The Science of Language Pt. 1 of 3 (the basics)
Have you ever wondered how and why you can easily construct sentences, understand someone else, and hold conversations with little to no effort? I mean, think about it. Without knowing the exact words to use or how those words come together, you can pluck a few words out of your mind at a given time with significant speed to construct a coherent sentence from a basic outline. For example, if Jake asks how I prepare and cook salmon fillets? To answer this question, you must first understand the question being asked and the intonation with which it is being said. Perhaps Jake’s tone of voice is tense. In that case, you need to find out whether or not he is frustrated, annoyed, embarrassed, angry, or experiencing any other of the dozens of possibilities that will guide your response to the question. To understand Jake's state of mind, maybe you look at him to interpret his facial features. Perhaps you already understand the tone in which he asks the question based on the small verbal, motor, or facial cues he has been exhibiting. Maybe it is in the way he is breathing? In any case, our brain not only needs to recognize the question but how it is said. Assume you know Jake is an exceptional cook, but you can’t identify the cues or intonation in which his question is asked. In that case, you might miss the sarcasm in his voice. Or you can’t recognize the hold in his vowels as he asks the question, and you miss some undertone.
We make interpretations at such a fast level that most of the time, we don’t even realize that we begin evaluating before speaking. For the sake of more clearly seeing how language works, let us further assume that Jake was sincere and wanted to know how to prepare and cook that salmon, and you’re willing to help him. But to help him, you need first to know where to begin. You won’t start from the end and work your way backward or start from the middle and jump around. Instead, you will start from some point near the beginning or at the point where Jake is struggling. Then you begin to speak. And you don’t just talk; you’re also simultaneously evaluating his nonverbal response, how you delineate information, and his level of expertise. These bits of information guide the way you communicate. If this weren’t the case, you might be overexplaining and underestimating his understanding. Or, on the other end, you might find yourself extraordinarily terse or using verbiage outside the scope of what Jake is familiar with. In other words, you must evaluate and momentarily consolidate your way into balanced communication. And that’s only half of it; the other half is communicating. But to understand the components of communication, we need first to understand the elements of language and how those elements come together to create a shared understanding.
The Basics of Language
When we think of language, we think of words, the construction of words to create sentences, and communicating those sentences verbally. However, language is much more fundamental than that. For instance, if two people were in a room and one person put their hand on a hot stove, the sensory receptors on the hand would send an electrical signal to the cerebrum to instantly remove the hand. This is internal communication. And this internal communication creates a motor response that can now be viewed externally by the other person in the room. If the viewer interprets your reaction as painful and undesirable, you nonverbally communicate that your actions should not be repeated. However, suppose the painful stimulus is small enough or manageable, like getting hit in the head with a basketball or stepping on a Lego (where we know the degree of pain) and, as a response, laugh. In that case, the viewer can also interpret this as a non-threatening stimulus, even in the face of mild pain. This is because the degree to which the person feels pain is also influenced by how he perceives it.
How we learn to associate words with their meaning is nonverbal communication, such as movement, facial dispositions, and even spoken but unintelligible words, such as grunts, sighs, and laughs. We can imagine if a child grew up in an environment where sighing meant you were happy and crying meant it was time to eat (without any variation), then the child would grow up performing these tasks and create connections in the brain that was so strong that if years later he saw someone for the first time sighing as a result of frustration the boy would not make this association but instead think the person was hungry.
That is not to say that many of these elemental sounds are not innate because they are. When stressed, breathing may become irregular; we may hold our breath without recognizing it or take quick, short breaths, our muscles may be tensed, and we may have an over-expressed central nervous system. As a response, our body produces a physiological sigh or a deep breath, which may have innate roles in relaxing the muscles, restoring oxygen levels, counteracting stress, and returning to homeostasis. It would be incorrect to presume that these unintelligible forms of communication don’t have directionality or innate meaning, but instead, perception can be much more easily altered. And perception (or focusing, associating, integrating, and retrieving) is broadly how we begin to interpret language, how we continue to use language, and how we interpret the world.
The Basics of Language Part 2
Once we can create an association between the object or object of desire with the correct word or an attempt at the proper usage of the word is the moment we begin constructing our internal map of language. To put it another way, we recognize the identity of a word in its most rudimentary or animalistic sense, a form of differentiation put into words. For example, babies recognize this all the time by differentiating who is holding them: this feels different, this smells different, and something different has the potential to be threatening. Since babies can’t control the inflection of their voice competently nor have enough perceptual experience to discover themselves and mirror others, they begin to communicate by crying. It is only when they can conceptually find the identity of words that they can start to unravel the usage of grammar and word meaning.
First, it begins with the phoneme, the smallest unit of language, which is why babies often say k, ch, duh, muh, guh, and other similar sounds. Afterward, babies use the first meaningful or comprehensible lexical ingredient, such as mom, dad, no, ban for banana, or um for food. Succeeding 0 to 2 years of gradual progression from phonemes, morphemes, and a vocabulary of 50 words arises this remarkably expedient period between the ages of 2-4, where the child goes from making under a hundred-word associations to over a thousand. This is a remarkable period for language development since, for the first time, a child can understand one to two new words every day, not only by recognizing proper grammar and intonation but by mapping and sticking the words to their correct attachment. At this moment, the child's brain plasticity is developing stronger neuronal connections in the angular gyrus, Broca's area, and the insular cortex, which cooperates with other brain regions to help understand and consolidate words and concepts and retrieve the necessary words to express thoughts and desires through language.
In the following article, part 2 of 3, we will examine how the brain allows us to perceive, consolidate, and retrieve language. Moreover, we will examine how perception arises from the brain, allowing this remarkable ability to comprehensively understand language.
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