ABSTRACT
For the cognitive psychologist, perhaps the most remarkable and intriguing of human abilities is our capacity to use language. Why should this be so? After all, activities involving language are commonplace in our everyday lives. We talk to our families, listen to the news, read the newspaper, chat on the phone, all without conscious effort or obvious premeditation. These activities, however, rely on an ability which, on reflection, is exceptionally clever and impressive. In the words of Steven Pinker (1994), ‘Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other’s minds’ (p. 15). So, by varying those sounds, each of us can tell someone the plot of a film seen last night, ask what they had for breakfast or tell them to ‘go and take a running jump’. In the same way each of us can follow that film plot, provide information about what our breakfast consisted of or react to the injunction to take a running jump (without, it should be noted, taking its words literally).
