LANGUAGE AND COGNITION
( BAB 6 )








Resume Ini Diajukan Untuk Memenuhi Tugas Mata Kuliah Psycholinguistics
Jurusan Tarbiyah Prodi PBI Kelompok 2
Oleh:
Kelompok 5

NURJANNAH (02114038)
ERNI RATNAWATI (021140
ILHAM ARAS (021140

SEKOLAH TINGGI AGAMA ISLAM NEGERI (STAIN)
WATAMPONE
2014

LANGUAGE AND COGNITION                                                                                                                                            
Human culture, social, behavior, and thinking could not exist as we know them in the absence of language. But although no one would deny the central role of language in human life, to define the nature of that role has been a persistent and difficult problem since the beginnings of philosophy. Although language pervades mental life, it does not constitute that whole of psychological states and processes. There are images and emotions, intentions, and abstractions, memories of sounds and smells and feelings, much more.
LANGUAGE, SPEECH, AND THOUGHT
Twentieth-century psychology has attempted to be “scientific.” This has generally meant that is the obligation of psychologist to limit themselves to tangible phenomena –behavior measured, recorded, materially manipulated. Until recently, terms like “stimulus”  “response” were preferred to notions such us “mind”, “thought”, “idea”, and “mental representation”. More recently it has become clear that regularities in measureable and observable behavior can be accounted for by postulating internal structures and processes; but in the early days of American behaviorism, such theorizing was held to a minimum. Accordingly, it was far more acceptable to talk about “speech” than to make claims about “thought”.
A less extreme position has a rich history in Russian psychology. One of the earliest scientific position taken on this problem was voiced in 1863 by Ivan M. Sechenov. The father of Russian physiology and mentor of Pavlov (p. 498):
When a child thinks he invariable talks a t the same time. Thought in five-years-olds is mediated through words or whispers, surely through movements of the tongue and lips, which is also very frequently (perhaps always, but in different degrees) true of the thinking of adults.
The Russian position, then, is that language and thought are closely linked in childhood, but that, in the course of development, adult thinking becomes free of language in some ways-at least free of overt or covert SPEECH RESPONSES. This position was most significantly elaborated by the great Soviet psychologist of the 1930s, L. S. Vygotsky. In his major work, Thought and Language (1962) first published in the USSR after his untimely death in 1934, Vygotsky developed the notion that in both phylogeny and ontogeny there are strains of nonverbal thought.
Though Without Speech
To begin with, we must be careful to remember the distinction between LANGUAGE and SPEECH made at the beginning of the book. Speech is a tangible, physical process resulting in the production of speech sounds, while language is an intangible system of meanings and linguistics structures. Thus watson’s position does not deal with LANGUAGE and thought at all; rather, he equates SPEECH and thought. Cognitive psychologists, like Vygotsky and Piaget, are concerned with speech and thought to the extent that speech is involved in communication of knowledge between people. But, more essentially, they are concerned with LANGUAGE and thought, that is, with the relations of inner linguistic and cognitive structures. To them, this inner use of language need not always be reflected in the articulatory movements of the vocal apparatus.
 Many arguments have been raised against the strong Watsonian hypothesis. The most obvious criticism seems to come from the implication that a man deprived of contact with his speech musculature would lose the ability to think.
The reduction and absurdum  that is impossible without speech movements in the mouth has also been tested experimentally. Intravenous injection of a form of the drug curare brings about temporary muscle paralysis- to the extent that oxygen and artificial respiration are required.
However, we can go beyond the behaviorist aversion to inner states and ask whether thought is possible without INNER SPEECH- that is, without some internal linguistic activity, even it not overtly or covertly articulated. There are many mental processes which seems to be pre linguistic or nonlinguistic.
Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. the state our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no more gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. If wrong names are proposed to us, this is singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them.
And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact in his INTENTION OF SAYING A THING before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intention, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consist of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! The intention TO-SAY-SO-AND-SO is only name it can receive.
The “schemes of thought not yet articulate” are not simply unconscious sentences waiting for expression.
The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seems to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.
There is a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concept. It is also clear that desire to arrive at logically connected concepts is emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought- before there is any
Connection with logical construction in words or other kinds if signs which can be communicated to others.
In seeking the relations between language and cognition, then, we must ask two more differentiated questions. If we view language as one of many forms of MENTAL REPRESENTATION, we must explore the various forms and ask how they are interrelated. This is essentially a structural question. There are various ways in which one can describe the structure of knowledge. The history of philosophy is a chronicle of attempts to reduce all of knowledge to linguistics structures, or to reduce linguistics structure to something else, or to posit various kinds of coexisting and interacting mental entities. This history continues in cognitive psychology.
LANGUAGE AND MENTAL REPRESENTATION
First let us consider the forms that seem most evident to consciousness:  words and images. It is these forms that initially attracted the attention of philosophers and psychologist.  The use of words and sentences as the medium of thought is so obvious as not to need technical description. But the role of imagery has been controversial- perhaps because people seems to differ greatly in the degree to which they experience mental imagery.
Imagery
Language is one of many ways in which we can represent knowledge to ourselves. Some knowledge seems uniquely suited to linguistic representation. How, for example, could we represent to ourselves a philosophical theory or an historical event without being able to talk about it? However, Einstein spoke of visual and muscular images in his thinking, Beethoven would certainly have spoken of auditory images, and Picasso of visual images. The mental image, or internal image, has recently regained respectability in cognitive psychology (e.g., Kosslyn, 1975; Paivio, 1971; Shepard &Chipman, 1971), and it has a long history in philosophy.
The psychologist Jerome Bruner has pointed out that such “enactive representation” underlies motor skill generally. Children learn much about the world through active manipulation, and there is a good deal of evidence that enactive representation, or muscular imagery, is an early means for representing objects.
Other kinds of life task rely on VISUAL imagery. Bruner points out that if you learn your way
From home to work by remembering a series of left and right turns, you will have difficulty in finding yourself if you get lost, for you have no overall representation of the route, you can scan it back and forth and find your place and your way.
Propositions  
You have already encountered propositional models in the discussion of generative semantics and its applications to child language. There have been many recent cognitive models which take the proposition to be the basic form in which knowledge is represented (e.g., Anderson & Bower, 1973; Fredriksen, 1972; Kintsch, 1974; Norman & Rumelhart, 1975).
The psychological reality of such representation is far from being resolved. Furthermore, as we have seen, such a level of representation correspond neither to the knowledge of the even not to precise encoding of that even in any particular language. Proposition, like images, may well be PART of mental representation, but they do not exhaustively portray the contents of the mind.
Feature and prototypes
 Clearly, much of meaning can be described in terms of underlying feature or attributes. Humans and mammals and fish and birds are all “animate”, woman and ewes and goddesses and mermaids are all “female”, and so forth, however, not all meanings can be “decomposed” into such features. What, for example, are the features that distinguish red from green, beautiful from ugly, or acquaintance from friend?
Even in cases where features are available for analysis, they may not apply in an all-or-none fashion, like ‘male’ and ‘female’, or ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’. Consider, for example, a featural description of chairs. This seems to be a class that shades off at its boundaries in all directions. When the back of a chair gets a low enough, or its legs get long enough, its become a bench, and so on.
Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I mean board-games, card-games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? __Don’t say:” there MUST be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’” but LOOK  AND SEE whether there is anything common to all. __for if you look at them you will not see something that is common to ALL, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.
Language and Thought Again
Language has access to all of these forms of representation, in that we can talk about all of them. Even though sensory images are not linguistic, and are difficult or impossible to describe in words, you can answer questions as to whether, for example, nectarines taste like peaches, or whether the sound of the cello is “dark,” or whether Schumann’s songs capture the feeling of Heine’s verse. And even though Einstein had difficulty in finding the words for his thoughts, he eventually succeeded. We can analyze experience into propositions and features and prototypes and talk about this analysis. Is there a language of the mind, a “mentalese,” which can translate between sensory images and abstract thoughts and linguistics expressions? It is clear that language is not the underlying code of thought, but what is?
LANGUAGE AS A “TOOL OF THOUGHT”
Let us first consider some of the roles played by language in the learning and memory.
Verbal mediation and behavior
It was the initial hope of behavior psychology that conditioning and problem-solving experiments using animal would provide the key to human behavior as well. However, it soon becomes obvious that, in many
because of the use of verbal thought as a means of arriving at and holding onto solution. Indeed, Pavlov himself came to the conclusion, late in his life, that his work on conditioned reflexes had only limited application to human behavior because of the complex role of linguistic signals in calling forth complex stored structured of past experiences.
“Of course a word is for man as much a real conditioned stimulus as are other stimuli common to men and animals, yet at the same time it is so all-comprehension that it allows of no quantitative or qualitative comparisons with conditioned stimuli in animals…… the word created a second system of signal of reality which is peculiarly ours, being the signal of signal. On the one hand, numerous speech stimuli have removed us from reality…… on the other, it is precisely which has made us human”
Accordingly, in soviet psychology much attention was paid to ways in which language mediates between stimuli and responses (Slobin, 1966b). For example, in training an animal, one repeatedly presents stimulus configurations, waiting for the animal to discover the contingencies between stimulus and response. However, in training human subjects, one can use verbal instruction.
Verbal coding and memory
The ability to code experiences verbally often influences the way in which such experience are remembered. In fact, many memories are distorted just because they are stored in verbal from-because not everything can be accurately represented in a verbal summary. Verbal is thus a two-edged sword.
This is clearly revealed in experiments on memory for visual aspects of stimuli- e.g., form color. Many such experiments have shown that memory of visual images can be distorted to better conform with their verbal labels (Glanzer & Clark, 1964; Lants & Stefflre, 1964). These experiments presented subjects with a set of twelve ambiguous figures, such as O-O, which would be seen as either eyeglasses or dumbbells. The subjects were told that they would first see 12 figures, which they would later have to reproduce as accurately as possible. Each figure was named as it was presented-e.g., in one case the above figures was named eyeglasses and in the other dumbbell. The result was the subjects tended to reproduce the ambiguous figures to better conform with their verbal labels.
Language and childhood Amnesia
Frued believed that memories of early childhood are actually present in the adult unconscious, but inaccessible to conscious recall because they are laden with repressed matters of infantile sexuality. Could it just be “repression” which hides early memory from us, or might there be other, more cognitive reasons? Piedget (1964) has also examined such problems, and the issue has been discussed with great insight by the psychologist Ernest Schachtel (1959). The cognitive approach to the problem reveals interesting aspects of the role played by language in memory.
Schachtel raises important objection to Frued. He points out that the Fruedian explanation of repression of memories connected with infantile sexuality fails to explain why all memories of early childhood are inaccessible to adult recall. One general cannot bring such memories to awareness even though psychoanalysis or the other means of memory stimulation.
He goes on to argue (1959) that early autobiographical memory may be impossible for strictly cognitive reasons, because:
“The categories (or schemata) for adult memory are not suitable receptacles for early childhood experiences and therefore not to preserve these experiences and enable their recall. The functional capacity of the conscious, adult memory is usual limited to those types of experience which the adult consciously makes and is capable of making”
What he means to say is that the child’s way of perceiving the world is so different from that of the adult that the two worlds are almost mutually incomprehension. Consider how difficult it is to imagine what a young child is really thinking and feeling-much less an infant. One reason for difference, of course, is simply the cognitive development which takes place in the process of growing up. Another reason is tied with the fact that adult TALK about that experience and memories and, as we have already noted, tend to code store their experiences linguistically. That is to say, you can get back to an adult memory by reconstructing it from a verbal description or “tag” such verbal tags are not available for very early experiences. Schachtel points out that when you ask an adult to recount his experience to you, he follows certain standard “signposts” of his culture, relating such fact as education, marriage, jobs, trips and so on. These memories are schematic generally do not have the vividness or force of the living experience. Living and telling are two different modes, and only the skilled writer or storyteller can breathe life into a retrospective account. (In reports of drug experiences the point is often made that the experiences cannot be conveyed verbally; but note that this is true also of everyday experiences).
LANGUAGE AS A TOOL IN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT  
The use of language in childhood
we have already argued that all children learn language equally well, according to universal patterns of development, so that there is no such thing as a “language deficit” in child development. But what if the deficit is in communicative skills? Social environments certainly do differ in regar to how well they match the school environment. Clearly, children who have acquired the motivations, habits, values and form of speaking used in the school system will perform better in that system tahn children who come from social backgrounds different from those on which the education system of given sosiety is based. The pedagogical emphasis on the role of language  as a tool of cognitive development is, I think misplaced. In fact, linguistic communication plays a very specialized role in cognitive development- perhaps both facilitating and retarding various aspects of the process.
An anthropologist and a clinical psychologist, Marida Hollos and Philip Cowan, carried out a detail study of the cognitive development of child in children in several different social setting. Consider the first learning environment, which they describe in the following terms.
“Children spend most of their time in solitary play or in observation of others. Since there are few commercial toys and games, solitary play involves manipulation or observation of object that occur naturally in the environment….. most frequent interaction take place with the mother, the father spend much of the day away from the house….the amount of verbal interaction between mother and child is limited. Mothers do not prompt or encourage children to talk, ask question, or suggest activities. There are no periods of storytelling o discussion….. interaction and communication between adult members of the family is limited to mealtimes and evening. The major part of the evening is devoted to watching television.  
Similarly, assuming that normal children have a certain capacity for learning at a given age and that the human mind is an active agent, it is possible that if the available energy is channeled towards social relation and verbal skills there is less capacity available to seek and act on physical concepts and thereby develop in that area of cognition.
The role of linguistic communication of childhood
Linguistic interaction is obviously a major means by which the child acquires the knowledge and values of his society. Vigotsky formulated the basic problem as one of investigating “how a function, arising in communication and at first divided between two people, can restructure of his mental processes”.
Vygotsky, on the other hand, stressed that all speech is social in origin and sought to discover the function served by early overt speech in the life of the child. He opposed  both Piaget’s notion of the eventual atrophy of egocentryc “outer speech” and watson’s position that this speech, under the pressure not to talk out loud, was simply internalized to become subvocal speech, and thus the equivalent of thuoght. Rather, he attempted to show that early egocentric speech split from communicative speech and is a transition stage between full-fledged speech out loud and silent thought.
Cognitive development without linguistic communication
Piagetian research suggest that cognitive development cannot be significantly speeded up by special language training; and psycolinguistic research suggest that new concept most often emerge before the child has mastered the relevant linguistic means of expressing those concept. Language rather than bringing about cognitive advances, seems to follow behind mental development, replecting the level of reasoning and knowledge attained by the child.
The only way to pull these issues apart is to study cognitive development in the absence of language. There is only one appropriate group of children for such  investigation- namely, deaf children  who have learned  neither speech nor sign language. By generalizing the results of the studies summarized above and applying  them to a theoretical position on the influence of language on intellective development, the following is suggested: (a) language does not influence intellectual development in any direct, general, or dicisive way.(b) the influence of language may be indirect or specific may accelerate intellectual development: by providing  the opportunity for additional experience throught giving information and exchange of ideas and by furnishing ready symbols (word) and linguistic habits in specific situations.
Language and Schooling
I suggested that education must be geared to the particular sorts of abilities  which need to be developed in a given child  or group of children. Verbal experience is only one kind of experience which children need in order to develop skills or gain knowledge.
The Rule of Culture in our culture we are used to learning skills by verbal instruction. We even buy  books on hwo to play tennis or draw or exercise, relying solely on contex free, noninteractive language to advance knowledge and abilit. The fact that fairly complex skills can be learned on an obsevational basis is of theoritical  importance to our earlier discussions of language and thought, indicating another separation between the two. A graphic exam is description of how mayan indians in cantel. This conclusion should not lead you to believe, of course, the schooling has no effect other tahn getting people to talk about what they know. The very use of context free-language is an important skill in itself, and is crucial for adapting to the constant innovation in the technological and sosial orders which all people must face in  our times.
The Rule of Dialect   psycolinguistically there is no basis for relating a particular dialect or language to special success in normal mental development. Because this issues has been most sharply raised in relation to Black English, it is worth examining this particular dialect  of english in discussing realtion between language and thought  in development. As you can expect  from the general position taken in this book, everything we have said about  the nature and development of language, and it is relation to cognition, is as true  for speakers of Black English as it is for speaker of any other language or dialect.
Note that the two dialects are especially close at the preschool period in their use of negative, auxiliaries and question forms. The dialects diverge at a later stage in childhood, but at the preschool level they are roughly equivalent on functional and grammatical grounds. (where the dialects differ, of course, is in their social consequences in the contemporary American  social system). Even for adult speakers, the differences between the dialects are superficial in linguistic terms as it has been pointed out most clearly by the linguist.
Given differences as subtle and superficial  as these, it would be hard to argue that black english , as a version of english should have any consequences for cognitive development. Eventually these children will have to come to terms with the standard dialect as a tool for practical social and economic purposes in our society.
All too often, standard English is represented  by a style that is stimultaneously overparticular and vague. The accumulating flow of words buries rather than strikes the target. It is verbosity which is most easily taught and most easily learned, so that words take the place of thought and nothing can be found behind them. When we have discovered how much of midle class style is matter of a fashion and how much actually help us express ideas clearly we will have done ourselves a great serves.
LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY AND DETERMINISM
The notion that different languages influence thinking in different ways has been present since the beginning of philosophy. Human being do not live in the objective world alone, not alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problem of communication or reflection. The specification of differences is the first of three problems which must be considered in trying to relate these two sorts of phenomena. The first question ask: (1) what kinds of linguistic facts are being referred to? (2) with what kind of phenomena is a connection being made? (3) what is the nature of the connection?
It is important to bear these three question in mind : the nature of linguistics evidence, the nature of the behavioral evidence, and the causal nature of the connection. Only a few psychological experiment have tried to related specific linguistic differences to specific sorts of behavior and event when a relation is found, it is not clear just what the causal nature of the relation is.
The Lexical Level  
 When you compare two language, you mind find that one of them has a word for which there is no one word equivalent at all in the other language. We have thousands of word which we have borrowed from other language whenever necessary.
Language also differ in providing super ordinate terms to name various categories. Language also differ lexically in the ways in which they divide various semantic domains. Language differ in the number of color terms they have and how they divide up the color continuum.
The Grammatical Level
The natural or at any rate, the naïve thing is to assume that when we wish to communicate a certain idea or impression, we make something like a rough and rapid inventory of the objective elements and relation involved in it, that such an inventory or analysis is quite inevitable, and that our linguistic task consist merely of the finding of the particular words and grouping of word that correspond to the term of the objective analysis.
An Experimental Test
An important collection of experiment was carried out in late 1950s in connection with the south west project in comparative psycholinguistic. The method was an object triads test, in which the child had to pick which two object, of three presented,” went best” together: for example, one of the pairs consisted of a yellow stick and a piece of blue rope of comparable size. The experiment showed that “ in both the Navaho groups…the trend is toward the increasing perceptual saliency of shape or form, as compared with color, with increasing age.
Conclusion
The fate of the Sapir – whorf hypothesis at the present time is interesting today we are more concerned with linguistic universals and cultural universal than with linguistic and cultural relativity. Cultural anthropologist are looking for ways in which the underlying structure of culture are alike, and psychologist are moving out of western cultural to cross cultural studies, in an attempt to understand general laws of human behavior and development. Perhaps in an age when our world has become so small, and the most diverse cultures so intimately interrelated in matters of war and peace, it is best that we come to an understanding of what all people have in common. But at the same time it would be dangerous to forget that different language and cultures may indeed have important effect on what people will believe and what they will do.