Lecture+6(耶鲁大学-心理学导论讲稿).pdf

1 Introduction to Psychology Yale University Lecture 6 This class today is about language. And language is, to a large extent, where the action is. The study of human language has been the battleground over different theories of human nature. So, every philosopher or psychologist or humanist or neuroscientist who has ever thought about people has had to make some claim about the nature of language and how it works. Im including here people like Aristotle and Plato, Hume, Locke, Freud and Skinner. Im also including modern-day approaches to computational theory, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. If you hope to make it with a theory of what people are and how people work, you have to explain and talk about language. In fact, language is sufficiently interesting that, unlike most other things Ill talk about in this class, there is an entire field devoted to its study, the field of linguistics that is entirely devoted to studying the nuances and structures of different languages. Now, Ill first, before getting into details, make a definitional point. When Im talking about language Im meaning systems like English and Dutch and Warlpiri and Italian and Turkish and Urdu and what weve seen and heard right now in class in the demonstration that preceded the formal lecture. [Before class started, Professor Bloom had several bilingual students give demonstrations of non-English speech.] Now, you could use language in a different sense. You could use the term language to describe what dogs do, or what chimpanzees do, or birds. You could use language to describe music, talk about the--a musical language or art, or any communicative system, and theres actually nothing wrong with that. Theres no rule about how youre supposed to use the word language. But the problem is if you use the word language impossibly, incredibly broadly, then from a scientific point of view it be