Stella Christie:	Thanks, Erin, for that very generous introduction. Thank you for joining me today. It's very lovely to be able to deepen this opportunity to share with you one strand of my work and looking at how language could affect thinking. And I just want to say from the very start that there is, even within this one trend, there's basically two big cams, and I'm going to talk about one of the cams, because there's not enough to talk about both. 
	Okay. So, let's get started. It's very difficult for us to imagine how we would be without language. This talk will never happened. We'll never know each other. It's very difficult for us to interact. At the very least, we'll be very inefficient if not impossible if we don't have language. And the question that I think is really, really, is  really bugging us or very important and is not my own question. Philosophers have been struggling with this question for a very long time. Psychologists really like this question, as well. Is the question, "Is there mind without language?" Is there something in your head. Can you think about something if you don't have language? Okay. Well, I would like to ask this questions together with you and tell you a little bit about the answers to this question. But let's step back for a moment and think about what is language, right? 
	Most of you would probably think, "Well, language is a means of communication." And you are absolutely correct. Language is a means of communication. But that's not all of it. In fact, if language is only a means of communication, that's not unique to us. What's unique about language is that it's a symbol system. Lots of animals communicate with each other, and they have the means to do that. But what's really interesting, what's really fascinating about human language is that a symbol system. Now let me unpack a little bit what do we mean by a symbol system. Well, first thing is that we have ... Language has symbols for things. When you look at this picture, you will call this "dog" in English. And if you just stop by for a moment and think about it, there's no way you could actually figure out the meaning of dog truly your sensory experience, right? And so in this ... So, what we say about we label this thing "dog" is arbitrary. The symbol is arbitrary, and that's actually very important. 
	So the symbol's arbitrary. Let me illustrate it with a couple of other languages. In Indonesian, this is called "anjing." So, it sounds, it looks very different from dog. And again, it's because it's arbitrary symbol. It doesn't conform to your sensory experience. You will never figure out the meaning of it unless you are actually told about it, or you learn about it. So that's arbitrary. In Polish, will be called "pies." So, again, look very different. So, the symbols are arbitrary, and any symbol can stand for any meaning. But of, course it doesn't come for free. We have to agree on what symbol we use for what, right? People can, you know, go you can have death-life battles about what symbols you want to use for particular concepts. 
	More importantly, it's also governed by a system. I said one of the systems that govern it is conventionalized. If one of you suddenly said, "This is cat," you will be shunned by your colleagues. So, that's one of the systems that's governing it. It's also governed by a system that we all know to use it correctly, so if I show you two of these things, in English you have to say there are two dogs. In Indonesian, you don't change anything. You just say the word "anjing." You say the word "two," but the word "anjing" on itself doesn't change. So the system is governed by the system, but the system is different. Okay. In polish, you actually have to change the word itself. So, when you say two dogs, you say "sa dwa psy." And so the word "pies" actually changed. Polish does give you headache if you say five dogs, it changed again. Jest piec psow. And when you say there are no dogs, it also changed again. Nie ma psow. 
	So, the noun itself is conjugated, so it's actually there's no ... There are differences. It takes different forms. So, this is just to illustrated that language uses arbitrary symbols that's governed by a system. And this is a system of language that we will now look at today in answering our question, "Is there mind without language?" Now what do we mean by this question? By this question, we're asking, do they have ... When you look at babies, you ask the questions, do they have enduring thoughts as opposed to reacting to senses all the times. It is all the times sensory reactions to what comes. Lights, smile, sound. Or is there a thought that's in the mind about what is light could mean? What is that smile could mean? In other words, we also want to ask the question, is it a state of blooming, buzzing confusion? As the father of psychology, William James, famously said in his book in 1890 that for infants, it's always a state of blooming, buzzing confusion. 
	If you have a nagging feeling that you actually have seen this baby before, you are correct. Because the father of this baby is here. This is Ellie Grosvenor, Dan's son. He's bigger now and even cuter. All right. So, let's ask ourselves, "How do we find out, though?" Because, we can just ask them. Babies cannot answer. They wouldn't understand. So, we need clever ways to find out is there mind with language? Are there enduring thoughts? Or are the state of the babies' minds always a blooming, buzzing confusion? Okay. 
	So, we need to make use of what babies can do. And one thing that they're really good at, is they're really good at looking. They're pretty much ... If you have babies, and a lot of you probably have, you probably realize there's not much things they can do. They can cry. They can suck their pacifiers. And they can look. And you probably forgot about this looking aspect, because it happens all the time. But for psychologists, for developmental psychologists, this has been really exploited. This gives us really, really good means to ask the question to find out whether there is mind without language. Because they don't have language yet at this point. At least, they're not speaking. They hear language all the time. Okay. 
	So, to find out about the mind, we are going to make use of looking. And the looking experiment has a simple, yet elegant logic. So, I want to go through this logic together with you, so we get a sense about how can we really be sure the answer to our questions whether there's mind without language. 
	It's just not freely looking, however, because let's say I ask you to look at these two. Where do you want to look at? You're gonna shrug your shoulders and say, "I don't care." It's just the same, interesting the same. Or some of you may say, "Well, I have cats at home, so I prefer to look at the cats," or, "I'm bored with the cats." But it's gonna be all over the place, right? You have no idea where you should look. You're not gonna care. And presumably this is gonna be the same with the human infants. However, if I proceed ... If I first show you this series of pictures ... I show you this dog, this dog, this dog, this dog, this dog, this dog and this dog. Then you probably now have a preference where do you want to look at between these two. 
	Some of you will ... So after I habituate you to this series of pictures, some of you in the test would may prefer, may say that, like, "Oh! There's something new. And I want to prefer to look at something new." Some of you who prefer to look at the old stuff, will look at this one, as well. 
	It doesn't matter where you look at, but what we're really interested about, or what the logic of this experiment is that, in order for you to be able to look ... To say that this is new. Or to say that this is old, you have to know something about these things. You have to say that these are dogs. There's no way you can use your sensory experience to find out that this is old. Why? Because notice that this very dog doesn't actually show up here. So, if you just match based on how it looks, you're not gonna be able to say new versus old. In essence, both of these in terms of being pictures, there are new pictures. But in terms of being concept and categories, this is the old concept are same as the habituation. And this is the new concept. I also purposefully choose a picture of a cat and a dog that has very similar in color. And in fact, if you just go by how it looks, this color of the fur is more to this color of the fur. 
	So, that's the logic of experiment. We show habituation trials to look at, to probe at the particular concepts. So, in this case, we want to ask, "Do infants know something about cats?" Or "Do infants know something is about dogs?" And then we gave them ... Sorry. We gave them two test trials. Both of them are new. One coming from the old concept, and one coming from the new concept. And if they differentiate, if they look longer to the new ones, or to the old ones consistently, then they tell us that they have something in their mind that organizes these things, all these things, into a single concept. In the lab. It usually looks like this. That there is an infant sitting on the mom's lap, and infants will be watching video. So, this is during the test trials. This is actually a test from Lisa Oaks' lab where she actually asking whether how detailed the infants know about properties of cats and properties of dogs, because they both have four legs and fur and so on. 
	And behind the screen so the babies and the moms cannot see this person over here, you call the looking time, whether the infant looks to the left or to the right. And you'll be able to tell where do they look longer. Okay. So, let me pause for a moment and also invite you if there's anything that is unclear, please let me know, and ask me questions as I go along. Okay. Is the logic of this looking time experience pretty clear? Okay. Yeah. Question. 
Speaker 2:	So, it seems like the logic that there's only two kinds of minds. One that likes new things and one that likes old things, that don't care. What if there's somebody who just likes a variety? 
Stella Christie:	Yeah. That's gonna screw up the experiment. No. For sure. Because if you get ... So, you do want to get consistency from your participants, and this is something that actually we deal a lot. This is one difficulty that we deal a lot, because we can't predict in particular whether the infants before is going to prefer to look at new things or to look at old things. General rules of thumb is that usually the young infants prefer to look at familiar stuff. Whereas the slightly older infants, six months old later, they usually prefer to look at new stuff. But this is much of a debate within the community about you even can predict this before the experiment. And it's actually very interesting. There's a lot of interesting implications about what's the state of the cognitions about whether you prefer old or new or if you prefer none of those. We'll not results if you prefer variations. Okay. 
	So, that's an example. I just gave you an example of using looking time experiment when asking a concept like, "Do you know what cat is?" As opposed to dogs. I'm gonna show you a different one. So, here's in this experiment, my colleagues and I asked the questions, "Do you have a concept about amount? Amount of stuff that you look at in this world. Do you know that whether the soup that is in your cup is more or less than the soup in the person's cup next to you?" Okay. So, that's a question we ask in terms of our concept. Now you're familiar with this notion habituation trials refers how to habituate them to a certain event. And this is the event that we're habituating them. There is a hand that's pick up a cup, and the hand poured a cup onto the white plate. And then the hand goes back. Okay. So, we do the habituation trials over and over again with the same amount of sand. 
	So, this is actually one tea spoon of sand. Of blue sand that we're pouring over and over again. Now because this is a live experiment, we did this live, over the time ... Over the many habituation trials, we actually varies about how much this blue sand covered the white cup. How spread out it is and so on. Because what we're really interested about is, do infants actually see the amount itself and not the shape covering the plate. So, when we were doing test trials ... So, again test trials, the logic is there is old. So, this one is old. And there's a new one. So, here's old amount and new amount. Okay. This is the same amount as before. And their question is, do infants actually look differently between this old amount and new amount? We did this with seven months old. And here's how it looks like in the habituation trials. 
	So, remember I said that we measured their looking time, so this is habituation trials one, two, three and the last three habituation trials. And what you can see here, that the looking time of the infants decreased. Sometimes you may hear that the babies are bored. That's what really is. We tried to bore them. If they stay constant, then it's difficult for us to ask, "Hey. Do you see something new? Or do you see something old?" Right? So, we first have to bore them. So, the looking time decreased, and then we take a look at the test. Here's the novel average over a couple of trials, and here's the familiar. And what you can see here in this case in this experiment, the infants actually prefer to look longer to the novel amount. And because the infants prefer to look longer at the novel amount, and because we actually vary how much the sand covers the white plate, and these are exactly the same white plate between here. What we conclude from here is the infants have some kinds of quantity discrimination with mass things like sand at seven months old. 
	We did this with also with three months olds and they showed interesting ... They are able to distinguish it, but only when the habituation is with large amounts. Somehow there's that allows them to be able to know the things better. Okay. So, those are very, very short two snippets of what we can do to ask the questions, "Is there a mind without language?" And the answer is a resounding yes. It's definitely not a state of blooming, buzzing confusion. We know this decades of work by psychologists, developmental psychologists have shown us that infants know a lot of things. So, they know folk physics. They, like you, know that object persists over time and space. If you show them magic that the object disappeared when they come into another object. Infants will be very surprised. They will look longer. They also know that unsupported objects fall to the ground. They understand gravity. That maybe not [inaudible 00:16:47] like conscious notions of what gravity is, but if they see a object hanging in the air, they also look very surprised. 
	So, here are some exampled from folk biology. They expect animals, but not artifacts to actually have insides. So, they have some sense of if you ... If an animal, and they know animals from self-movement and [inaudible 00:17:10] movement, they expect that these things to actually have insides. Even if it looks like a can. So, a can that moves by itself and say, "Quack! Quack!" the infants will be very surprised. If you turn around the can and show that the can is hollow. Because they expect that animals would have something inside. They also have notions about how psychological ... They have notions of psychology. So, they also expect that agent has a goal and not just mere physical movements. So, for example, if they see a hand reaching over here, instead of just encoding this event as simply "Hand going to the left space," or simply "hand going up," they will actually encode this as a goal-directed movement if it's done by an agent. 
	So, the hand wants a teddy bear. So, if I switch the teddy bear to ... And the ball, in terms of space, and the hand continues to go through the same space, they'll be very surprised. Because the infants expect that the hand wants the teddy bear and not just going to the same space. So, encoding of the actions is also goal directed. There are numerous categories that infants already know by this point. They know things about numerosity. So, these are just snippits about what infants know without language. Okay. 
Speaker 3:	How old were these children? 
Stella Christie:	These are varies. Some of them are like ... I don't give the exact things here, but by six months old, you definitely know about the gravity. The expectation about folk biology comes the earliest we know is at eight months old. There are various ones here. Some of the objects that passed each other, we know that by three months old, they already expect that. So, there's a variation, as well. And that's a really important question. I know that I make a sweeping comments that infants know about this, but it also depends on their age, obviously. 
	So, then we may ask, if infants already know so much, okay then, what is language good for? Right? They already have this good notion and it's not a state of blooming, buzzing confusion. What is the rule of language here? Well, you may say, "Well the language can make you communicate very easily." Lots of you parents are really excited when you hear first words from your children. Because you can finally find out what is it that they're thinking, or what is it they're doing. And that's great. But remember that we said that what's really unique about human language is not only that it's a means of communication, but it is a symbol system. 
	So, for the rest of the talk, what I would like to ask together with you is that what does one get from acquiring a symbol system? A highly developed symbol system as languages. So, not only that you can communicate, but beyond that, what do you get from acquiring a symbol system? Now, to ask this question, I actually would like to jump ahead and, so what I would like to argue is language is a cognitive tool. And we're going to see this in a moment. But I would like to jump ahead and do things that you can do but not babies. So, because now you know that babies can do a lot of things. So I want to restore your confidence a little bit that you do more than babies. Okay? All right. So, please complete this sentence. "Walcorp divests of itself investors and bought a more profitable tire company. Like wife Marta divorced George, and what would Marta do?"
Barry:	Buy a more profitable tire company. 
Stella Christie:	That's precisely what you should not do, Barry. Does anyone care shout out what Marta should do?
Speaker 5:	She married the more desirable husband. 
Stella Christie:	She married the more desirable husband. Absolutely. That's probably ... Most of you will do this, right? And she then married a more advantageous man. Okay. Now, this doesn't come solely from knowing, so having a communication. Because notice what is it that you do not do. You don't say that she bought a tire company, except Barry, because Barry's here to spoil my talk. You also notice that she just married someone. You particularly said ... If you got it right, right? You particularly said that she married a more advantageous man. 
	So, what you were doing, what you just said is, you perceive the relational similarity. You notice that there is a relations between Walcorp divesting investors and you do an inference of this same relation to Marta divorcing George. And there were new inference that Marta is going to get a more profitable husband. Perceiving the relational similarity is the essence of what we do all the time, from quotidian things to very sophisticated things, is called analogical reasoning. So, the essence of analogical reasoning is you are able to see patterns, relations, the similarity of patterns and relations across events. In this case, across the events of Walcorp investors and Marta and George events. 
	Analogy pervades our life. Perceiving a relational similarity pervades our life from things that are very mundane, like metaphors. When you think about fishing for compliments, you understand its meaning right away. And you're not thinking about the fish or the smell of the sea. You're thinking about the relations of what fishing means. Whether you bait it, right? And you actually look for it. And it may be hard to get it. So all these things you get from understanding the relations between actual fishing and fishing for compliments. You understand simile. Life is like a box of chocolate. Again from noticing relational pattern. From noticing the relational similarity. And you use this all the times. You don't even think about it, but that's what the cognitive process is the [inaudible 00:23:27] can understand this. Although, my students kind of say, like, "These days you don't always ... You never get a box of chocolate that you don't know what's in side." Right. So, simile is about to die, I think. 
	You use analogy for teaching a lot, probably. This is just a classic one from physics high school. That you use the analogy of something that you understand very well, the relational pattern of fluid flow of water flow to understand electrical flow. So, you use analogy for teaching a lot. And many of you probably use analogy for your teaching. Please send them to me. I love collecting analogies. They're really great. Analogy and creativity has been talk a lot about how to create the link that having good analogical reasoning breeds a lot of creativity. And obviously, in scientific discovery, analogy becomes something that's really important. Konrad Lorenz, in his Nobel Lecture Prize in 1974, the title of his lecture is, "Analogy As A Source of Knowledge." Because he felt that all his works, all his scientific discovery comes from analogical thinking. 
	Think about relational patterns across the animals that he studied. An IQ test like Raven's Progressive Matrices, some of you in education's probably familiar with this. You've seen this in IQ tests in your children in primary school. Essentially what you're doing here is that you need to understand your relational pattern that happens on the first row, on the second row in order for you to be able to complete this answer. So, in IQ test, you also use this a lot. 
	So, I want to ask a questions then, if language as a symbol system is a good cognitive tool, then how does this cognitive tool help us with our analogical reasoning? Then give you three simple examples about this. The first one that I want to argue is that when you have words, when you have those symbols, when you name things, it gives you accessibility and stability. What do I mean by this is that the concept that you name that relational pattern that you name, you suddenly say, "It's symmetry." That relational pattern that you name is more likely to be retained and accessed in the future. Much like from this drawer into this drawer, you can find your socks more easily. This is not my sock drawer. My sock drawer is more like that. But, I would love to have my sock drawer like that. 
	When I see this, I think about language, and I think that's what one of things that language is doing. It really makes it very neatly compartmentalized, such that it's more likely for you to retain it to know that, well there are actually pink sock in my drawer. And you can access it in the future. It's much easier for you to access in the future. And that's a metaphor that we really think about what the language does to our mind. If you put it in a gift box, it's made even easier for you to carry. And here's an example. When we show this picture to four-year-olds, and then we ask them, "Hey look at these two pictures. Do you see these two pictures?" And they're like very excited about this. And we ask them, "Which of these two pictures is the match for these pictures?" Which one would you choose? 
	Thank you, [inaudible 00:27:05]. I think, hopefully most of you choose the left one, right? Because you see the pattern. But 98 percent of the four-year-olds actually chose this one. Why? Because they see that there is some math within this, and they overlook the pattern completely. Not that this is wrong. But as we say, if you don't understand the pattern, if you don't see a relational similarity, it might impede your analogical reasoning. But if you have a word for it, and probably this is why you can so fast, as you can so quickly go zoom into the relational pattern. It's because you're thinking about symmetry. Som you have the word for it, and the naming of the pattern makes it a lot more accessible for you to go for it. If you have the name, it actually can serve as a higher order preposition. Essentially, as the building blocks, so you can choose to build these things from drawing the circle, the dot and the lines one each of the time. But you probably wouldn't do that. You're probably gonna connect all the triangles, and that makes you a lot faster. 
	And that's what happening, as well, when you actually have a label for a relational schema. So, if you look at this sentence that I just picked randomly picked from a New York Times book review, "Adversity caused by droughts or floods far exceeds the direct impact on the food supply." Now, you have no trouble understanding this sentence, but let me just remind you for a moment, there's so much economy, I mean efficiency, that is actually being portrayed by all these words are relational words called relational nouns. Think about "adversity," "caused," "droughts," "floods," "exceeds," "impact." All those are relational patterns that are neatly encapsulated by the word. You don't have to go through from the very beginning again to explain what does caused even mean? Or what does drought, like, mean? 
	The second way that language can augment analogical reasoning is that, that language can invite abstraction. And I want to illustrate this by showing you a very simple test. A lot of these tests are simple, because we're doing it with young children. Where we do with this test is we show this picture, and we say, "See this one?" And we ask them which of these two ... It's a matching test again. Which of these two matches this one? And this one is really simple. Unlike the previous one, there's nothing that should be distracting you. And yet, the two and three-year-olds choose at random. Here, there's only one correct answer. The match should be this one. This thing doesn't match this in any way. They chose at random. 
	And here's an example of, like, a kid choosing it at random. But then something magical happens if I actually change and say, "Look. This one is called a traffic." Now, when they actually hear the word "traffic," they actually chose the same relation. So, this is moved by itself. They actually choose the same relation here. So, now they are correct. The same two and three-year-olds. And the language can do something really magical here. What is happening? Well, I think what's happening is that they actually think that traffic, even though they don't know what traffic is, we never tell what is traffic. Traffic is just something that they hear. It's novel word. But what they think, what's happening here that [inaudible 00:30:30] traffic. Things that are called the same name must mean the same thing. 
	And if they think that traffic means the same thing across these, they're actually starting to look for the comparison, and they actually look for ... And they will be able to abstract what is the same between all these three so I can call them traffic. And happen to be nothing is about the object. It's the same. It's about the relation. The current way that language can augment analogical reasoning is in language there is structure. And the structure in language can also invite structure in your mind. Structure in your concept. So, here's another test. This is a hiding and finding game. A hide and seek game the children really ... That we did with three-yeah-olds and four-year-olds, and they really love this game. 
	So, what they had to do in this game is really easy. There is a start, and I said, "Oh, look where I'm hiding this star." And I said, "Now you close your eyes, and I'm gonna hide the start at the same place over here. And you have to find the star at the same place. If you find the star, you're gonna get a sticker." And they're very motivated with stickers, so they're gonna try to find the star very quickly. Okay. So instead of finding it over here, which is at the same place, top-to-top, middle-to-middle, bottom-to-bottom, the three-year-olds and the four-year-olds, and even the five-year-olds that we tested in this study, they will actually go for here. Because they're attracted by this matching of a pizza picture and a pizza picture. And then you probably ask me, "Why did you make it this way?" Well, we made it [inaudible 00:32:04] because we wanna see can they overcome this object matching, simple matching that object into relational and look at the relations.
	So, they go for this one, and they never find the stickers, and they're frustrated when you do this a lot of times. And so then another study, what we did is we used the same test, but we actually put language over here. But, not all languages are the same. Not all set of words are the same. And here are two set of words that we're using. One is a systematic set of words, and the other one is a non-systematic one. So, we call this here ... This is called the first room number one, and this is called room number two. This is called room number three. Half of the children heard that. The other half of the children heard, "This is room, the dog's room. This is the pig's room. This is the sheep's room." And we tested their memory. Which one is the dog's room? This one. 
	They're very good at this. And what's rally fascinating here is that these set of terms is ... It has a system. If you know where one is, you can infer where two is. If you know where two is. If you know where two is, you can infer where three is. There's a [inaudible 00:33:17] change in height. And there's a systematic structure of language. It is abstract, however. And it's to learn how to relate. In contrast, these set of words are something that children are very familiar with. It's very concrete. You know what dog is. You know what pig is. You know what sheep is. And they really like calling it dog's room, pig's room, sheep's room. They're familiar and they're appealing, and they're concrete. So, these are two sets of words, and we want to know whether the systematic nature if this set of words, even though it's less appealing, more abstract. 
	Does it find a systematic structure in the mind, as well such they can do the test correctly. And the answer is yes. Even though they have the same memory about which room is called the pig's room, and which room is called the third room. They only do well when they hear this number of words. Room number one. Room number one. Room number three. Some of the children even go out and they say, "oh, like, we called that drawer drawer number one, number two, number three. 
	So, I really, really enjoy doing this, and they proceeded. This is probably the reason, if you're a New Yorker, you actually are very proud of how your city is very logical, because you can find out where exactly 61st Street and 60th Street. But different from Boston, you have people, like, saying how Boston is so chaotic, because there's no system in how the roads are arranged. The words, it's not systematic. The labeling is not systematic. Right? You have Mass Ave. you have all kinds of, like, Harvard Ave`. But you don't know the relations within Harvard Ave., and Mass Ave. In New York, that's much easier. You know the relations within 60th Street and 61st Street. Easier to find your way. Just to illustrate, it's not only for very young children that the systematic structure of the language can also invite systematic representations in the mind. 
	So, with and without words, there's definitely a mind without language. And what's really exciting development in the field is that we have the empirical tools to find out about this mind very precisely what is it in the mind? What is known, and what is not known? And we felt we can have  more precise predictions about what does language do to augment your thinking? In particular here, what does language do to augment your relational thinking? I offered three very precise rules of what exactly language does. Language can give you ... Naming can give you stability and accessibility, so that you remember it better. You can carry it around better. You can tell other people tell other people better. You can make inference better. Common labels can invite comparison and abstractions. You can get a new abstraction of knowledge. The structure of language also invites conceptual structures. 
	And we come back to the very first question that we ... To the second question that we asked that it's only communication, but it's about symbolic system. And you notice that by naming, I am making use of the property of the symbolic property of the language. And for these two, in finding comparison and abstractions, and finding conceptual structure, I'm making use of language as a symbolic system. So, these are some of the things that we know. And with that I want to thank you for your attention. As Erin has said, we always need your support. We need a lot of children. It's not easy to get children for this event. So, if you have children ages two-to-seven-year-olds, join us at the kid lab. There's a very easy way for you to actually join us. You can just sign up in our website. So, if you go to kidlab.swarthmore.edu, you can right away click signup, and we have a very easy system where we call you. And we do the study space on your availability.