Language: Learn It 1—Language Use

  • Understand terms used to describe language use
  • Describe the typical content of conversations
  • Understand how the use of language develops
  • Understand the relationship between language and thinking

What is Language?

Imagine two men of 30-something age, Adam and Santiago, walking down the corridor. Judging from their clothing, they are young businessmen, taking a break from work. They then have this exchange.

Adam: “You know, Gabe bought a ring.” Santiago: “Oh yeah? For Mia, isn’t it?” (Adam nods.)

If you are watching this scene and hearing their conversation, what can you guess from this? First of all, you’d guess that Gabe bought a ring for Mia, whoever Gabe and Mia might be. Perhaps you would infer that Gabe is getting married to Mia. What else can you guess? Perhaps, Adam and Santiago are fairly close colleagues, and both of them know Gabe and Mia 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.

language

Language is a communication system that involves using words and systematic rules to organize those words to transmit information from one individual to another. While language is a form of communication, not all communication is language. Many species communicate with one another through their postures, movements, odors, or vocalizations.

Two speech bubbles.
Figure 1. Language is an essential tool that enables us to live the kind of lives we do. Much of contemporary human civilization wouldn’t have been possible without it. [Photo: Marc Wathieu]

This communication is crucial for species that need to interact and develop social relationships with their conspecifics. However, many people have asserted that it is language that makes humans unique among all of the animal species (Corballis & Suddendorf, 2007; Tomasello & Rakoczy, 2003).Language is used in our everyday lives. If psychology is a science of behavior, scientific investigation of language use must be one of the most central topics—this 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’t 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—it 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.

How Do We Use Language?

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’s how we learn a language, and that’s how we use it; we exchange words and utterances to communicate with each other. Let’s consider the simplest case of  the two people from our example, Adam and Santiago, 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

Common ground 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, “Gabe bought a ring,” he takes for granted that Santiago knows the meaning of the words he is using, who Gabe is, and what buying a ring means. When Santiago says, “For Mia, isn’t it?” he takes for granted that Adam knows the meaning of these words, who Mia is, and what buying a ring for someone means. All these are part of their common ground.

Man in business attire using his hands to to talk with another man.
Figure 2. 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]

Note that, when Adam presents the information about Gabe’s purchase of a ring, Santiago responds by presenting his guess about who the recipient of the ring might be, namely, Mia. In conversational terms, Santiago’s utterance acts as evidence for his comprehension of Adam’s utterance—“Yes, I understood that Gabe bought a ring”—and Adam’s nod acts as evidence that he now has understood what Santiago has said too. This new information is now added to the initial common ground. 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.

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 Santiago would know who Gabe was. He’d have said, “A friend of mine is getting married,” to another colleague who wouldn’t know Gabe.

audience design

Audience design is when speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences’ knowledge. If their audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object (such as Santiago about Gabe), they tend to use a brief label of the object (i.e., Gabe); for a less knowledgeable audience, they use more descriptive words (e.g., “a friend of mine”) to help the audience understand their utterances.

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., Dunbar, 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.

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 store. How can we keep track of our common ground under such circumstances?