Language and Cognition
By Wu Amin
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Outline
1 What is Cognition? 2 What is Psycholinguistics?
2.1 Language Acquisition 2.2 Language Comprehension 2.3 Language Production 3 What is Cognitive Linguistics? 3.1 Construal and Construal Operations 3.2 Categorization 3.3 Image Schemas 3.4 Metaphor 3.5 Metonymy 3.6 Blending Theory
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Comprehension of text
Text is the net of propositions that make up the semantic interpretations of individual sentences. Readers abstract the main threads of a discourse and infer missing connections, constrained by limitations of short-term memory and guided by how arguments overlap across proposition and by linguistic cues signaled by the text.
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2 What is Psycholinguistics
The study of psychological aspects of language. It
usually studies psychological states and mental activity associated with the use of language. An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences. Psycholinguistics investigate the relationship between language and thought.
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Six subjects of research
Language acquisition (L1 / L2) Language comprehension Language production Language disorders Language and Thought Neurocognition
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The Definition of Cognition
In psychology, COGNITION is used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a view that argues that the mind has internal states and can be understood in terms of information processing. Another loose definition of “Cognition” is the mental process or faculty of knowing, including awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment .
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2.1 Language Acquisition
Holophrastic stage （单词句阶段）：Shortly before
their first birthday and lasting from two months to a year. Language’s sound patterns Sensitivity to phonetic distinctions in parents’ language. One-word stage: objects, actions, motions, routines.
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Comprehension of sentences
Important as word recognition is, understanding language requires far more than adding the meaning of the individual words together. We must combine the meanings in ways that honor the grammar of the language and that are sensitive to the possibility that language is being used in a metaphoric or nonliteral manner. Two factors stand in the way of sentence comprehension: structural factors and lexical factors.



Embed one constituent inside another: Big doggie. Give doggie paper. Give big doggie paper. Use more function words: missing function words and inflection (90%) in the beginning but good use by the age of 3, with a full range of sentence types. All parts of all language are acquired before the child turns four.
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Two-word stage: around 18m
Child utterance Want cookie More milk Joe see Mature speaker I want a cookie I want some more milk I (Joe) see you Purpose Request Request Informing
Truck table
Daddy run Joe push Push cat
The truck is on the table
Daddy is running I (Joe) pushed (the cat) I pushed the car
Informing
Informing Informing Informing
Child utterance No sleep Not tired Where doll?
Mature speaker I don’t want to go to sleep I am not tired Where is the doll?
Purpose Refusal Refusal Question
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Language and Cognition
The formal approach basically addresses structural patterns, including the study of morphological, syntactic, and lexical structure. The psychological approach looks at language from the view of general systems ranging from perception, memory, attention, and reasoning. The conceptual approach is concerned with the patterns in which and the processes by which conceptual content is organized in languages.
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2.2 Language Comprehension
Language comprehension is a process for us to get familiar with the real world. From a psycholinguistic point of view, we store a great deal of information about the properties of words in our mental lexicon, and retrieve this information when we understand language. We can instinctively connect the known items stored in our mind to the unknown ones and access to more information in processing and comprehending language.
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Related fields
As an interdisciplinary study of language and psychology, psycholinguistics has its roots in structural linguistics on the one hand, and in cognitive psychology on the other hand. It is also closely related to a set of other disciplines such as anthropology, or the neurosciences.