utterances. Then they move on to two-word telegraphic speech, and then elaborate their noun and verb phrases while acquiring the appropriate grammatical morphemes. Children seem to go through the same stages in the same order.
Generally, children learn to utter sentences by imitation, conditioning, and hypothesis testing. Operating principles give the child a rough guide to analyzing adult's utterances. Adults and older children contribute to the learning process by simplifying their speech when talking to youngsters. When speaking to a 2-year old, we tend to use sentences that are short and speak at half the normal, speed. We also avoid complex constructions.
Some of our language - learning abilities may be innate. It is difficult to distinguish between innate and learned aspects of a complex behavior like language.
Can other species learn our language?
Some experts acknowledge that other species have communication system but these are qualitatively different from those of the human species. These may have been due to limitations in the vocal abilities are in the case of the chimpanzees, our closet evolutionary relations in the animal kingdom.
How else can one's thoughts be expressed aside from language?
Not all thoughts are expressed in language. Others are manifested as visual images. These images are found in perceptions. Images of objects and places have visual details. We may also perform mental operations on these images. Scientists, artists, and writers produce their creative work through visual thinking.
What is the nature of communication?
Communication makes use of signals. One is called sign and the other is called symbol. Sign acquires meaning by the natural relation of events to each other. Example: Thunder is often the sign of rain to come. Symbol has been invented by human beings. A meaning is assigned to each symbol. Example: The colors of traffic signs. A symbol can take many forms: a picture, a sound, a spoken word. Almost all people use gesture of the hands and face as communication is language. A sign language is often used by the deaf.
What are the kinds of language?
Language can be either oral or written. Oral language developed many years before writing was invented. A growing child learns oral language first before the written one. The form of written language tends to be more repetitive and redundant than the written language.
How is language studied?
Linguistics is the general name for the study of language. The history of language and the relation of languages to each other is studied by the philologists or comparative linguists. Phoneticians study the sounds of a language. The rules that govern the structure of a language interest the grammarians. The meaning of words and sentences in a language are analyzed by the semanticists. Psycholinguists are psychologists who study how language is learned and how it functions in human thinking.
