Language is considered universal because it is present wherever there are people. This is further affirmed by:
- Deaf children creating their own language (Goldin-Meadow 1982)
- Humans have an innate ability to follow complex rules they are not aware of
- Different cultures have different languages (5,000+ languages, 750 discovered in New Guinea alone)
- Language development is similar across cultures (regardless of language, "babbling" starts around 7 months, meaningful words at 1 year, and multiple words at 2 years)
- Most languages have words for nouns and verbs, a system to make things negative, ask questions and convey past or present

Why is language considered "universal"?

How people understand spoken and written language. How people process language sounds and have conversations.

Language Comprehension

Language acquisition is the process of learning a language, a key area of study in cognitive development. Research indicates that the sequence in which children learn language structures is remarkably consistent across different individuals and cultures, suggesting a universal pattern in this developmental process.

Language Acquisition

How language is represented in the mind and brain. Includes how people group words to make phrases and how it is represented in the brain.

Language Representation

Any form of language, whether spoken, signed, or written, is structured around specific components. The two primary components are its lexicon (vocabulary) and its grammar (rules).

Components of Language

References on Language

- comprehension
- acquisition
- production
- articulation

Types of Language Interactions

Language families are groups of languages connected through a common language (called a ancestral, parental, or proto-language) that all languages in the family developed from. Language family classification is not always universally agreed upon.

Language Families

How people produce language. Includes the physical creation of speech and mental processes involved.

Speech Production

A language that is spoken in the U.K., the U.S., and multiple other countries.

English

A research study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of utilizing telepractice versus traditional forms of assessment when testing language and literacy skills, specifically the Test of Integrated Language and Literacy Skills (TILLS). 

Telepractice versus Traditional Assessment of Language and Literacy Skills Study

Farsi, also known as Persian, is a language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan (where it is also called Dari), and Tajikistan (where it is known as Tajik, a variant written in the Cyrillic script). Farsi has a rich literary tradition, with a significant body of classical literature that spans poetry, prose, and philosophical works.

Farsi

Which of the following best describes the concept of language?

Which of the following elements are essential for a system to be considered a language?

Which of the following statements about language is true?

Which of the following is a key characteristic of language?

When seeking mental health treatment language barriers can be a significant obstacle towards bettering an individuals health. If a patient and healthcare professional are unable to communicate effectively it can lead to misunderstandings, misdiagnoses, and a lack of trust.

Language Barriers in Psychological Care

A demonstration of translation between English and German is the sentence pair where 'I have an apple' in English corresponds to 'Ich habe einen Apfel' in German. This illustrates a basic parallel corpus entry.

Example of an English-German Translation Pair

Although language is a method of communication, not all forms of communication qualify as language. Many animal species, for instance, communicate through non-linguistic means such as body posture, physical movements, scents, or vocal sounds. This broader form of communication is vital for social interaction within a species.

Distinction Between Language and Communication

It is a widely held view that the capacity for language is what distinguishes humans from all other animal species. This perspective suggests that language is a unique and defining characteristic of humanity.

Uniqueness of Human Language

The application of grammatical rules to a language's vocabulary enables the creation of novel and inventive expressions. This inherent flexibility allows for communication about a vast spectrum of subjects, encompassing both concrete concepts like immediate physical surroundings and abstract notions such as future plans, detailed instructions, or unseen planets. Furthermore, language provides the necessary framework to construct, organize, and articulate complex cognitive structures, including schemata and artificial concepts.

Expressive Power of Language

A central question in psychology is whether language shapes thought or if thought and beliefs shape language. This debate explores how the words we use may influence our perception and cognition. The existence of untranslatable words, which describe concepts or emotions in one language that lack a single-word equivalent in another, serves as a key area of investigation. Such words raise the question of whether different languages can lead to distinct patterns of thought among their speakers.

Relationship Between Language and Thinking

Language is a formal system of communication that is structured by a set of rules, known as grammar, and utilizes a vocabulary of words, referred to as a lexicon.

Google

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Columbia University

State University of New York at Buffalo

University of Chicago

Trinity College (CT)

Cognitive psychology is an area of psychology that focuses on studying cognitions, or thoughts, and their relationship to our experiences and actions. Like biological psychology, it is broad in scope and often involves interdisciplinary collaborations to study mental processes such as:  - attention - language - memory - perception - problem-solving - creativity - thought - decision-making - processing - knowledge - learning

It also includes the study of computer-based cognitive models such as connectionism (parallel distributed processing). Fields that draw from cognitive psychology include learning science and developmental psychology.

Cognitive Psychology

The study of language. Topics include language form, meaning, context and social, cultural and historical influences.

Linguistics

A field focused on the psychological study of language. The goal is to study the psychological processes. Its four major concerns are: 
- Comprehension
- Speech production
- Representation
- Acquisition


Psycholinguistics

- Art
- Religion
- Philosophy
- Literature
- History
- Archaeology
- Anthropology
- Languages
- Classics
- Gender Studies
- Disability Studies
- Digital Humanities

Humanities Disciplines 

Goldstein, E. B. (2014). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience. Nelson Education.


Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020, April 22). Psychology (2nd ed.). OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-introduction

OpenStax Psychology (2nd ed.) Textbook

Reference of Foundations of Large Language Models Course

The flow of ideas and associations that can lead to conclusions or actions

Thought

Choosing a belief, action or object out of a set of alternative options.

Decision-Making

The process of consciously focusing on specific stimuli. Attention is a limited resource, but automatic processing allows us to use our limited attention on other stimuli while performing an automatic task.

Attention

Information and knowledge encoded into the brain to be retrieved 

Memory

Perception is the complex psychological process of organizing, interpreting, and consciously experiencing sensory information. It involves making sense of the raw data detected by sensory receptors, actively shaping our conscious experience based on focused attention, past experiences, and cultural background.

Perception

Creativity is the ability to generate, create, or discover new ideas, solutions, and possibilities.

Creativity

- Structuralism
- Behaviorism 
- Cognitive revolution

Early schools of thought/movements in Psychology (leading up to cognitive psychology)

Contributing fields to cognitive psychology

Contains Sources Relevant to Cognitive Psychology:
- Sources From Books
- Sources from Journals
- Sources from Websites
- Journals from Organizations 

References for Cognitive Psychology

Processing (cognitive)

Understanding or awareness of something or the sum total of one's understanding/awareness of all things.

Knowledge

Learning science an interdisciplinary field that works to further our understanding of learning as well as to engage in the design and implementation of learning innovations. Contributing fields include cognitive science, computer science, educational psychology, anthropology, and applied linguistics. 

Learning Science

An approach to computer-based cognitive model in which concepts are represented by distributed activity across a network.

Connectionism (parallel distributed processing (PDP))

Problem solving is a fundamental cognitive process people engage in daily to find solutions for challenges they encounter. These challenges can range from straightforward tasks, such as doubling a recipe, to more complex situations, like handling an unexpected equipment failure under a tight deadline. A more formal definition states that "problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods in an orderly manner to find solutions to problems."

Problem Solving

The psychological and neurobiological operations by which information is processed, to build knowledge and understanding that supports decision making.

Cognition

Cognitive psychology helps designers to overcome psychological barriers and create products that are more intuitive for the products to be more readable, accessible, easy to navigate and allowing for users to use products more intuitively. 

UX Research and Cognitive Psychology

It is something that accompanies a mechanism but is not actually part of that mechanism. Looking at that something will not tell us anything about what is going on in the "mechanism". Examples include:
- Experiences of mental imagery

Epiphenomenon

Which of the following best describes the focus of cognitive psychology?

Which of the following is an example of a mental process studied in cognitive psychology?

Which of the following fields draws from cognitive psychology to understand how people learn?

Which of the following concepts is central to cognitive psychology?

Language

A cognitive psychologist is a psychologist who studies thinking and explores questions related to mental processes. They investigate topics such as how people determine the best way to solve problems, how individuals develop an understanding of concepts without direct physical experience (for example, understanding snow without ever seeing or touching it), and how young children acquire language without formal instruction.

Cognitive Psychologist

Cognitive psychologists investigate a wide array of subjects to better understand human mental processes. Specific areas of study include determining and measuring different types of intelligence, analyzing why individuals vary in their problem-solving abilities, and evaluating how emotional intelligence influences success in the workplace. Additionally, researchers explore how individuals organize information gathered from their environments into meaningful categories of thought.

Research Topics in Cognitive Psychology

- Computational
- Psycholinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Neurolinguistics
- Semiotics
- Syntax
- Pragmatics
- Semantics
- Applied linguistics
(add more)

Sub-fields of linguistics

-  Menn, L. (2022). Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved February 6, 2022, from https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/neurolinguistics#:~:text=Neurolinguistics%20is%20the%20study%20of,it%20in%20our%20everyday%20lives. 

References of Linguistics 

An ancient human tradition found everywhere in the world. The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung as a way of remembering history, genealogy, and law.

Oral Literature/ Oral Tradition 

Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia allowed writing to become a dependable method of recording transactions. Although, in both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, "writing may have already emerged because of the need to record historical and environmental events." 

The History of Writing

Code-switching, within the disciplines of linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP), is the phenomenon where a speaker or text alternates between two or more distinct languages during a single communication or document. A common example of this practice is a mixed-language sentence that seamlessly combines vocabulary from both English and Chinese.

Code-Switching in NLP and Linguistics

Add your sources as children reference nodes here!

Psycholinguistics Sources

History is the study and interpretation of a series of facts about the past and why certain events happened. 

History

Religions are collections of beliefs, practices, and meaningful places/items/people that provide an understanding of the supernatural, spirituality, and transcendence. 

Religion

The study of human behavior, societies, and cultures throughout history (including the present). Anthropology, in broad terms, studies methods to describe and explain the similarities and differences in biology and culture of all humanity in all times and places. 

Anthropology

An investigation into fundamental and often general questions concerning humanity, knowledge, reality, and existence.

Philosophy

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores how all gender identities are developed and how they affect people’s experiences in society.

Gender Studies

Literature most broadly is all written work in addition to “oral literature”. 

Literature

Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that examines the consequences and implications of disability as well as various issues that impact the disability community.

Disability Studies

Digital Humanities is an area that interacts with computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities.

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