Language is a communication system that we use to code and express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Language is a cognitive process and throughout the study of it, it has become clear that it is difficult to separate language from thinking, as humans are very linguistic. Some of the more significant areas of language study are the acquisition, production, and the comprehension of language. Comprehension is how we understand, process and remember both spoken and written language. Speech production is the physical and mental process that produce speech, and acquisition is how people learn to speak and learn a language. Research as shown that children learn to respond to the vowel sounds of their language, but do not respond to the phonology of other languages as well. Skinner and Chomsky are two psychologists who have had very different views on how language is used and learned. Skinner believed that language is learned as a product of operant conditioning or reinforcement, while Chomsky believed that our language abilities are due to far more than just conditioning since children say far more things than they could have had reinforcement for. He also believed that the ability to invent language is encoded in our genes, this indicates that perhaps there is an underlying basis of language across all cultures. In summary Chomsky believed that as humans we are inherently linguistic and that it is apart of our genetic make up.
There are multiple things that make up language they are phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Phonology is the sounds involved in speech they combine to form words which is morphology, words combine to form sentences which is syntax. Sentences can then be combined to make a meaningful statements, which is semantics. Semantics are used in certain ways, which is the basis behind pragmatics. All of the parts of language make it very important to psychological processes since it is a tool for social interaction, we use it to exchange information, to identify groups (use of dialect), and we use it to express our feelings, thoughts, and ideas. One area of language study that is not easy to answer is whether or not human language is a unique specialized ability or if human language is just another type of general animal communication. This question is hard to answer because as humans we don't have a very good way to judge other species communication thus we can only watch visual forms of communication which are complicated and limited.
Although there is debate about the uniqueness of human language, the study of human language has shown some specific features. First there is semanticity. This is the idea that symbols have arbitrary meaning, they can refer to objects or to relationships between objects, but the symbols alone don't have a direct connection to what they are representing. Words are the basic forms of symbols. The next characteristic of human language is displacement. This is the characteristic of language that allows us to talk about objects or relationships that are not directly present, this allows us to refer to objects that are in another place or time. Creativity is one of the more distinctive features of human language. This is the idea that language is combinatorial or that elements can be combined in many ways that allows people to say brand new things. With basic rules governing language symbols can be combined in very powerful ways to create new words, phrases, sentences and more. We the regular rules we have the ability to create lots of new statements. Research is not clear on whether or not any other language systems have the creativity or the ability to be so unique. The last key characteristic of language is structure dependency, the arrangement of the symbols matters, if the syntax is different the semantics may also be different. In addition to human or verbal communication there are non-verbal or non-human forms of communication they include facial expressions, gestures, posture, and prosody. In some circumstances gestures can become the main form of communication as is the case with sign language.
As we speak and communicate we are constantly monitoring what is being said and predicting what will come next. When what someone says does not make sense or has a different meaning than what is expected, ie it is semantically incorrect, a N400 effect occurs in the event-related potential (ERP), in the central part of the brain between the frontal and parietal lobes. If the order of the words is incorrect, a syntax error, an ELAN (early left anterior negativity) occurs in the left frontal lobe at about 120 ms. In correct syntax may also elicit a P600 effect in the parietal area when the sentence is reanalyzed. Since we very quickly find errors in sentences debate has arisen about how we parse a sentence. Parsing is breaking down larger structures into their component parts in an attempt to understand the sentence. One of the parsing approaches is the Syntax-First Approach of Parsing, this is the idea that we first concentrate on the syntax of a sentence to understand it. This can be shown by the fact that we still try an make sense of a sentence with very few actual words or by garden path sentences. How you parse the syntax of the sentence changes how the sentence is interpreted. In addition to debate about how we first try and interpret a sentence there has also been controversy over the effect language has on our thinking. At the center of this debate is the Whorf hypothesis, which proposes that the language of a culture affects the way people think and perceive.
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