Language and Culture

Language pervades social life. It is a primary means by which we gain access to the contents of others' minds and establish shared understanding of the reality. Meanwhile, there is an enormous amount of linguistic diversity among human populations. Depending on what counts as a language, there are 3,000 to 10,000 living languages in the world, although a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers and half have fewer than 10,000 (Crystal, 1997). Not surprisingly, a key question in culture and psychology research concerns the role of language in cultural processes. The present chapter focuses on two issues that have received by far the greatest amount of research attention from cultural researchers. First, how does language and human cultures co-evolve? Second, what are the non-linguistic cognitive effects of using a certain language? Does speaking different languages orient individuals to see and experience the external reality differently? The scope of the present chapter does not permit a comprehensive review of all pertinent research; only a selected sample of studies will be used to illustrate the main ideas in the present chapter. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol4/iss2/2 Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock. Sigmund Freud (1900, p. 165) Language pervades social life. It is a primary means by which we gain access to the contents of others' minds and establish shared understanding of the reality. Meanwhile, there is an enormous amount of linguistic diversity among human populations. Depending on what counts as a language, there are 3,000 to 10,000 living languages in the world, although a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers and half have fewer than 10,000 (Crystal, 1997). Not surprisingly, a key question in culture and psychology research concerns the role of language in cultural processes. The present chapter focuses on two issues that have received by far the greatest amount of research attention from cultural researchers. First, how does language and human cultures coevolve? Second, what are the non-linguistic cognitive effects of using a certain language? Does speaking different languages orient individuals to see and experience the external reality differently? The scope of the present chapter does not permit a comprehensive review of all pertinent research; only a selected sample of studies will be used to illustrate the main ideas in the present chapter. Co-Evolution of Language and Culture? Throughout the history of hominid evolution, the brain, language, and culture have coevolved in close interaction with each other. Figure 1 illustrates the co-evolution of the brain, language, and culture. Spoken languages emerged about 350,000 years ago, preceded by several remarkable anatomical changes, including a large expansion of the size of the hominid brain, descent of the larynx, redesign of the supralaryngeal vocal tract, and evolution of specialized auditory and memory capabilities for processing speech (Levelt, 1989). Some recent findings also show that the evolution of human language is built on a biological foundation. The Broca’s area in the brain controls speech in humans, and a recent study (Petrides, Cadoret, & Mackey, 2005) discovered a distinct brain region in macaque monkeys that controls jaw movements. This region is located in the same region and has the same anatomical characteristics as Broca’s area and is connected with the brain area that is involved in the retrieval of information from memory. When this area in the monkey was electrically stimulated, the subject displayed jaw movement sequences. Before the emergence of spoken languages, hominids had relied primarily on hand gestures and vocal signals to communicate their thoughts to others. Spoken languages have several advantages over hand gestures. A spoken language works at a distance and in the dark, and does not interfere with other motor activities (e.g., hunting). In addition, because humans can produce an infinite number of sound patterns, relative to hand gestures and primitive vocal signals, a vocal language can support a larger number of different words. As such, speech is much more efficient in conveying meanings than are hand gestures and vocal signals (Krauss & Chiu, 1998). 3 Chiu: Language and Culture Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 Figure 1. Co-evolution of biology, language and culture The development of human language is also an adaptive response to the need to represent non-immediate events symbolically. The use of language as a means to represent non-immediate events is a unique human accomplishment (Hockett & 1968). Based on their pragmatic functions, speech acts can be classified into five major types: directives (e.g., orders, demands, requests), expressives (e.g., representatives (use of linguistic symbols to represent an immediate, non displaced event), commissives (commitments, promises), and declaratives (e.g., fired; Austin, 1962; Searle, 1975). Other mammals use directives and expressives extensively, but the use of representatives, commissives, and declaratives is predominantly human (D’Andrade, 2002). Additionally, while other mammals typically use representatives to refer to immediate events only, humans often use representatives to refer to something that is not immediately present (e.g., that lives exist in other planets. in complexity, to coordinate social activities and facilitate division of work, people needed to be able to represent non-immediate events mentally. This in turn increas for the development of grammar and true symbols (a sign that may refer to different referents) as opposed to indexical signs with rigid one its referent. Ouch or Some scientists are convinced ). D’Andrade (2002) believes that as human societies grew