PSYC20007 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Helen Keller, Vervet Monkey, Anne Sullivan
14 Jun 2018
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Lecture 10 - Tuesday 3 October 2017
PSYC20007 - COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE 10
LANGUAGE, REFERENCE & MEANING
TODAY
•Define and distinguish between three “modes of reference”
•Icon, index, symbol
•Understand the hierarchical relationship between the three modes of reference
•Understand the process by which iconic and indexical modes of reference develop into symbolic
reference
•Example from Savage-Rumbaugh’s chimp language learning experiments.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
•“My teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she
spelled into the other the word water... I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of
her fingers - and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me... I knew then that "w-a-
t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand...... Everything had a
name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.” -- Helen Keller. The Story of My Life.
(Chapter 4)
•The image shows Helen Keller as a child, with her teacher Anne Sullivan. At 19 months of age,
Helen Keller became ill (Meningitis?) and was left deaf and blind. She later learned language via
finger-spelling of words onto her hand. The extract from her life story tells of the moment she
first realised the link between the words being spelled onto her hands and their meanings. This
lead to a desire to know the names for all “things” (nouns within a symbol system), and so began
her ability to think and communicate with language.
VELVET MONKEY CALLS
•Vervet Monkey alarm calls: “Eagle” “Snake” “Leopard”
•Seyfarth et al. played recordings of alarm calls from a speaker in the bushes and watched the
troop respond differently to each.
•Words?????
→ Seyfarth, et al (1980) reported that Vervet monkeys make three distinct calls to alert fellow troop
members to the presence of specific predators in the environment. Each call is acoustically distinct,
and each results in a distinct (i.e., predator specific) behavioural response. Are these calls the
equivalent of words in a language? If not, why not?
WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
→ (Deacon, 1997): A definition: – “Language is a mode of communication based on symbolic
reference.
•Involving combinatorial rules that comprise a system for representing logical relationships among
these symbols”
CORE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE
•Languages consist of two core components:
•Word meaning: Symbolic reference
•Syntax: Rules for combining words into sentences.
Lecture 10 - Tuesday 3 October 2017
PSYC20007 - COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
WORDS & REFERENCE
•Words are ABOUT things, they have meaning.
•A (spoken) word is an association between a co-occurring sequence of speech sounds and an
object, or an idea, that the word refers to.
•Seems to be a simple matter of associative learning
•But symbolic reference is NOT simple
•What makes symbolic reference different from non-symbolic forms of reference?
•Eg., laughter, facial expressions, gestures, alarm calls....
•The Vervet Monkey alarm calls discussed earlier occur only in the presence of the stimulus that
elicits them. The eagle call indicates the presence of an eagle, rather than representing a more
abstract semantic concept of eagle that can be used in different contexts or in the absence of an
eagle. The call signals a particular action to be taken. Laughter, facial expressions, tone of voice
(prosody) and gestures all provide paralinguistic cues to meaning. They are more similar to the
alarm calls of other animals than to language – yet language is surely built on their foundations.
Recall my first lecture about grounding symbolic systems in lower (i.e., more fundamental) levels
of reference.
PEIRCE’S THREE MODELS OF REFERENCE
→ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an American philosopher and logician who, among
other things, pioneered the study of semiotics - the study of systems of signs and to what they refer.
He distinguished between three modes of reference whereby a sign refers to something that it
signifies.
Pages 69-83 of the chapter by Deacon (on the recommended reading list for this lecture) go
through the distinctions between these three modes of reference. We will go through each in detail
over the following slides.
•Reference:
•The means by which one thing (a sign) ‘ brings to mind’ another thing (the signified)
•Iconic (icons)
•Indexical (indices)
•Symbolic (symbols)
•These three modes of reference are defined by the nature of the relationship between the sign and
that which is signified. -- See pages 69-83 of chapter by Deacon
ICONS, INDICES & SYMBOLS
ICONS
•Iconic reference forms the basis for recognition memory. We ‘ re-cognise’ when we perceive the
similarity between an object and a previous experience with it, or with something similar. Iconic
reference forms the basis for perceptually coded mental representations (mental imagery).
•Iconic reference is based on a physical similarity (resemblance) between the sign and what it
signifies.
•A portrait or landscape painting relies on the physical similarity between the painting and that
which is represented.
•Pantomime relies on similarity between actions and object/ situation being portrayed.
•Onomatopoeia in spoken language relies on an iconic resemblance between the sound of the
word and its referent (Eg. buzz, hiss)
•Iconic reference forms the basis for basic perceptual recognition processes.
•“re-cognition”
•And, for perceptual forms of mental representation (mental imagery)
•“re-presentation”
•Iconicity underpins how we ‘re-cognise’ similarity between the current input and previous
experiences.
Lecture 10 - Tuesday 3 October 2017
PSYC20007 - COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
INDICES
•Indexical reference is based on a physical or temporal contiguity (correlation, co-occurrence)
between a sign and what it signifies:
•Alarm calls indicate presence of predator
•Pheromones indicate sexual receptiveness
•Smoke indicates fire
•Words can be used indexically when they point directly to their meaning:
•Here, there, I, me, you, this, etc.
•Nouns and verbs are initially used indexically in the presence of the thing or action to which they
refer.
SYMBOLS
•The symbol relies for its meaning, not on its resemblance to the thing it represents, but on the
memory that the users of a symbol system have for the symbol itself and its relationship to other
symbols within the system – symbolic reference is agreed upon as a function of social interaction
and convention. A symbol system would be hopelessly constrained if all words needed to
somehow resemble (sound like) the thing they represent. Similarly, language would not be
symbolic at all if what you were referring to needed to be present (indexed) every time you use a
word. Nevertheless, during language development the iconic and indexical layers are often
necessary to ground future symbolic representation. The activity we will do in in the lab class in
Week 10 is designed to provide some insight into the evolution of a symbol from iconic and
indexical processes.
•Symbolic reference is based on some formal or agreed upon link (social convention) between a
sound and its meaning.
•Symbolic reference holds irrespective of:
•The similarity in physical characteristics between sign or object (iconic)
•There is nothing about the sound of the word CAT that resembles catishness
•Any physical or temporal contiguity between sign and object (index)
•Words are used to refer to things that are not physically present or temporally related
•There is nothing about particular signs that makes them intrinsically icons, indices or symbols.
What determines the mode of reference is the interpretation of an observer; only when similarity
(icon), contiguity (index), or convention (symbol) is the basis by which one thing invokes (‘brings
to mind’ ) another can we determine the mode of reference. For example, some signs in the
gestural (visuo-spatial) languages of the deaf have an iconic quality to them (some signs resemble
the thing they signify, like a pantomime). Nevertheless, such signs are ultimately interpreted
symbolically within the system of symbols comprising the language. The iconic quality of a
particular sign is only a part of what gives that sign its meaning within the web of higher-order
relationships that defines the symbolic system in which it is embedded.
•Icons, indices and symbols are not mutually exclusive forms of reference.
•The three forms of reference co-exist within a hierarchical representational structure
•The symbolic level depends on the prior establishment of the more iconic and indexical levels.
•That is, the symbolic layer is “grounded” in the lower layers.
SYMBOLIC LEARNING
•Just as we noted in Week 1 in relation to the hierarchy of mental representations, symbols must
be grounded in lower level representations. Symbol systems are “grounded” in both iconic
(imagistic) and indexical (associative) forms of reference. Indeed, word recognition within a
language relies on both initial correlations between a word and its referent, and on recognising an
iconic resemblance between the repeated instances of the words themselves. For example, word
recognition depends on the similarity of particular instances of the sound of the word cat to other
instances of that word. So, the symbolic, indexical and iconic forms of reference are not mutually
exclusive – they are related in a hierarchy. Finally, symbols come to rely for their interpretation !
!
