Cognitive Psychology

May 20, 2013

PSY/360 Cognitive Psychology

Language Paper

Presented to:

University of Phoenix

When birds chirp and sing, a cat's purr, and ducks quack clucks that is a form of communication. Are these sounds considered language? According to the standard definition of language the answer is no. Communication must be talkative, subjective, structured, procreative and vibrant to be deemed language (Willingham, 2007). Animal noises document communication, appears subjective, and could be considered active; however, animal communication is not organized and is not reproductive. Besides, the particular awareness to the corresponding of human cognitive functions and language assimilation is the mental dictionary that holds all of the stored depictions of words, the lexicon. These lexical entries store the articulation, spelling, and part of speech for every word that has been adjusted. Humans identify words by comparing what they notice distinctly with these items. As far as the subject of animal communication, humans associate the sounds that come from the animals with the stored lexicon to control if the sounds establish a known language. In addition, a in-depth understanding of language is more difficult than the standard definition of language and the idea of a lexicon, but includes the key features of language, the four levels of language structure and processing, and the role of language handling in cognitive psychology.

There seems to be a serious period of development in which humans are naturally subject to the accommodation of the grammar and syntax of language. This study was directed by Jackie Johnson and Elissa Newport to Chinese and Korean immigrants to the United States decided that at the age of 16 the skill to simply learn a new language drops extremely, specifically the ability to become extreme fluent in English syntax. In addition, language seems to be a specifically human attribute, even excluding our close inherited relatives, the primates. It is clear that primates use some representational level of communication to converse. The fact still remains that primates do not use anything like the language we use every day, nor are they skillful of learning grammatical language. They adapt learning the surface building of language and using it in incomplete conditions, but they are not clever of discovering the deep structure of language and then converting the underlying meanings of language to other expressions. Basically, understand words, not language.

The four primary levels of language are phonemes, words, sentences, and texts. Phonemes are the specific sounds that constitute the audible and written reproduction of words. There are about 46 phonemes in the English language, but about 200 phonemes are used worldwide in human language. In turn, the 46 English phonemes can be combined, through the laws of grammar and syntax, to create approximately 600,000 words. Through the above-mentioned lexicon, humans have the capability to control the spelling, pronunciation, and part of speech of each word; therefore, giving humans the means through which to construct coherent sentences complete with a noun phrase and verb phrase. It is at this point in language construction that the meaningful creation of actual text is possible. The grammar that rules text creation seem to be logical rather than successive, meaning that it does not matter so much that sentences follow a particular stream of conjunctive adverbs, but that the sentences logically flow from one to the next. In sum, the 46 phonemes of the English language can be combined, according to the laws of grammar and syntax, to create approximately 600,000 words, which can in turn be constructed into sentences, as an addition of lexical entries, and can finally be assembled into texts that follow a logical flow.

The problem of language comprehension is largely a problem of perception, rather than a problem of actual structure or articulation. For example, if a person were to look at the spectral analysis of speech they would quickly realize that there are