COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE

System of Symbols

Language is a system of symbols that are used to communicate information and concepts among two or more individuals. Language is also used for venting emotions, joke telling, and social greeting. Humans use language along with other images for thinking.

Language uses both mental and external representations and images of objects or events. An author communicates with a reader using the symbols of letters and words to get across ideas. In conversation, the speaker and listener exchange mental representations using spoken rather than written symbols. Languages share four rudimentary properties. 

1. A language could be learned by children. 

2. It must be able to be spoken and understood readily by adults.

3. It must capture the ideas that people normally communicate.

4. It must enable communication among groups of people in a social cultural context.

The Essence of Language

Reef Knot

Some factual knowledge is very difficult to convey with language. For example, try describing to a friend what a spiral is, without resorting to gestures or drawing a diagram. Or, try instructing someone, in words alone, how to tie a reef knot. 

Such visual-spatial knowledge is not easily conveyed in words alone. 

The essence of language is the use of symbols to convey meaning. Humans use words, or patterns of sound, to refer to objects, events, beliefs, desires, feelings, and intentions.  The words carry meanings. If our friend says he is happy, then you interpret this to mean something about his emotional state. If instead of speaking, your friend whistles a tune, than his behaviour may say something about his emotional state, but it is less meaningful. Your friend might whistle by habit or whistle when he is angry, sad, or happy. Unlike speech whistling is not specialized to convey a clear meaning.

Words Are Arbitrary

The words used by humans lack any connection between the symbols and the meaning they carry and so differ across languages. “Uno”, “ein”, “onnu” and “one” are arbitrary sounds referring to the same numerical concept. A single scratch in the dirt or mark on a clay tablet would be a nonarbitrary way of referring to the number one.  Ten such marks would nonarbitrarily refer to ten. But the use of nonarbitrary symbols can get very cumbersome. For example to convey the number 100 one hundred scratches have to be marked.  The invention of Arabic numerals for representing numerical qualities vastly simplified the task of representing, say, 543 cups of tea. Another specialism of the language is that by putting together strings of words in different orders, one can express a very large number of different meanings.

Origins of Language

Linguists have restructured early languages by studying the relationships among the written records of ancient languages dating back about 5000 years. It is presumed that the early languages existed 10,000 years ago. A long debated idea on the origin of language claims that it developed from gestures. Jean Aitchison, Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford, says that language and gestures may well have evolved together.  When our ancestors first began to communicate their thoughts to other individuals, they needed a way to refer to specific objects and to relate those objects. It is known that gestures are synchronized in time with oral statements to convey meaning. Spoken words and gestures are synchronized even in congenitally blind individuals who have never seen anyone gesturing.  It could that gestural and spoken output developed in tandem.

Another argument is that language evolved as a consequence of the larger brain of humans. This is tying the horse behind the cart.  A plausible alternative is that language and large brain emerged more or less simultaneously.  As our ancestors lived together in increasingly larger groups, the degree of social interaction increased. Deception possibly became more important, in order to gain an advantage in getting the food, water, and shelter needed for survival. These kinds of social forces may have selected for slightly larger brain but at the same time selected for increased means of communication. Thus, language and brain size may have fed off each other in evolution. Increasingly sophisticated means of communication demanded increasingly complex brain structures. Internet may bring about subtle changes in the human brain. 

Ambiguous Language and Recognizing Emotional Conflicts in Others Part I

In my post of 12/2/14, intrapsychic conflict and dysfunctional family patterns, I discussed what I believe to be the most important way to integrate three of the major schools of psychotherapy: psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, and family systems. To boil it down, conflicts that people experience over what to think and how to behave (intrapsychic conflicts) are triggered and reinforced, on a variable intermittent reinforcement schedule, by family members who are stuck with rules of behavior that are no longer adaptive because of changes in the ambient culture. In a sense, the whole family shares the intrapsychic conflict.

The family members in this situation give one another mixed or contradictory double messages about what behavior they expect from one another.

If you are stuck in this situation and are motivated to recognize the double messages and to try to discuss the conflicts in a meaningful way (metacommunication), how might you recognize when other family members are thusly conflicted? This post and the next will discuss how to do that. Specifically, I will show the intrinsic ambiguity that is a feature of all language is used by those conflicted to accomplish two goals:

1. Keeping their conflicted feelings, beliefs and motivations unclear to other people.

2. Keeping those things unclear to even themselves to avoid anxiety.

Linguists tell us that any sentence in any language can be interpreted at two different levels - which may then conflict. One level is the purely lexical or object level, that is, what the specific words actually mean. The other level is the meta level. This level concerns the relationship of the two conversants in which any statement is made. The context provided by the entire history of the relationship between the two conversants alters the meanings of the sentences.

If I say to a friend "I love ice cream" as we pass an ice cream parlor, I may not merely be conveying a message about my preferences in dairy products. I might also be suggesting, for example, that we stop and have an ice cream. The indirect nature of the request may, for example, indicate that I lack the power in the relationship to just demand that my friend go into the parlor with me. The power differential is part and parcel of the nature of the relationship between the two people.

 Whenever two people who have formed a relationship have a conversation, any statement made may refer to either the object or the meta level. The two levels may seem to be in harmony or they may contradict each other. Another way of looking at this phenomenon is that all statements may refer either to the feelings, thoughts, and intentions of the individual apart from the relationship context, or to the feelings, thoughts, and intentions within the relationship context.

When the listener does not know which of these descriptions best applies to a given statement, an ambiguity is created about the motives of the person making the statement. The statement, "I love ice cream," is an example of a statement in which the object and meta levels would not be contradictory in most social situations. It is totally consistent for me to both like ice cream no matter who I am with or even if I am alone and for me to want my friend to accompany me to an ice cream parlor right now. If, on the other hand, I make this statement as we pass an ice cream parlor while implying that I would rather be somewhere else, then the motivation behind my statement becomes ambiguous. And confusing.

Individuals will invariably react to such ambiguity, but they do not tend to think of the communication as ambiguous. For instance, if a widowed mother says to her son, "You don't care about me; you never want to come when I desperately need you," it is natural for him to assume that his mother wants him to change his behavior. He believes that she wants him to gladly come over whenever he is needed. 

It seems that he will continue to believe this, even if the requests for help are made with impossible frequency at times clearly inconvenient for him and without a shred of gratitude on his mother's part when he complies. He may continue to believe this, in fact, even if criticized every time he complies with his mother's request.

  

The son in this situation is in a rather strange bind. He is being criticized by his mother for attempting to please her. To add insult to injury, her requests are almost impossible to follow without a complete disregard for his own needs. Interestingly, most people in such a predicament do not come to the conclusion that the mother may not, in fact, really want the help she asks for, or, alternately, that she does not even know whether she wants it or not. The idea of an intrapsychic conflict being the cause of such behavior is not generally considered, even though it is the most common cause. 

The idea that the mother is knowingly pushing the helper away for some ulterior motive is one that just does not appear to most people to make any sense. However, this is precisely what is happening. This is the "net effect" for which the behavior was designed.

The ambiguity is Mom's motivation in this case suggests the possibility that his mother has a conflict within herself over her dependency needs. Perhaps she is not happy being looked after by her son, but might believe, for example, that being independent is not proper for a woman. No matter how the son behaves in regard to the issue, she becomes displeased. because his actions interfere with either her true desires for independence or the rules required by her gender role. He is in a "no-win" situation. However, her displeasure does not result directly from the son's behavior, but from her own internal conflicts.

  

With this in mind, let us look at the ambiguity of the "you don't care about me" part of her statement. It may refer not to the son's lack of concern for his mother per se, but to the motives behind his helping behavior. It could mean that she believes that the son's behavior is based on his own selfish wish to look after and dominate her, rather than on her desire to be looked after by him. He could be helping her because he likes being a kingpin, for instance - not because he cares about her.

Within the context of dysfunctional family relationships, it is often true that consideration of the seemingly less likely interpretation of a statement reveals the truth as to what is really going on!

In the next post, we will look in more detail about the semantics of intrapsychic conflict.