It can be stated without a doubt that language is tied to cognition and vice versa. Language is a key element of cognition. It helps us to organize our thoughts and ideas. Cognitive linguists study language as a thing that reflects fundamental features and designs in the mind of a person. So, we use language for encoding, decoding, and transmission of thoughts (Evans & Green, 2006). We can distinguish such processes that cognition includes – thinking, remembering, language understanding, reasoning, learning, etc. All of these processes cannot be accomplished without using a language (Patel, D., Patel, S., & Wang, Y., 2003).
Language and Lexicon
The definition of a language is one of the most disputable notions among the linguists all over the world. One of the possible definitions is that a language is a means of transferring and sharing human feelings, ideas, and thoughts. Every language can be spoken and written. It presupposes the presence of a certain group of words. This group of words can be a various topics and association with a great variety of subjects. All these words form the lexicon of a language. They are tightly connected because language cannot exist without lexicon (Willingham, 2007).
Language and lexicon are studied by the cognitive psychology because language involves a lot of mental or cognitive processes. The lexicon can also be defined as a mental dictionary. And every human being is a possessor of his or her own mental dictionary in which we keep the images and representations of the words (spelling, pronunciation, belonging to the definite part of speech). Also, language and lexicon belong to cognitive psychology because it studies a particular usage of the lexicon of a person while utilizing a language in the certain situation (Rick Dale, 2004).
Key Features of a Language
In order to understand what a language is we should evaluate the key features of a language first. These features are considered to be integral parts of every language. The first one is a communicative feature. Without a doubt communicative role of a language is the most important. A language enables the process of communication between individuals. That, in its turn, enables sharing ideas, information, etc. The second one is arbitrariness. Of course, arbitrariness is among the key features of language because human language is arbitrary. It means that a person cannot predict the meaning of an unknown word because often it bears a little or no similarity to a thing or notion it describes. The only, still partial, exceptions to this are the notions of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism (Kordula De Kuthy, 2001).
The third feature is structural. Through the structure of a language, one can evaluate its complexity. The fourth feature is generative. This means that a person can actually create a limitless number of various meanings using different words of a language. A language offers its user uncountable amount of ways to express oneself. The last one is language dynamics. A language is not static, even more – language is ever-changing. It is in a process of a constant development. Its development depends on changes that happen in the world (Willingham, 2007).
We cannot but mention that there are also some other features of a language. For example, language is uniquely human. As it was mentioned above, there are five key features of a language. We cannot argue that non-human being can communicate but it is the only one feature of their communicative system. Even though, we can say that some species of animals can understand the human language they definitely cannot use it.
Levels of a language structure and processing
We can differentiate 4 main levels of a language. Those are phonemes, words, sentences, and texts. A phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit of a language. The phoneme has no independent lexical and grammatical meaning, but it is used to distinguishing and identification of meaningful units of language (morphemes and words). There are around 200 phonemes in the use and near 46 in use in English. Phonemes are hard to perceive because the production of the phonemes differs with every other speaker.
A word is one of the basic structural units of a language, which is used to name objects, their properties, and characteristics, their interactions, as well as to name abstract notions created by the human mind. More than 600,000 words can be produced with the help of combinations of those 46 phonemes (Willingham, 2007).
A sentence is a unit of language, which is grammatically organized a combination of words (or a word) with the semantic and prosodic completeness. A person produces his or her ideas with the help of sentences. There are a lot of aspects that can influence a structure of a sentence, selection of words, and grammatical structures. All of the aspects are under the analysis of cognitive linguistics.
Text is one of the broadest notions of linguistic but in a nutshell, it is a combination of sentences united by a certain idea or subject. The main features of a text are cohesion and coherence. That is why all the sentences in a text are to be logically connected. They also have to be united with one joint idea.
A Role of Language in Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies cognitive processes of the human mind. Research in this area is usually associated with memory issues, attention, emotions, presentation of information, logical thinking, imagination and the ability to make decisions. Many notions of the cognitive psychology form the basis of modern psycholinguistics. The findings of cognitive psychology are widely used in other parts of psychology, in particular in social psychology, personality psychology, and educational psychology.
Cognitive psychology studies a language taking into consideration such questions as its perception, production, acquisition, and acquisition. And to understand these processes we need to understand how the language works. And it is impossible without knowing the structure of a language. So, in order to understand the way language is formed. The learner should take into consideration that every component in language is important and have hierarchic structure. Phonemes form words, words form sentences, and sentences form texts. All of these are used by a person in order to express oneself (Willingham, 2007). And the language in its turn plays the main role in cognitive psychology. It takes part in every kind of cognitive processes and helps to transfer thoughts and ideas despite its form (thoughts can be either written or verbal). As well as it helps to receive information because perception is also a kind of cognitive process that involve language usage. A person focuses on the sounds and words in order to achieve distinct understanding.
References
Dale, Rick, (2004) Cognitive and Behavioral Approaches to Language Acquisition: Conceptual and Empirical Intersections, The Behavioral Analyst Today, Vol 6, Issue 4
Evans, V. & Green, M. (2006). Cognitive linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University.
Patel, D., Patel, S., & Wang, Y. (2003). The second IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics. Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society.
Willingham, D. T. (2007). Cognition: The thinking animal (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
