Talking to
each other
Words enable me to share with you my innermost thoughts. I can
describe my own sensations, such that you’re able to recreate in your
mind an experience I had a thousand miles away, or a hundred days
ago. My words are literally altering your mind. We can talk about
things that haven’t happened yet, or even about things that never
will. I can utter a sentence that’s most likely never been said or written
before: “The Rough Guide to Psychology is my favourite book”, and still
you and every other English speaker can decipher the meaning. This
is possible through a mixture of acquired vocabulary and syntactical
awareness – the ability to interpret the rules about the way words are
ordered and the relationships between them.
Language and its development
Linguistics is a vast, cavernous discipline in its own right and there’s only
the space here to touch on a few key principles and debates. Psycholo-
gists are particularly interested in how we acquire language in the first
place, and also how language is represented and processed by the brain.
But most of all, they’re curious about the links between thought and
language, with some experts even going so far as to suggest that we are
unable to think about things for which we lack the words.
The scholarly tussles in the field of language development have
largely revolved around whether or not the capacity for language is
innate. Of course, we know that the family environment that a child is
brought up in plays at least some role, because English children raised
by English-speaking parents don’t suddenly start babbling in Mandarin
but invariably end up speaking English, just like their parents. In fact,
babies start out with the ability to hear foreign speech sounds, but lose
this over time as they adapt to their particular linguistic environment.
A study in the 1980s showed this in relation to Japanese babies and the