Language and the Development of Consciousness: Degrees of Disembodiment

1. Lecture 11 7 Dec., 2005 Language and the Development of Consciousness: Degrees of Disembodiment Helena Hong Gao & Philip David Zelazo Department of Psychology University of Toronto

2. Required readings: • Gao, H. H. & Zelazo, P. D. (to appear 2005). Language, Consciousness, and Embodiment. In W. F. Overton and U. Mueller (eds.), Body in mind, mind in body: Developmental perspectives on embodiment and consciousness. Lawrence Erilbaum Associates, INC., Publishers. • Seitz, Jay A. (2000). The bodily basis of thought. New Ideas in Psychology. Vol 18(1). pp. 23-40 Recommended readings: • Zlatev, Jordan. (2004). Embodiment, Language and Mimesis.  In T. Ziemke, J. Zlatev and R. Frank, Body, Language and Mind: Vol 1: Embodiment. Berlin. • Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3. Embodiment vs. disembodiment • Child development is simultaneously a process of embodiment and a process of disembodiment. • Embodiment occurs as the child grows physically and becomes enmeshed in an ever-expanding web of social and physical interactions with the environment. • But at the same time, aspects of psychological development, including the development of language, allow the child to disengage from the flow of sensorimotor processing via increasingly complex forms of cognitive mediation. • This cognitive mediation allows the child imaginatively to transcend time and space—to be disembodied.

4. The Levels of Consciousness Model (Zelazo, 2004) • Children are increasingly able to reflect on their own conscious experiences (e.g., from just seeing something, to knowing that they are seeing something, to knowing that they know this, and so on) • Consequently, to formulate and use increasingly complex sets of rules for regulating their behavior.

5. Examples of Disembodiment in Children’s Behavior • Examples of age-related changes in children’s ability to disengage from a compelling construal of a situation. • E.g., In children’s pretend play children become more likely, over the course of the second year, to perform pretend actions (e.g., talking on the telephone) with pretense objects (e.g., a spoon) that bear little physical resemblance to the real objects, and they also become more likely to perform pretend actions without objects altogether (e.g., Ungerer, Zelazo, Kearsley, & O’Leary, 1981).

6. Examples of Disembodiment in Children’s Behavior • Similar changes continue into the preschool years (Overton & Jackson, 1973; O’Reilly, 1995). • As these changes occur, there are complementary changes in children’s ability to resist responding on the basis of the actions suggested by the real objects (e.g., putting the spoon into one’s mouth) (Elder & Pederson, 1978; Pederson, Rook-Green, & Elder, 1981). • Vygotsky (1978) described this type of development as a change in the relative influence of “object properties” versus “meaning.”

7. The general development pattern—from stimulus-dependent to cognitively controlled E.g., A-not-B task • In the A-not-B task (Piaget, 1954; Marcovitch & Zelazo, 1999), 9-month-old infants watch as an object is hidden conspicuously at one of two or more locations, and then they retrieve it. When the object is then hidden at a new location, 9-month-olds are likely to search for it at the first location, as if the context elicits a prepotent response. E.g., The dimensional change card sort (DCCS) (Frye, Zelazo, & Palfai, 1995; Zelazo et al., 2003). • In this task, children are shown two target cards (e.g., a blue rabbit and a red car) and asked to sort a series of bivalent test cards (e.g. red rabbits and blue cars) according to one dimension (e.g. color). Then, after sorting several cards, children are told to stop playing the first game and switch to another (e.g., shape, ‘Put the rabbits here; put the boats there.’). Regardless of which dimension is presented first, 3-year-olds typically continue to sort by that dimension despite being told the new rules on every trial (e.g., Zelazo et al., 2003).

8. Linguistic Disembodiment • Gradually, however, linguistic meaning comes to dominate sensorimotor experience, as Vygotsky (e.g., 1978) and Luria (e.g., 1961) described. • An example comes from a recent study of 3- to 5-year-olds’ flexible understanding of the adjectives “big” and “little” (Gao, Zelazo, & Debarbara, 2005). • When shown a medium sized square together with a larger one, 3-year-olds had little difficulty answering the question, “Which one of these two squares is a big one?” However, when the medium square was then paired with a smaller one, and children were asked the same question, only 5-year-olds reliably indicated that the medium square was now the big one. • This example shows an age-related increase in children’s sensitivity to linguistic meaning when it conflicts with children’s immediate experience, and it reveals that interpretation becomes decoupled, to some degree, from stimulus properties.

9. Linguistic Ambiguity • Linguistic ambiguity can occur both at the lexical level • (e.g., homonyms such as bear and bare;night and knight) • and at the sentence level • (e.g., idiomatic expressions such as, “A cult is not a religion. A cult is a different kettle of fish entirely.”).

10. Recognizing and resolving ambiguity involves reflecting on language per se—it involves metalinguistic understanding • For example, in order to recognize and resolve the ambiguity in the spoken, • “At night, she practices at becoming the best knight in the land,” • one first has to notice that night and knight sound identical [nait]. • Further reflection yields an appreciation of the phonological ambiguity in relation to other aspects of semantic meaning. • For example, it allows one to appreciate the dependency between the preposition at and the appropriate interpretation of [nait].

11. Metalinguistic understanding develops during the preschool years (and beyond) • Robinson, Goelman, and Olson (1983) found that even 5-year-olds tended to confuse what was meant with what was said when they heard ambiguous verbal messages. • In one study, the experimenter and child sat on opposite sides an opaque screen, and each had their own set of cards, which varied along two dimensions (e.g., large/small and red/blue flowers). They then played a game in which they took turns choosing a card from their set and describing the card in such a way that the other player could choose the identical card from his or her set. When acting as the speaker, the experimenter sometimes intentionally provided ambiguous descriptions. For example, the experimenter might tell the child, “Pick up the red flower,” forcing the child to choose between the big red flower and the small red flower. The child generally chose one of the red flowers (e.g., the big red flower), and then he or she was asked to make a judgment about what was said. The child either heard a disambiguated version of the original utterance (e.g., “Did I say ‘the big red flower’?”), a verbatim repetition of the original utterance (e.g., “Did I say ‘the red flower’?”), or an incorrect version of the original utterance (e.g., “Did I say ‘the blue flower’?”). • 5-year-olds rejected the incorrect version 81% of the time and accepting the verbatim repetition 76% of the time. However, they incorrectly accepted the disambiguated version 60% of the time, suggesting that they did not understand that the two utterances expressed different intentions.

12. Linguistic understanding is closely tied to understanding one’s own and others’ mental states (Pratt & Grieve, 1984; Rowe & Harste, 1986). • Consider, for example, children’s developing understanding of ironic and sarcastic expressions. • Appreciating irony and sarcasm requires the coordination of two different perspectives on the same linguistic utterance. • Milosky and Ford (1997) found that the rate of recognition of sarcasm was rather low even in school age children: Sarcasm was recognized by 6-year-olds 30% of the time and by 9-year-olds 50% of the time.

13. According to Mehrabian (1967; see also Mehrabian & Ferris, 1967; Mehrabian & Wiener, 1967), 55% of our communication consists of body language, 38% is expressed through tone of voice, and only 7% is communicated through words. That is, a large proportion of verbal input is actually decoded or interpreted with the help of non-linguistic input such as facial expressions, gestures or body language, and setting.

14. Children’s ability of integrating all linguistic perspectives via metalinguistic awareness is explained by Tamasello (2000) as “powerful skills of: • (i) intention-reading and cultural learning, • (ii) analogy making, • (iii) structure combining” (Tamasello, 2000: 235).

15. language can play a causal role in helping one to ascend to a higher level of consciousness(Zelazo, 2004) • E.g, Jacques, Zelazo, Lourenco, and Sutherland (2005) presented 4- and 5-year-olds with the Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST). • Four-year-olds generally perform well on Selection 1 but poorly on Selection 2, indicating that they have difficulty thinking about the pivot item in more than one way—they have difficulty disengaging from their initial construal of the item. • However, when children were asked to label the basis of their initial selection (e.g., when they were asked, “Why do those two pictures go together?”), their performance on Selection 2 improved substantially. This was true whether children provided the label themselves or whether the experimenter generated it for them.

16. This tree structure depicts two incompatible perspectives on a situation—a perspective (s1) defined by rules A and B and a perspective (s2) defined by rules C and D. The perspectives are incompatible because the same antecedent conditions (or aspects of the situation) lead to different consequents, and hence are to be treated differently, depending on the perspective. So, for example, rule A indicates that consequent 1 (c1) should follow antecedent 1 (a1) whereas rule C connects a1 to c2. In the FIST, 4-year-olds typically adopt one perspective (e.g., s1), and have difficulty disengaging from it and considering it in contradistinction to the other. When the perspective is labeled, however, children are obliged to adopt the position at the top of this hierarchy—they are obliged to step back from the thing labeled and reflect on it—and from this position, the alternative perspective (e.g., s2) is easier to access.

17. Cultural differences in the development of understanding of abstract mental terms like think • For instance, questions such as, “What do you think of a peacock? Is it a big bird or a small bird?” can be normally answered in English in the following two ways: • (a) “I think it is a big bird.” • (b) “I don’t think it is a big bird”

18. In Mandarin, possible responses differ: • (c) Wo renwei ta bu shi yi zhi da niao. I think it not be one classifier big bird. I don’t think it is a big bird. • (d) Wo juede ta bu shi yi zhi da niao. I feel it not be one classifier big bird. I don’t feel that it is a big bird. • (e) Wo xiang ta bu shi yi zhi da niao. I think/guess/imagine/anticipate/gather/infer it not be one classifier big bird. I guess that it is not a big bird.

19. In Swedish: • (f) Jag tror inte, att det är någon stor fågel. (tror: same as the English think in a) • (g) Jag tycker inte, att det är någon stor fågel. (tycker: indicating an imaging aspect) • (h) Jag anser inte, att det är någon stor fågel. (anser: indicating a conclusive reasoning aspect) • (i) Jag skulle inte tro, att det är någon stor fågel. (skulle inte tro: indicating that the result of reasoning can be claimed to be true) • (j) Jag har svårt att föreställa mig, att det är någon stor fågel. (har svårt att föreställa mig: expressing one’s feeling of difficulty in visualizing or depicting a scene as an answer) • (k) Såvitt jag förstår, är det inte någon stor fågel. (såvitt jag förstår: indicating one’s own understanding, which might be different from others’)

20. Conclusion • The notion that children’s interpretations become more influenced by language (i.e., increasing linguistic relativity) as the relation between thought and language becomes increasingly reciprocal • The suggestion that the mechanism whereby this complex, reciprocal relation develops is one of disembodiment, through the development of levels of consciousness (Zelazo, 2004). • Disembodiment, or psychological distancing as a result of an ascent through levels of consciousness, puts children in a position that allows them both to be more sensitive to various influences on their interpretations and to exert greater control over these interpretations.

21. Online papers on consciousness: http://consc.net/online.html