Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [353]
Today, many psycholinguists, as a result of their research, give more credit to environmental influences in language acquisition than Chomsky does. They stress, for instance, the informal language training provided by “motherese,” the special way mothers (and some fathers) talk to small children. Nevertheless, while many psycholinguists question details of Chomsky’s L.A.D. theory (which he himself has much qualified and modified over the years), most agree that human beings have a genetically determined ability to understand and acquire any language.
Psycholinguists have also explored other important questions about the relation of language to thought. Do we always or only sometimes think in words? Is thought possible without words? Do the words of our native language shape or limit our thinking? The issues have been much debated and much studied. A few highlights:
—The linguist Benjamin Whorf theorized in 1957 that thought is molded by the syntax and vocabulary of one’s native language, and offered cross-cultural evidence to prove his point. One of his examples was that the Hopi Indian language does not distinguish, at least not as we do, between past, present, and future (a rare exception to a nearly universal rule). Instead, a Hopi speaker indicates through inflections whether he or she is talking about an event that actually happened, one that is expected to happen, or about such events in general. Whorf and his followers accordingly maintained that the language we use shapes or influences what we see and think.62
—On the other hand, anthropologists have found that in many other cultures people have fewer color terms than English-speaking people but experience the world no differently. The Dani of New Guinea have only two color terms: mili (dark) and mola (light), but tests of speakers of Dani and other languages that lack many explicit color names have shown that their memory for colors and their ability to judge differences between color samples are much the same as our own. At least when it comes to color, they can think without words.63
—The studies of children’s thinking, carried out by Piaget and other developmental psychologists, show strong interactions between language and thought. Hierarchical categorization, for one thing, is a powerful cognitive mechanism that enables us to organize and make use of our knowledge; if we are told that an unfamiliar item in an ethnic grocery store is a fruit, says Philip Lieberman, we know at once that it is a plant, edible, and is probably sweet.64 This inferential capacity is built into the structure of language and acquired in the normal course of development. Studies show that children begin verbal categorization at about eighteen months, and that one of the results is the “naming explosion,” a phenomenon every parent has observed. Thus, says Lieberman, “particular languages do not inherently constrain human thought, because both capacities [language and thought] appear to involve closely related brain mechanisms.”65
The physical locations of some of those brain mechanisms were pinpointed through the study of aphasia, a speech disorder caused by an injury to or lesion in a specific part of the brain. A lesion in Wernicke’s Area, as we saw earlier, results in speech that is relatively fluent and syntactical but often nonsensical; victims either mangle or cannot find the nouns, verbs, and adjectives they want. Howard Gardner, a Harvard cognitive psychologist who has explored aphasia, has given this example, taken from a conversation he had with a patient:
“What kind of work have you done, Mr. Johnson?” I asked.
“We, the kids, all of us, and I, we were working for a long time in the… you know…it’s the kind of space, I mean place