Psychology 101: Intro to Psychology

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Have you ever wondered how human language is constructed to form meaning? Why is language more complex than animal calls? In this lesson, we'll take a look at the basic units language and learn how meaning is formed.

Let's start with a quick experiment. Try to think about a chair, but don't let yourself use any words. Can you do it? It should be pretty difficult. Human language and human thought are so tightly bound together that it can be really hard to separate them from each other. This makes the question of what language is, and how it functions, a particularly challenging one for psychologists.

Because language is so complex, it has been defined in various ways. Let's understand it as a system of communication that requires the ability to produce and understand spoken, signed or written utterances. So we're talking about spoken languages, like English and Spanish, or non-spoken languages, like American Sign Language.

There are many systems of communication; traffic signs, for example, are a system of visual symbols that tell us where and how we can drive. But traffic signs are not a language. They fail an important test: though they can be combined with each other to make new meanings in some limited cases, they do not have the flexibility to be combined into lots of new meanings. A 'no turn on red' sign modifies a traffic light to tell you that when the light is red, you can't make a right turn; this is similar to how an adjective modifies a noun, like how a 'tree' becomes a 'big tree.' But 'big' can be used to modify almost any noun, while 'no turn on red' can only be used to modify a traffic light. Traffic signals are limited to a few specific contexts in a way that words are not.

Let's return to the 'chair' from our first example to think more about combinability. 'Chair' may be combined with other words to produce distinct meanings. Adjectives modify the chair itself: 'brown chair.' Verbs define how the chair is used: 'I picked up the chair.' But even these statements are able to be further modified: 'I picked up the brown chair.' It's possible to add additional information to a statement: 'I picked up the brown chair in the morning.'

The idea that combinability is an important characteristic of language probably still seems a little abstract. But it might be easier to understand when we compare human language to even the most complex animal communication systems. Vervet monkeys use three distinct alarm calls: one for leopard, one for snake and one for eagle. The vervets react differently when they hear the different calls; the 'leopard' call prompts a retreat into the treetops, while 'eagle' prompts a dash into the underbrush. It's tempting to view these calls as words. Doesn't the 'snake' call signify a snake in the same way that the word 'chair' signifies a chair? It does signify 'snake,' but in a very limited way - what it actually means is 'look down at the ground and watch out!' The vervets can't combine the 'snake' call with other calls to produce any meaning other than 'watch out.' You can modify 'chair' to mean 'brown chair,' 'red chair,' 'small chair,' 'big chair' or any other kind of chair. The vervet calls are limited to the context of escaping danger just as the traffic signals are limited to the context of an intersection. This is the difference between a call and a word.

You've probably had to study grammar in school. It can be tedious to learn all the formal rules of clauses and gerunds and all that stuff. But grammar is actually a really important concept that gives language its characteristic combinability, and it exists naturally in our heads, not just as a boring list of rules in English class. When we learn to speak, we learn to distinguish the sounds of our language from random sounds. The smallest possible unit of sound that we learn to distinguish is called a phoneme. Our vowels and consonants are phonemes, or distinct sounds that we can combine to make words. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning. It's easiest to think of morphemes in terms of things like prefixes and suffixes. The prefix re-carries a meaning of doing something again. Words like 'apply' and 'organize' have their meanings changed by adding re- to the front: 'reapply,' 'reorganize.' The study of how phonemes and morphemes produce meaning is specifically called semantics, while grammar and syntax more generally refer to how words combine to form new meanings in larger groups like sentences or phrases.

So we've learned about what makes language distinct from other forms of sight and sound-based communication systems. We looked at the combinability of words in language and saw how traffic signals and vervet alarm calls didn't have this quality. Then we learned that grammar and semantics are sets of rules for combining the phonemes and morphemes, the building blocks of language.