{"id":60628,"date":"2021-12-08T00:08:01","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T05:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=60628"},"modified":"2021-12-08T00:08:01","modified_gmt":"2021-12-08T05:08:01","slug":"our-emotions-and-identity-can-affect-how-we-use-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/our-emotions-and-identity-can-affect-how-we-use-grammar\/","title":{"rendered":"Our emotions and identity can affect how we use grammar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nLanguage and social identity have been making headlines recently. Last month, Air Canada\u2019s CEO Michael Rousseau\u00a0faced scrutiny over<\/a>\u00a0not knowing French \u2014 his language deficit is helping support\u00a0Bill 96 in Qu\u00e9bec<\/a>\u00a0(which seeks to change the Canadian Constitution to affirm\u00a0Qu\u00e9bec as a nation and French its official language<\/a>). Meanwhile Indian chain store Fabindia had to change advertisements for its\u00a0festive Diwali clothing line<\/a>\u00a0from its Urdu name to appease Hindu nationalist politicians.<\/p>\n

Language can evoke a strong social and emotional response. But the dominant theory of language in linguistics,\u00a0thanks to Noam Chomsky<\/a>\u00a0(and the one in which I was trained), fails to consider these aspects.<\/p>\n

In linguistics, and in cognitive science in general, the human mind is conceived of\u00a0metaphorically as a computer with different algorithms<\/a>\u00a0for different procedures \u2014 with no reference to emotion or social context.<\/p>\n

A better understanding of language and its neuroscientific basis would help us handle linguistic issues throughout our lives. My\u00a0new research<\/a>\u00a0underlines how emotional context affects how we understand and use language at the neural level. It also identifies a piece of the human language puzzle that has, up until now, been missing.<\/p>\n

What is human language<\/h4>\n

The components of this puzzle are hard to define because the big picture, \u201clanguage,\u201d is difficult to specify.<\/p>\n

When I ask students at start of term, \u201cWhat is human language, anyway?\u201d they typically fall silent. So, we start the discussion by separating out communicative systems (like\u00a0plants<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0bees<\/a>, which communicate but do not have language); whether language has to be auditory (no, think about sign language); and the\u00a0difference between dialect and language<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We then discuss sentences like \u201cColourless green ideas sleep furiously<\/a>\u201d to show that human language is governed by a\u00a0grammatical system<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a sentence can be grammatical without meaning. Finally, another big question: Why do we have language?<\/p>\n

Other mammals have sophisticated communicative systems (chimps<\/a>,\u00a0elephants<\/a>,\u00a0whales<\/a>) but cannot generate an infinite number of sentences. For example,\u00a0Koko the gorilla<\/a>\u00a0could not say, \u201cTomorrow, I might eat one or two bananas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why not? Seemingly, it would be due to the structure of her brain compared to ours.<\/p>\n

Neuroscientist\u00a0Suzana Herculano-Houzel<\/a>\u00a0has pointed out that our brains are different because of\u00a0the number of neurons<\/a>\u00a0packed into our skulls \u2014 it\u2019s less about the size of our brains. The density of that packing, and the ensuing\u00a0neuronal connections<\/a>\u00a0this density allows for, gives rise to our ability to acquire language from birth and use it till death.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s leave aside the neuroanatomical differences between our brains and those of gorillas for others to solve. That still doesn\u2019t help us resolve the issue of defining language and its essential components.<\/p>\n

Basic language perception is tied to emotion<\/strong><\/h4>\n

In contrast to my\u00a0Chomskyan training<\/a>, recent results from my lab show that social identity is not, in fact, a supplemental feature of language, but a feature that is part of every level of linguistic knowledge and use.<\/p>\n

This seems highly counterintuitive, especially given that the first formal grammar,\u00a0Ashtadhyayi<\/a>\u00a0(circa 550 BCE), by\u00a0Sanskrit grammarian Panini<\/a>\u00a0established the idea that language is a system of abstract rules, where these grammatical rules make no reference to emotion or social context.<\/p>\n

In contrast to this age-old idea, my\u00a0recent work<\/a>\u00a0using\u00a0EEG technology<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 which measures\u00a0brain wave activity<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 has shown that the affective state of a person (how someone feels) while they\u00a0read non-emotional sentences<\/a>\u00a0in English changes the nature of the brain response.<\/p>\n

I was stunned by these results. What does it mean if basic sentence comprehension is tied to emotion?<\/p>\n

Just the superficial gist<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Psychologist\u00a0Lisa Feldman Barrett<\/a>\u00a0paves the way to understanding these findings.<\/p>\n

She assumes that the\u00a0main function of the brain<\/a>\u00a0is to regulate our bodies as we move through life. That means that at every given moment, our brains assess our hunger, threat levels, etc. to figure out how much energy we need to get through the day. Thinking and cognitive perception are secondary products of how our brain responds predictively to our environment.<\/p>\n

If she\u2019s right (and I think she is), I would say that linguistic function, which must include a grammatical system, can also be understood as an \u201cadd-on\u201d feature of the brain.<\/p>\n

If the context of a comment\u00a0requires deep attention<\/a>\u00a0to meaning (due to difficult sentences), then our grammatical system can become engaged. Otherwise, it is likely that many people interpret only\u00a0word meaning<\/a>\u00a0to get the superficial gist of a sentence, then moving on to the next.<\/p>\n

This is comparable to psychologist Daniel Kahneman\u2019s take on\u00a0how the mind works<\/a>, so perhaps it\u2019s not surprising that these general principles also work for language.<\/p>\n

If the grammatical system is a resource that the brain uses depending on context, then our emotions and identity can also affect how we use grammar. This is precisely what we have found.<\/p>\n

Author Bio:<\/strong> Veena D. Dwivedi is Professor, Psychology\/Neuroscience; Director, Dwivedi Brain and Language Laboratory at Brock University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Language and social identity have been making headlines recently. Last month, Air Canada\u2019s CEO Michael Rousseau\u00a0faced scrutiny over\u00a0not knowing French \u2014 his language deficit is helping support\u00a0Bill 96 in Qu\u00e9bec\u00a0(which seeks to change the Canadian Constitution to affirm\u00a0Qu\u00e9bec as a nation and French its official language). Meanwhile Indian chain store Fabindia had to change advertisements […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[12717],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-60628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-grammar"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOur emotions and identity can affect how we use grammar - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/our-emotions-and-identity-can-affect-how-we-use-grammar\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Our emotions and identity can affect how we use grammar - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Language and social identity have been making headlines recently. 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