Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [237]
A bit of research evidence about the role of language in thought: Prekindergarten children were shown three black squares and told to choose one; if they chose the largest, they were rewarded. Once they had learned to choose the largest, they were shown three new squares, the smallest of which was the same size as the former largest one; again it was the largest that was rewarded. But the children had no mental symbols with which to tell themselves to “always choose the largest” and kept picking the size that had previously been rewarded, even though it now brought no reward. Kindergarten and older children, however, were quickly able to tell themselves to choose “the largest one,” regardless of the actual size of the square.29
More complex and advanced problems are also easier to solve if words are used to guide thought. A group of nine- and ten-year-olds was instructed to think out loud while trying to solve difficult problems involving moving disks from one circle to another in the fewest moves; another group did not receive these instructions. The group that thought out loud solved the problems faster and more efficiently than the silent group; the deliberate use of words caused them to think of new reasons for trying one method or another and thus helped them find correct solutions.30
Language acquisition: Developmentalists and psycholinguists (psychologists interested in language acquisition and use) have spent a great deal of time in recent decades listening to children speak, calculating how rapidly they learn new words, tracking the kinds of mistakes and corrections they make, and so on. Among the findings is that children develop or acquire new forms (word endings, forms of verbs, prepositions) in a relatively uniform sequence. Between two and four their vocabularies increase from a few hundred words to an average of twenty-six hundred. (They acquire fifty or more per month.) They first imitate verb forms they hear, then generalize on verb endings, reasonably (but wrongly) assuming that language has regularities throughout (“I taked a cookie,” “I seed the birdie”), and only slowly learn to use irregular verb forms. They stubbornly cling to their grammatical errors, as in this bit of dialogue reported by one psycholinguist:
CHILD: Nobody don’t like me.
MOTHER: No, say, “Nobody likes me.”
CHILD: Nobody don’t like me. (eight repetitions of this interchange)
MOTHER: No, now listen carefully; say, “Nobody likes me.”
CHILD: Oh! Nobody don’t likes me.31
They correct their errors by themselves when they are good and ready. Apparently they acquire many elements of grammar that they do not use until, at some moment, they mentally compare what they are saying to some stored knowledge and see the discrepancy.
JAMIE (nearly seven): I figured something you might like out.
MOTHER: What did you say?
JAMIE: I figured out something you might like.32
The most significant advance in the study of language acquisition concerns the means by which children understand syntax—the arrangement of words in a sentence that denotes their relationship to one another and thus the meaning of the sentence. In 1957 B. F. Skinner published a book called Verbal Behavior, in which he explained the child’s acquisition of language entirely in terms of operant conditioning:when the child uses a word or sentence correctly, the parents or others approve, and that reward conditions the child to use it correctly the next time.
But in the same year Noam Chomsky, a brilliant young psycholinguist, presented a radically different analysis in his Syntactic Structures. He asserted that “there must be fundamental processes at work quite independently of ‘feedback’ from the environment”; the brain must have inborn capacities to make sense of language. As evidence, he pointed out that children produce innumerable sentences they have never heard, which makes imitation through conditioning seem a quite inadequate explanation of sentence formation. Furthermore, children