Language

Hi! Hope y’all had a nice spring break. Especially for those who have AP exams just around the corner, you need all the rest you can get. In fact, this entire article is actually an excuse to do my AP Psych final project. I’m supposed to create some sort of study tool for a psychology topic, in order to help future students with reviewing their materials. From the title, it should be obvious which topic I chose.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist, said that language is the “jewel in the crown of cognition.” Since Cognition/Cognitive Psychology is one of the more largely represented topics on the AP exam, I decided to create some animations/comics to help visualize aspects of this unit. I know this isn’t related to humor, so in order to create some semblance of connection to humor psychology, I tried to make the animations funny, or weird, at least. Not sure if it worked, but I hope it helps anyone interested in psychology. 

Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound. Morphemes are the smallest units of sound that carry meaning. For example, “fish” is a morpheme, and its phonemes are “f,” “i,” and “sh.” Other examples of morphemes are “me,” “it,” and “or.” Sometimes morphemes can also be phonemes, such as “I.”

To distinguish morphemes and phonemes, you could say that phonemes “morph” into morphemes.

Noam Chomsky theorized that language was unlearned, and that we’re predisposed to learn it. This is a concept called universal grammar. To remember Chomsky’s name, I made him a gnome who chomps skis. 

Infants are exceptional at learning to comprehend language, even before they learn to produce it at the same rate- infant comes from “in fantis,” which means “not speaking.”

The stages of language development in infants: babbling, one word, two word, and telegraphic speech (speaking like a telegram). 

As with other skills, there is a critical period for learning languages - if you weren’t exposed to language after 7 yrs old, you can’t master any language. 

After puberty, it’s very difficult to learn a second language- therefore, the younger you are, the faster you can learn a language.

Aphasia is the impairment of language- usually caused by left hemisphere damage to Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area

• Broca’s area- helps control language expression- area of the frontal lobe, usually in left hemisphere- directs muscles involved in speech

• Wernicke’s Area- Involved in language comprehension + expression- usually in left temporal lobe

Broca’s area only consists of a mouth (language expression), and has muscular arms (directs muscles involved in speech). 

Wernicke’s Area has no mouth (comprehends language), but has a very large left ear (on the left temporal lobe). 

Wernicke’s area transforms language into noodles, which Broca’s area eats in order to express. 

Benjamin Lee Whorf hypothesized that language determines how we think- for example, we can’t think about things if we don’t have the words for them. This is called linguistic determinism.

This is a bit of a change of pace given the image to text ratio, but I hope you enjoyed it regardless. Thank you for reading, and I hope you stay tuned for June!