yesterday's--I'm sorry, on Monday's lecture.

One is that somebody came up after class and asked when the

preference for your own language emerges in development and

fortunately, studies pretty much exactly

this sort of infant understanding.

She knew the answer. There's been studies looking at

newborn babies finding that pretty much the moment they pop

out they favor their own language over other

language--over other languages. And this suggests that they are

listening while in utero, while in the womb,

to the rhythms of their language and developing a

preference for it. A second issue is,

I talked very briefly about a court case in which the person

was--said at a moment where someone else was pointing a gun

at a police officer, "Let him have it!"

and a police officer was killed. And that person was charged

with murder but I admitted I didn't actually know how things

turned out and was kind enough to do extensive research.

Well, he went to Wikipedia and [laughter]

found out the answer. The answer is he was tried and

found guilty for murder. He was then subsequently

pardoned. In fact, he was pardoned in

1988, which is really nice except he was executed in 1957.

But they did it into a movie. So, it's a movie.

Okay. So, I want to do today,

for the first part of the lecture, is continue the

language lecture and then move to perception,

attention, and memory. And what we had spoken about

was--We first talked about universals of language,

then moved to some detail about the different aspects of

language including phonology, morphology, and syntax.

We discussed the ways in which language does the amazing things

it does, including the fact that language has used arbitrary

science or sounds to convey concepts,

and that languages exploit a combinatorial system including

recursion to put together these symbols into a virtually

limitless set of meaningful sentences.

We then talked about development and made some

remarks about the developmental time course – talking about

the emergence of language from babies to – where babies are

really good at learning language to you who are not,

whose brains have atrophied, whose language capacities are

dead. Final issue is to shift to

animals. Now that we know something

about language, we could then ask do animals

use--possess the same sort of language?

And if not, can they learn it? Now, there is absolutely no

doubt at all that nonhuman animals possess communication

systems. This has been known forever and

is not a matter of controversy. And if you want to use the term

"language" to mean "communication," then the answer

is obviously "yes." Dogs and bees and monkeys have

language. If you want to use language

though in the more technical, narrow sense as anything that

has the properties that we discussed earlier,

using English and ASL and Spanish and so on as our

background, the answer's almost certainly "no."

Animal communication systems fall into sort of one of three

categories. Either there is a finite list

of calls, so vervet monkeys, for instance,

have a small list of calls to convey different warnings like

"attack from a snake" or "attack from a leopard."

There is a continuous analog signal.

So, bee dance, for instance,

works on this way. Bee dance communicates the

location of food sources but doesn't do it in any

syntactically structured way. Rather, the intensity of the

dance corresponds to the richness of the food source.

And then, you get things like random variation on a theme such

as birdsong. But what you don't find in any

real sense is phonology, morphology, syntax,

combinatorial systems or arbitrary names.

Now, this much is not particularly controversial.

There gets to be a lot of controversy though.

This is the summary about nonhuman communication systems.

It gets more controversial when we get to famous cases of

primates trained by humans such as Kanzi,

Nim Chimpsky, and other famous primates that

you may well have seen on the Discovery channel and other

venues. And this is fairly

controversial. If you read the Gray textbook,

while nothing in it is particularly inaccurate,

I think Gray is actually a little bit too credulous,

too believing in the claims that have been made about the

abilities of the animals. So many scientists argue,

for instance, that animals like Kanzi,

even if they can be said to be learning words at all,

learn very few of them. And it takes them extensive

years of training to learn, unlike a normally developing

child who could learn a word in a day or a word in an hour.

The utterances often have order but this order tends to be very

limited and lacks the recursive properties.

And in fact, the lack of recursion is not

controversial. Finally, the utterances of

chimpanzees--trained chimpanzees are extremely repetitive so what

you often see on TV and in documentaries is sort of a

sampling. And the sampling could often be

very impressive but if you take just what they say at random it

tends to look like this. This is typical chimpanzee

utterances just taken at random: "Nim eat, Nim eat.

Drink, eat, me Nim. Me gum, me gum.

Tickle me, Nim play. Me eat, me eat.

Me banana, you banana, me you give.

Banana me, me eat. Give orange,

me give, eat orange, me eat orange."

Lila Gleitman once commented that if any normally developing

child spoke like this, his parents would rush him

screaming to a neurologist. There's a broader question

here, which is, "Why would we ever expect a

chimpanzee to learn a human language?"

We don't normally expect one species to have the capacities

associated with another species. So, bats use echolocation to

get around and some birds navigate by the stars,

but there's not an active research program seeing if cats

can use echolocation or dogs could navigate by the stars.

And I think one reason why you might be tempted to think,

"well, of course chimps must be able to learn language" is

because you might be caught in the grips of some bad ideas

about language. So, one idea is you might say,

"Look. Chimps should use language

because chimps are so smart." But the response to this is,

"they are smart but we know that smart isn't enough."

We know that the human capacity for language is not totally a

result of smartness. There are smart children who,

due to some deficit in their language capacity,

don't speak or understand a language.

So, the smartness of chimpanzees does not in itself

demonstrate that they should be able to learn language.

You might also point out correctly that chimps are our

nearest evolutionary relatives, which is right,

so you--one would expect on the face of it--it's not

unreasonable to expect us to share a lot of abilities with

them. On the other hand,

we split from them a long time ago and plainly humans are

different from chimps. And there was five million

years either way and that's more than enough time for a language

capacity to evolve. Now, none of this is to say

that the study of nonhuman communication systems isn't

interesting. From my own--This is my

personal opinion I'll raise here.

From my own opinion, the study of the attempts to

try to teach chimpanzees, or gibbons, or gorillas,

a human language like ASL are misguided.

It would be as if a team of monkeys kidnapped a human child

and tried to train him how to hoot like a monkey.

It might be enjoyable but it does not seem to give us any

rich insights. What I think is a lot more

interesting is the study of these animal communication

systems in the wild. There's a linguistics of human

language that has delineated the principles that underlie all

human languages. It would be as extraordinarily

interesting to attempt the same linguistic program to the other

communication systems used in the wild such as the cries of

vervet monkeys and bee dance. So, this brings the section on

language to a close but I want to tell you a few things we

didn't talk about. One of the problems with an

Intro Psych course is we have to whip through a lot of topics

very fast. So, if you were to take a

course that focused directly on language you might learn,

for instance, more about language in the

brain, something touched about very briefly in the textbook but

something that has a large literature associated with it.

Similarly, and related to this, there's language disorders,

disorders like aphasias and disorders like specific language

impairment and dyslexia. There is the study of language

perception and production. How is it that we do this

amazing feat of understanding and producing words in a

fraction of a second? Where does that ability come

from? There is the study of reading

which is, in many ways, different from the study of a

language. Remember when Darwin described

language as an instinct. He carefully distinguished it

from other things that don't come natural to us including

reading. And in fact,

reading is difficult. Reading is a cultural

invention, not every human has it.

And unlike language, reading is acquired with

tremendous difficulty over many years.

On the other hand, reading plainly intersects with

language. It's a new way of conveying

language, moving out from speech to writing.

And the psychology and neuroscience of reading is thus

very interesting. There's bilingualism and

multilingualism. The questions people in this

room typically are going to be interested in is does it matter

for how well you learn language whether you're learning one or

two or three or four. How is it that a multilingual

encodes all these different languages inside a single brain?

And so on. Finally, a very hot issue is

that of the relationship between language and thought and I'm

actually--A few years ago I taught an entire seminar called

"Language and Thought" devoted to precisely this question.

And it's a cool question and it could break up into two very

general questions. One is, "Is language necessary

for abstract thought?" And one way to answer that

question is to look at creatures without language like babies and

chimpanzees and see how smart they are.

It might be that they're not--that they're very smart,

in which case it would suggest you don't need language for

abstract thought. On the other hand,

it might be that they have certain cognitive limitations,

which would suggest that language is essential for

abstract thought. Then there's the related

question. Even once you know a language,

does the structural properties of the language that you know

affect the way you think? And the claim that the language

you know affects how you think is sometimes described as

linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

So for instance, there's a lot of research

looking at speakers of different languages such as English versus

Korean and seeing whether structural differences in these

languages affect how you think. Now, some of this work is

discussed in the readings, the book--the Gray textbook,

and the selections from The Norton Anthology. And this

makes up--again, I've showed this to you on

Monday--your reading response where you have to address this

question and take your best shot at answering it.

What are your questions about language?

Yes. Student: [inaudible]

Professor Paul Bloom: The question was raised,

"Some people learn languages easier than others and how do we

explain this?" And the answer is you could ask

the question both with regard to first language learning – so

some children learn language very quickly,

some are very slow – and also with regard to second language

learning. Some of you are breezing

through your second language requirement here at Yale.

Others are struggling and miserable.

And there's considerable variation.

There's the story of Einstein who was very slow to learn

language and didn't speak at all until he was four.