00:01
Some believe that language
and thought or the cognition
cognitive side of things are
actually developed separately.
00:06
So they’re not happening.
00:08
So they’re teasing
those two those apart.
00:10
And to some extent,
that can make sense.
00:13
So like I said in my example
of the baby saying dada,
most of the time, initially at least, the
child doesn’t really know what dada means.
00:22
They know that it’s a sound
and they’re building a
vocabulary of these words
and building language.
00:27
And it’s not until a little bit later that
they actually realized that when I say
dada and I point to that weird
guy who’s always around,
that that’s actually my father.
00:35
that that’s actually my father.
00:37
That’s who I’m point to.
00:38
And it doesn’t make the association
of, you know, saying, you know,
bottle or baba or whatever a baby
ends up saying and points to
the bottle that it makes a
cognitive length between the
sound that I’m making and the
thought that I’m having.
00:54
Okay?
According to this idea,
there are three stages.
00:57
The first stage is immersion
in social speech,
so just really a sponge in
acquiring all this language.
01:03
And then talking to themselves,
trying different things.
01:06
So we call that private speech where
you’ll see little children sometimes kind
of just playing with their toys or
walking around and making weird noises.
01:13
And you know, and you’re laughing,
“Oh, isn’t that so cute?”
Well, the baby is actually trying to
express some of the sounds and words
that it knows and builds this phonetic
vocabulary and phonetic skills.
01:24
And then finally, it starts
to understand the grammar
and the relationship and
it builds inner speech.
01:29
And again, the children will
have this internal dialogue
and try to vocalize and
piece together the language
that they’ve started to
acquire and the cognitive
meanings around these words
to put them together.
01:40
And so, if you’re going to look at that
kind of figuratively, we’re saying,
“Speech is acquired first
and then we have thought.”
And then at some point,
the two of them overlap
when we get speech and
thought together.
01:52
Now, let’s take a look at
another complicating factor
and that would be looking
at where you from,
what is the language that you’re
ultimately going to speak.
01:59
So we call that linguistic relativity
hypothesis and it states that
cognition and perception are determined
by language that the one speaks.
02:06
So,
if you’re from, say, Canada
versus China versus Italy,
there are going to be
some differences there.
02:14
We all know that, right?
So, different language groups
conceptualize the world differently.
02:18
And so, there are some
semantic contacts.
02:20
There is some cultural influence and
there are different things that
people in that country might experience
versus other parts of the world.
02:29
So, you know, it can be
something as simple as --
a great example is we look at
groups that have a definition
for the words snow or water.
02:40
And so, we have the aboriginal
subpopulation in the Inuit.
02:43
And for them, they live
in a snowy climate.
02:46
They have several different words
that describe snow or define snow.
02:51
Whereas the average layman who
doesn’t live in snow all the time
has one definition, snow, right?
So, we’re saying here is this,
because of the semantic --
because of the cultural
influence, the semantic
distinctions are made between
these words and language.
03:08
And so, at the end of
the day, globally,
there is probably a core set
of language, words and rules
but then these can be further
convoluted as you start layering
the linguistic differences that
you would see across cultures.