{"id":1255,"date":"2015-09-10T18:11:33","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T18:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/intropsychmaster\/?post_type=chapter&p=1255"},"modified":"2024-05-17T02:35:08","modified_gmt":"2024-05-17T02:35:08","slug":"language-and-language-use","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/waymaker-psychology\/chapter\/language-and-language-use\/","title":{"raw":"Language and Language Use","rendered":"Language and Language Use"},"content":{"raw":"
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Learning Objectives<\/h3>\r\n
\r\n
    \r\n \t
  • Define basic terms used to describe language use.<\/li>\r\n \t
  • Characterize the typical content of conversation and its social implications.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/section><\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
    Imagine two men of 30-something age, Adam and Ben, walking down the corridor. Judging from their clothing, they are young businessmen, taking a break from work. They then have this exchange.<\/div>\r\n
    \r\n
    Adam: \u201cYou know, Gary bought a ring.\u201d Ben: \u201cOh yeah? For Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d (Adam nods.)<\/blockquote>\r\nIf you are watching this scene and hearing their conversation, what can you guess from this? First of all, you\u2019d guess that Gary bought a ring for Mary, whoever Gary and Mary might be. Perhaps you would infer that Gary is getting married to Mary. What else can you guess? Perhaps, Adam and Ben are fairly close colleagues, and both of them know Gary and Mary reasonably well. In other words, you can guess the social relationships surrounding the people who are engaging in the conversation and the people whom they are talking about.\r\n
    [caption id=\"\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"397\"]\"Two Figure 1<\/strong>. A language is an essential tool that enables us to live the kind of lives we do. Much of contemporary human civilization wouldn\u2019t have been possible without it. [Photo: Marc Wathieu][\/caption]<\/figure>\r\nLanguage is used in our everyday lives. If psychology is a science of behavior, scientific investigation of language use<\/em> must be one of the most central topics\u2014this is because language use is ubiquitous. Every human group has a language; human infants (except those who have disabilities) learn at least one language without being taught explicitly. Even when children, who don\u2019t have many languages to begin with, are brought together, they can begin to develop and use their own language. There is at least one known instance where children, who had had little language, were brought together and developed their own language spontaneously with minimum input from adults. In Nicaragua in the 1980s, deaf children who were separately raised in various locations were brought together to schools for the first time. Teachers tried to teach them Spanish with little success. However, they began to notice that the children were using their hands and gestures, apparently to communicate with each other. Linguists were brought in to find out what was happening\u2014it turned out the children had developed their own sign language by themselves. That was the birth of a new language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (Kegl, Senghas, & Coppola, 1999). Language is ubiquitous, and we humans are born to use it.\r\n

    How Do We Use Language?<\/h2>\r\nIf language is so ubiquitous, how do we actually use it? To be sure, some of us use it to write diaries and poetry, but the primary form of language use is interpersonal. That\u2019s how we learn a language, and that\u2019s how we use it. Just like Adam and Ben, we exchange words and utterances to communicate with each other. Let\u2019s consider the simplest case of two people, Adam and Ben, talking with each other. According to Clark (1996), in order for them to carry out a conversation, they must keep track of common ground. Common ground<\/strong> is a set of knowledge that the speaker and listener share and they think, assume, or otherwise take for granted that they share. So, when Adam says, \u201cGary bought a ring,\u201d he takes for granted that Ben knows the meaning of the words he is using, who Gary is, and what buying a ring means. When Ben says, \u201cFor Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he takes for granted that Adam knows the meaning of these words, who Mary is, and what buying a ring for someone means. All these are part of their common ground.\r\n
    [caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"546\"]\"Man Figure 2<\/strong>. The \"common ground\" in a conversation helps people coordinate their language use. And as conversations progress common ground shifts and changes as the participants add new information and cooperate to help one another understand. [Photo: boellstiftung][\/caption]<\/figure>\r\nNote that, when Adam presents the information about Gary\u2019s purchase of a ring, Ben responds by presenting his inference about who the recipient of the ring might be, namely, Mary. In conversational terms, Ben\u2019s utterance acts as evidence for his comprehension of Adam\u2019s utterance\u2014\u201cYes, I understood that Gary bought a ring\u201d\u2014and Adam\u2019s nod acts as evidence that he now has understood what Ben has said too\u2014\u201cYes, I understood that you understood that Gary has bought a ring for Mary.\u201d This new information is now added to the initial common ground. Thus, the pair of utterances by Adam and Ben (called an adjacency pair) together with Adam\u2019s affirmative nod jointly completes one proposition, \u201cGary bought a ring for Mary,\u201d and adds this information to their common ground. This way, common ground changes as we talk, gathering new information that we agree on and have evidence that we share. It evolves as people take turns to assume the roles of speaker and listener, and actively engage in the exchange of meaning.\r\n\r\nCommon ground helps people coordinate their language use. For instance, when a speaker says something to a listener, they take into account their common ground, that is, what the speaker thinks the listener knows. Adam said what he did because he knew Ben would know who Gary was. He\u2019d have said, \u201cA friend of mine is getting married,\u201d to another colleague who wouldn\u2019t know Gary. This is called audience design<\/strong> (Fussell & Krauss, 1992); speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences\u2019 knowledge. If their audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object (such as Ben about Gary), they tend to use a brief label of the object (i.e., Gary); for a less knowledgeable audience, they use more descriptive words (e.g., \u201ca friend of mine\u201d) to help the audience understand their utterances (Box 1).\r\n\r\nSo, language use is a cooperative activity, but how do we coordinate our language use in a conversational setting? To be sure, we have a conversation in small groups. The number of people engaging in a conversation at a time is rarely more than four. By some counts (e.g.,\u00a0Dunbar, Duncan, & Nettle, 1995;James, 1953), more than 90 percent of conversations happen in a group of four individuals or less. Certainly, coordinating conversation among four is not as difficult as coordinating conversation among 10. But, even among only four people, if you think about it, everyday conversation is an almost miraculous achievement.\r\n\r\nWe typically have a conversation by rapidly exchanging words and utterances in real time in a noisy environment. Think about your conversation at home in the morning, at a bus stop, in a shopping mall. How can we keep track of our common ground under such circumstances?\r\n
    \r\n

    Try It<\/h3>\r\nhttps:\/\/assess.lumenlearning.com\/practice\/454bb07d-0c31-4780-a149-f9e55aa949b5\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/assess.lumenlearning.com\/practice\/31b58581-1417-40f7-991f-c1d5c43a0f27\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nPickering and Garrod (2004) argue that we achieve our conversational coordination by virtue of our ability to interactively align each other\u2019s actions at different levels of language use: lexicon<\/strong> (i.e., words and expressions), syntax<\/strong> (i.e., grammatical rules for arranging words and expressions together), as well as speech rate and accent. For instance, when one person uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression (e.g.,Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986). Furthermore, if someone says \u201cthe cowboy offered a banana to the robber,\u201d rather than \u201cthe cowboy offered the robber a banana,\u201d others are more likely to use the same syntactic structure (e.g., \u201cthe girl gave a book to the boy\u201d rather than \u201cthe girl gave the boy a book\u201d) even if different words are involved (Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000).\r\n\r\nFinally, people in conversation tend to exhibit similar accents and rates of speech, and they are often associated with people\u2019s social identity (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991). So, if you have lived in different places where people have somewhat different accents (e.g., United States and United Kingdom), you might have noticed that you speak with Americans with an American accent, but speak with Britons with a British accent.\r\n\r\nPickering and Garrod (2004) suggest that these interpersonal alignments at different levels of language use can activate similar situation models in the minds of those who are engaged in a conversation. Situation models<\/strong> are representations about the topic of a conversation. So, if you are talking about Gary and Mary with your friends, you might have a situation model of Gary giving Mary a ring in your mind. Pickering and Garrod\u2019s theory is that as you describe this situation using language, others in the conversation begin to use similar words and grammar, and many other aspects of language use converge. As you all do so, similar situation models begin to be built in everyone\u2019s mind through the mechanism known as priming. Priming<\/strong> occurs when you're thinking about one concept (e.g., \u201cring\u201d) reminds you about other related concepts (e.g., \u201cmarriage\u201d, \u201cwedding ceremony\u201d). So, if everyone in the conversation knows about Gary, Mary, and the usual course of events associated with a ring\u2014engagement, wedding, marriage, etc.\u2014 everyone is likely to construct a shared situation model about Gary and Mary. Thus, making use of our highly developed interpersonal ability to imitate (i.e., executing the same action as another person) and cognitive ability to infer (i.e., one idea leading to other ideas), we humans coordinate our common ground, share situation models, and communicate with each other.\r\n
    \r\n

    Try It<\/h3>\r\nhttps:\/\/assess.lumenlearning.com\/practice\/6a356e00-b44c-46da-93d0-66a86abe2e47\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

    What Do We Talk About?<\/h2>\r\n
    [caption id=\"\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"272\"]\"Small Figure 3<\/strong>. Studies show that people love to gossip. By gossiping, humans can communicate and share their representations about their social world\u2014who their friends and enemies are, what the right thing to do is under what circumstances, and so on. [Photo: Bindaas Madhav][\/caption]<\/figure>\r\nWhat are humans doing when we are talking? Surely, we can communicate about mundane things such as what to have for dinner, but also more complex and abstract things such as the meaning of life and death, liberty, equality, and fraternity, and many other philosophical thoughts. Well, when naturally occurring conversations were actually observed (Dunbar, Marriott, & Duncan, 1997), a staggering 60%\u201370% of everyday conversation, for both men and women, turned out to be gossip\u2014people talk about themselves and others whom they know. Just like Adam and Ben, more often than not, people use language to communicate about their social world.\r\n\r\nGossip may sound trivial and seem to belittle our noble ability for language\u2014surely one of the most remarkable human abilities of all that distinguish us from other animals. Au contraire<\/em>, some have argued that gossip\u2014activities to think and communicate about our social world\u2014is one of the most critical uses to which language has been put. Dunbar (1996) conjectured that gossiping is the human equivalent of grooming, monkeys and primates attending and tending to each other by cleaning each other\u2019s fur. He argues that it is an act of socializing, signaling the importance of one\u2019s partner. Furthermore, by gossiping, humans can communicate and share their representations about their social world\u2014who their friends and enemies are, what the right thing to do is under what circumstances, and so on. In so doing, they can regulate their social world\u2014making more friends and enlarging one\u2019s own group (often called the ingroup<\/strong>, the group to which one belongs) against other groups (outgroups<\/strong>) that are more likely to be one\u2019s enemies.\r\n\r\nDunbar has argued that it is these social effects that have given humans an evolutionary advantage and larger brains, which, in turn, help humans to think more complex and abstract thoughts and, more important, maintain larger ingroups. Dunbar (1993) estimated an equation that predicts average group size of nonhuman primate genera from their average neocortex size (the part of the brain that supports higher order cognition). In line with his\u00a0social brain hypothesis<\/strong>, Dunbar showed that those primate genera that have larger brains tend to live in larger groups. Furthermore, using the same equation, he was able to estimate the group size that human brains can support, which turned out to be about 150\u2014approximately the size of modern hunter-gatherer communities. Dunbar\u2019s argument is that language, brain, and human group living have co-evolved\u2014language and human sociality are inseparable. Dunbar\u2019s hypothesis is controversial. Nonetheless, whether or not he is right, our everyday language use often ends up<\/em> maintaining the existing structure of intergroup relationships.\r\n\r\nLanguage use can have implications for how we construe our social world. For one thing, there are subtle cues that people use to convey the extent to which someone\u2019s action is just a special case in a particular context or a pattern that occurs across many contexts and more like a character trait of the person. According to Semin and Fiedler (1988), someone\u2019s action can be described by an action verb that describes a concrete action (e.g., he runs), a state verb that describes the actor\u2019s psychological state (e.g., he likes running), an adjective that describes the actor\u2019s personality (e.g., he is athletic), or a noun that describes the actor\u2019s role (e.g., he is an athlete). Depending on whether a verb or an adjective (or noun) is used, speakers can convey the permanency and stability of an actor\u2019s tendency to act in a certain way\u2014verbs convey particularity, whereas adjectives convey permanency.\r\n\r\nIntriguingly, people tend to describe positive actions of their ingroup members using adjectives (e.g., he is generous) rather than verbs (e.g., he gave a blind man some change), and negative actions of outgroup members using adjectives (e.g., he is cruel) rather than verbs (e.g., he kicked a dog). Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, and Semin (1989) called this a linguistic intergroup bias<\/strong>, which can produce and reproduce the representation of intergroup relationships by painting a picture favoring the ingroup. That is, ingroup members are typically good, and if they do anything bad, that\u2019s more an exception in special circumstances; in contrast, outgroup members are typically bad, and if they do anything good, that\u2019s more an exception.\r\n
    \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"420\"]\"People Figure 4<\/strong>. Emotion and Talk.[\/caption]<\/figure>\r\nIn addition, when people exchange their gossip, it can spread through broader\u00a0social networks. If gossip is transmitted from one person to another, the second person can transmit it to a third person, who then in turn transmits it to a fourth, and so on through a chain of communication. This often happens for emotive stories (Box 2). If gossip is repeatedly transmitted and spread, it can reach a large number of people. When stories travel through communication chains, they tend to become conventionalized (Bartlett, 1932). A Native American tale of the \u201cWar of the Ghosts\u201d recounts a warrior\u2019s encounter with ghosts traveling in canoes and his involvement with their ghostly battle. He is shot by an arrow but doesn\u2019t die, returning home to tell the tale. After his narration, however, he becomes still, a black thing comes out of his mouth, and he eventually dies. When it was told to a student in England in the 1920s and retold from memory to another person, who, in turn, retold it to another and so on in a communication chain, the mythic tale became a story of a young warrior going to a battlefield, in which canoes became boats, and the black thing that came out of his mouth became simply his spirit (Bartlett, 1932). In other words, information transmitted multiple times was transformed to something that was easily understood by many, that is, information was assimilated into the common ground shared by most people in the linguistic community.\r\n\r\nMore recently, Kashima (2000) conducted a similar experiment using a story that contained sequence of events that described a young couple\u2019s interaction that included both stereotypical and counter-stereotypical actions (e.g., a man watching sports on TV on Sunday vs. a man vacuuming the house). After the retelling of this story, much of the counter-stereotypical information was dropped, and stereotypical information was more likely to be retained. Because stereotypes are part of the common ground shared by the community, this finding too suggests that conversational retellings are likely to reproduce conventional content.\r\n
    \r\n

    Glossary<\/h3>\r\naudience design<\/strong>: constructing utterances to suit the audience\u2019s knowledge\r\ncommon ground<\/strong>: information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation\r\ningroup<\/strong>: group to which a person belongs\r\nlexicon<\/strong>: words and expressions\r\nlinguistic intergroup bias<\/strong>: a tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.\r\noutgroup<\/strong>: group to which a person does not belong\r\npriming<\/strong>: a stimulus presented to a person reminds them about other ideas associated with the stimulus\r\nsituation model<\/strong>: a mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description\r\nsocial brain hypothesis<\/strong>: the hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups\r\nsocial networks<\/strong>: networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel\r\nsyntax<\/strong>: rules by which words are strung together to form sentences\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>","rendered":"
    \n
    \n

    Learning Objectives<\/h3>\n
    \n
      \n
    • Define basic terms used to describe language use.<\/li>\n
    • Characterize the typical content of conversation and its social implications.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
      Imagine two men of 30-something age, Adam and Ben, walking down the corridor. Judging from their clothing, they are young businessmen, taking a break from work. They then have this exchange.<\/div>\n
      \n

      Adam: \u201cYou know, Gary bought a ring.\u201d Ben: \u201cOh yeah? For Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d (Adam nods.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      If you are watching this scene and hearing their conversation, what can you guess from this? First of all, you\u2019d guess that Gary bought a ring for Mary, whoever Gary and Mary might be. Perhaps you would infer that Gary is getting married to Mary. What else can you guess? Perhaps, Adam and Ben are fairly close colleagues, and both of them know Gary and Mary reasonably well. In other words, you can guess the social relationships surrounding the people who are engaging in the conversation and the people whom they are talking about.<\/p>\n

      \n
      \"Two<\/p>\n

      Figure 1<\/strong>. A language is an essential tool that enables us to live the kind of lives we do. Much of contemporary human civilization wouldn\u2019t have been possible without it. [Photo: Marc Wathieu]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

      Language is used in our everyday lives. If psychology is a science of behavior, scientific investigation of language use<\/em> must be one of the most central topics\u2014this is because language use is ubiquitous. Every human group has a language; human infants (except those who have disabilities) learn at least one language without being taught explicitly. Even when children, who don\u2019t have many languages to begin with, are brought together, they can begin to develop and use their own language. There is at least one known instance where children, who had had little language, were brought together and developed their own language spontaneously with minimum input from adults. In Nicaragua in the 1980s, deaf children who were separately raised in various locations were brought together to schools for the first time. Teachers tried to teach them Spanish with little success. However, they began to notice that the children were using their hands and gestures, apparently to communicate with each other. Linguists were brought in to find out what was happening\u2014it turned out the children had developed their own sign language by themselves. That was the birth of a new language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (Kegl, Senghas, & Coppola, 1999). Language is ubiquitous, and we humans are born to use it.<\/p>\n

      How Do We Use Language?<\/h2>\n

      If language is so ubiquitous, how do we actually use it? To be sure, some of us use it to write diaries and poetry, but the primary form of language use is interpersonal. That\u2019s how we learn a language, and that\u2019s how we use it. Just like Adam and Ben, we exchange words and utterances to communicate with each other. Let\u2019s consider the simplest case of two people, Adam and Ben, talking with each other. According to Clark (1996), in order for them to carry out a conversation, they must keep track of common ground. Common ground<\/strong> is a set of knowledge that the speaker and listener share and they think, assume, or otherwise take for granted that they share. So, when Adam says, \u201cGary bought a ring,\u201d he takes for granted that Ben knows the meaning of the words he is using, who Gary is, and what buying a ring means. When Ben says, \u201cFor Mary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he takes for granted that Adam knows the meaning of these words, who Mary is, and what buying a ring for someone means. All these are part of their common ground.<\/p>\n

      \n
      \"Man<\/p>\n

      Figure 2<\/strong>. The “common ground” in a conversation helps people coordinate their language use. And as conversations progress common ground shifts and changes as the participants add new information and cooperate to help one another understand. [Photo: boellstiftung]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

      Note that, when Adam presents the information about Gary\u2019s purchase of a ring, Ben responds by presenting his inference about who the recipient of the ring might be, namely, Mary. In conversational terms, Ben\u2019s utterance acts as evidence for his comprehension of Adam\u2019s utterance\u2014\u201cYes, I understood that Gary bought a ring\u201d\u2014and Adam\u2019s nod acts as evidence that he now has understood what Ben has said too\u2014\u201cYes, I understood that you understood that Gary has bought a ring for Mary.\u201d This new information is now added to the initial common ground. Thus, the pair of utterances by Adam and Ben (called an adjacency pair) together with Adam\u2019s affirmative nod jointly completes one proposition, \u201cGary bought a ring for Mary,\u201d and adds this information to their common ground. This way, common ground changes as we talk, gathering new information that we agree on and have evidence that we share. It evolves as people take turns to assume the roles of speaker and listener, and actively engage in the exchange of meaning.<\/p>\n

      Common ground helps people coordinate their language use. For instance, when a speaker says something to a listener, they take into account their common ground, that is, what the speaker thinks the listener knows. Adam said what he did because he knew Ben would know who Gary was. He\u2019d have said, \u201cA friend of mine is getting married,\u201d to another colleague who wouldn\u2019t know Gary. This is called audience design<\/strong> (Fussell & Krauss, 1992); speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences\u2019 knowledge. If their audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object (such as Ben about Gary), they tend to use a brief label of the object (i.e., Gary); for a less knowledgeable audience, they use more descriptive words (e.g., \u201ca friend of mine\u201d) to help the audience understand their utterances (Box 1).<\/p>\n

      So, language use is a cooperative activity, but how do we coordinate our language use in a conversational setting? To be sure, we have a conversation in small groups. The number of people engaging in a conversation at a time is rarely more than four. By some counts (e.g.,\u00a0Dunbar, Duncan, & Nettle, 1995;James, 1953), more than 90 percent of conversations happen in a group of four individuals or less. Certainly, coordinating conversation among four is not as difficult as coordinating conversation among 10. But, even among only four people, if you think about it, everyday conversation is an almost miraculous achievement.<\/p>\n

      We typically have a conversation by rapidly exchanging words and utterances in real time in a noisy environment. Think about your conversation at home in the morning, at a bus stop, in a shopping mall. How can we keep track of our common ground under such circumstances?<\/p>\n

      \n

      Try It<\/h3>\n

      \t