language
dmunger | June 10, 2005When I was about twelve years old, I came up with an idea for a massive practical joke to play on an unsuspecting baby. For its entire childhood, everyone around the baby would conspire to convince it that the sky was green. Then at some point in the future, perhaps in front of the entire sixth grade class at Whitworth Elementary School, the truth would be revealed, and one poor kid's world would be turned upside-down.
Somehow I was never able to recruit enough people to pull this ruse off, but it does beg the question: would such a joke even be possible, or would our natural perceptual…
dmunger | May 30, 2005The allure of music has been a recurring question for psychologists. Why do we see the need for music? Is music like language, or is it something entirely different? The attempts to answer the latter question have generated mixed results. Musicians with brain damage have retained musical ability while losing language ability. Some patients with a condition called amusia can recognize songs from their lyrics but not from the melody. On the other hand, healthy people remember melodies better when they are repeated with their original lyrics instead of the words from other songs.
Listen to the…
dmunger | May 13, 2005One of the oldest questions in the study of language involves how it influences our thought. One of the most controversial answers comes from Benjamin Whorf, the student of renowned anthropologist Edward Sapir: language not only influences thought; language determines thought—thought cannot exist without language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its strongest form, has been discarded by mainstream psychologists. After all, it's not difficult to come up with many examples of thought that do not involve language, such as mentally rotating an object or learning how to juggle (think about…
dmunger | April 22, 2005How is language acquired? We don't have to teach our children to speak; instead they just seem to pick it up on their own. Because language is acquired so readily, the study of language acquisition can be a messy business. What portion of language ability is "hard wired" into the brain, and what portion of it is "learned"? Or is the ability to learn what's hard-wired?
One way researchers have found to study how healthy children learn language is to study those with disorders. If we can learn how a brain malfunction affects language learning, then the specific characteristics of the…
dmunger | March 18, 2005Language researchers have long relied on participants suffering from language disorders as a means to better understand how language develops in healthy people. A new special issue of Applied Psycholinguistics covers the study of mental disorders that affect language development. Cognitive Daily will report on a couple of these articles in the coming weeks, so we thought it would be useful to first provide a general overview of some of these disorders, as Mabel L. Rice, Stephen F. Warren, and Stacy K. Betz of the University of Kansas do in their article "Language Symptoms of Developmental…
dmunger | March 15, 2005A few weeks ago, an article appeared in my local newspaper. According to the article, many mothers were beginning to teach their kids sign language, starting at a very young age. Both kids and parents had perfect hearing, but the babies learned sign language even before they could speak, communicating more effectively with their parents about basics like needing a diaper change or a favorite toy. I was immediately skeptical: what about learning spoken language? If babies could communicate effectively with signs, what incentive would they have to learn the language the rest of us speak?
Susan…
dmunger | February 24, 2005Literary theory is being influenced more and more by research in cognitive psychology, and as the previous article I discussed showed, psychology research is also influenced by theory. Today's article, "Generating Predictive Inferences While Viewing a Movie" (Joseph P. Magliano, Northern Illinois University, and Katinka Dijkstra and Rolf A. Zwaan, Florida State University, in Discourse Processes, 1996), is another example.
In much film theory, the key techniques used to tell a story are mise en scène, montage, cinematography, and sound. Mise en scène is everything used to create the set,…