Psychology of Language and Communication | Cognitive Psychology

“Language” and “communication,” although related, do not mean the same thing. This chapter will cover both topics, with an emphasis on language. “Communication” is a broader term and can be defined in many different ways, but here we are concerned with communication between organisms, humans, or animals. So here we will use this definition: communication consists of signals made by one organism that have meaning for other organisms and thus affect their behavior.

The nature of communication.

There are two kinds of signals. One called a sign, acquires meaning by the natural relation of events to each other. We learn, for example, that the growl of a dog may be a sign of a bite to come, that thunder is often the sign of rain to come, and that where there is smoke there is often fire. In each case, the sign has meaning because we have previously learned that those stimuli belong together. The second kind of signal called a symbol has been invented by human beings. They assign each symbol a meaning so that they can use it to communicate with each other. A symbol can take many forms. It can be a picture, as in Figure 7.1, or a sound, like a spoken word. The use of symbols for communication is what defines a language.

Kinds of Language.

Other kinds of symbols include whistling, which means different things in different parts of the world, and drumming, which is a well–developed communication system in some areas. Almost all peoples use gestures of the hands and face as communication devices. The most universal system of communicating with symbols, however, is a language in which words are spoken and written in different combinations to convey meaning. In societies that speak different languages but have close contact with each other – as was the case with the American Indians – hundreds of gestures may be used to surmount the language barrier. Such sign language is often used by the deaf; the version in this country is called the American Sign Language.

Language can be either written or spoken. The oral, or spoken, language developed many thousands of years before writing was invented. It is the first to be learned by the growing child. Writing language and spoken language differ in important respects. Their basic elements are different, one being letters and the other sounds. Written language is more carefully regulated by customs and grammarians than spoken language. Our speaking and writing vocabularies are not exactly the same – the written one is usually much larger. Further, our speaking and written grammars differ; we tend to convey different kinds of information in the two media; and our oral language is more repetitive and redundant than our written one.

Linguistics.

The general name for the study of language is linguistics. Within linguistics, there are several different approaches to language. Philologists, or comparative linguists, look at the history of language and the relation of languages to each other. Phoneticians study the sounds of a language. Grammarians are interested in the rules that govern the structure of a language. Semanticists analyze the meaning of words and sentences in a language. Psycholinguists are psychologists who study how language is learned and how it functions in human thinking. Humans use language as a tool of thought; through it they communicate not only with each other but with themselves. 

Speech perception.

Two kinds of signals are used in communication: signs acquire meaning by the natural relation of events, while symbols are invented for use in the language. Spoken language and written language differ in their basic elements of sounds and letters, their grammatical structure, the vocabulary used, and the amount of redundancy.

Linguistics is the general name for the study of language. Several kinds of specialists approach language with different interests. Psycholinguists, for example, study how language is learned and how it functions in human thinking. Attempts to teach speech to animals have failed, but chimpanzees can learn none vocal language consisting of symbols arranged in grammatical order.

Because we use speech for communication, it is the most important class of sounds we hear. Speech sounds are very complicated; moreover, they differ from one speaker to another. Regional accents increase the complexity: a Southern accent, for example, does not sound like a New England accent. The fact that widely different accents can be understood with a minimum of difficulty by the average listener is one of the areas of investigation in the study of speech as a stimulus.