Eric H. Lenneberg

The Biological Foundations of Language

The coming of language occurs at about the same age in every healthy child throughout the world, strongly supporting the concept that genetically determined processes of maturation, rather than env...

Of Language Knowledge, Apes, and Brains

Mans language ability is due to a more general, deep-seated cognitive ability characteristic of the species. It is argued that mans ability for mathematical thinking is a product of the same species-specific form of cerebration as language. The basis for mathematical constructs seems to be contained in the basis for language constructs; apparently, for every mathematical notion there is a homologous one in the sphere of language, the former always being more restricted and well defined than the latter. Mathematical ability may therefore be regarded as a special case of the more general ability that also generates language, and this point is further emphasized by certain similarities in the formal structure of mathematics (arithmetic in particular) and language. Taking advantage of the commonalities between language and arithmetic, it is possible to use the latter to illustrate important general characteristics of the former. The insights gained are relevant to biology at large, and to comparative zoology and neurology in particular. The zoologist who wishes to compare animal communication with language must know what the nature of language is-how (or whether) one might analyze it into components. He must know what might constitute a primitive or simple language. It is shown that the irreducible elements of the two systems under study (language and arithmetic) are processes (i.e., processes of “relating,” or simply “relations”) and that these processes combine into interrated systems. The systems have ontogenetic histories that might, perhaps, furnish a criterion for the notion of simplicity. We do not yet know what might be a homologous phylogenetic “cousin” of the basic human ability under consideration; howerver, we should expect it to be “homeomorphic” to the human system if it is derived from a common ancestral ability. Homeomorphic mapping is therefore the most reliable criterion so far for phylogenetic relatedness. By characterizing language and arithmetic simultaneously (in order to get at their common biological foundations) it is also possible to sharpen up the questions that the student of language should put to the neurophysiologist. The quest for innovation or differences in brain processes and functions now appears to be the primary one, whereas a description of structural changes in the human brain would be of interest only insofar as this would elucidate how brain functions might have become modified by them.

Color Naming, Color Recognition, Color Discrimination: A Re-Appraisal

The present paper is an attempt to reconcile the results of a number of empirical studies on the relationship between color naming, color recognition, and color discrimination. An earlier study by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) showed that under certain conditions color memory is affected by color-naming habits. A color which has an unequivocal name in English had a better chance, in their experiments, of being recognized correctly chan one which is not so easily named by English speaking Ss. However, this finding was confined to a particular type of experiment. It was also evident from their work that under different circumstances color names seemed to be of little consequence for accuracy in recognition. The factor that seemed directly related to the degree to which color names would affect recognition was the difficzilty of the memory task involved. I shall now present evidence that the Brown-Lenneberg findings are a special case of a more general phenomenon.

The Concept of Language Differentiation

Publisher Summary Language development in the child is viewed as a gradual increase in specializations and specificities, an ontogenetic development that has been called differentiation. The term is applied to postulated neurophysiological processes that underlie semantic, syntactic, and phonological aspects of language. To underscore the importance of processes, the discreteness of sounds, words, syntactic categories, and sentences are shown to be secondary and physiologically nonessential feature of language. The relevant processes are referred to as activity states, which themselves are labile and easily deformable; therefore, the infinite variability in shades of meaning is thought to correspond to families of activity states. The point is stressed that everything in language is of a relational nature and what has to be learned in language acquisition is how to relate or how to compute a relationship upon given physical data.

A Word Between Us

There is nothing obvious about the nature and function of language. The discovery of its nature is as difficult as an attempt to see our own retina or to sense the motion of the planet under our feet. Linguists have been accused by students of animal behavior that they are complicating the picture unduly by the introduction of formalization and by creating an aura of philosophy about language that is—they claim—unnecessary and merely serves to becloud the straightforward and “simple” facts. R. A. and B. T. Gardner, for instance, state (1969): The theories [on language] that can be constructed are never as interesting as the natural phenomena themselves, and the gathering of data is a self-justifying activity.

The Relationship of Language to the Formation of Concepts

Consider W. v. Orman Quine’s distinction between meaning and reference. Determination of meaning in terms of physical description is not feasible. The question remains whether the occurrence of those words that have reference can be fully accounted for by some objective description of physical phenomena. A reductionist semantic theory would answer this affirmatively. It would hold that the lexicon of a natural language has a set of primitive terms whose reference is exhaustively describable in terms of physical specifications (i.e. sensory terms such as red, hard, square), and that the rest of the lexicon is in turn describable in terms of these “primitive words”.

A laboratory for speech research at the Children's Hospital Medical Center.

TRADITIONALLY, hospitals have made facilities available for laboratories in the preclinical sciences. The present article reports on a new venture in hospital-based research: the establishment and ...

Some New Prospects for Neurophysiological Research on Disorders of Perception and Language

In a recently created section of neuropsychology at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry), we have begun to investigate certain pathological interactions between different sensory modalities as well as between sensory and motor activities. Although we have so far worked only with adult patients with acquired neurological disease, our preliminary findings suggest that similar research on children with given congenital abnormalities may provide insight into learning difficulties, particularly in the area of reading. We have just begun these investigations. We allude to them here because they have provided the motivation for the speculations that form the basis for this contribution and because they readily lead to further thoughts a la Piaget about the nature of space and time concepts and symbolization.

WHAT IS MEANT BY KNOWING A LANGUAGE

Publisher Summary Language is relational in every aspect and at every term. There are many practical situations in which one may be in doubt as to whether a subject knows English or whether he is just doing something that superficially resembles speaking, without any real knowledge of English. Among humans, it is not always clear whether an individual knows a natural language. Clinicians are faced with patients whose language behavior is so deviant that serious doubts may be raised about their language capacities. Such borderline cases help in the understanding of the nature of language. Language is so intimately interwoven with the cognitive life that it is found hard to imagine what language-free cognition would be like. Virtually every aspect of language is relational. Any kind of concatenation of words in any language and at any state of language development implies the relations between the concatenated words. The language community induces the child to treat what is before him in quantitative, qualitative, and comparative terms and induces him to say something that relates an object to its use, to the speaker, to the listener, or to another object.