Study Psychology

There’s another truckload of psychology reading due next week, and the only way you’re going to finish it all is by splitting this up with Vishal. He shows up at your door, looking a little rumpled with a scruffy button-up on, and you spend a second wondering why he’s dressed like he is.

“Here are the books,” he says, reaching into his backpack and dropping the stack on your desk.

It is an intimidating pile.

“The syllabus says we’re covering psycholinguistics this week,” you say, paging through the document on your computer.

“Oooh, there’s a Chomsky paper! I call dibs on this one,” Vishal says, picking it up. “I loved his stuff on mass media. Can I read it? I’m going to read it.”

“Hey, I’m not about to stop you,” you say, smiling at his enthusiasm. While he digs into the paper, you pick out one of the texts on code-switching.

It’s surprisingly engrossing reading. The chapter starts out by laying out the theoretical framework behind why one would switch languages or dialects in the middle of a sentence, but it really gets interesting when it dives into more concrete examples—there are case studies of Singlish (Singaporean English turns out to be exactly what you expected-lah), and then deep dives into how both fraternities and LGBT communities adopt and switch between their own localised patterns of speech.

“This paper’s absolutely bonkers! Get a load of this: Chomsky says that humans are born knowing language, like, not that we learn it from scratch, but that we already know a good chunk of it when we’re born,” Vishal exclaims, throwing his hands up in wonderment.

“How does that make any sense whatsoever?” you ask. “When’s the last time you heard a newborn talk? Or heck, even listen to basic instructions?”

“Look, Chomsky’s obviously not that stupid,” Vishal snorts. “He knows that babies don’t talk. His thing is that we don’t say nearly enough words and provide nearly enough information to them before they start responding to our commands. So he’s saying that there must already be structures or ways of interpreting built into baby brains—hence, innate language.”

“Oh,” you say with a frown. That sounds frighteningly plausible, but the actual science is probably also a bit above your pay grade at this point.

“Anyways, did you come across anything neat?”

“Yeah, some stuff on code-switching—get this, frat bros all know how to speak three languages! There’s regular English, for when they’re in class and stuff, and then there’s like bro-talk when they’re with each other, where women are objectified and gym is the constant reference point, and then there’s pick-up talk, where the opposite is true.”

“Oh, sort of like how people always say I talk different when I’m on the phone with Salena,” Vishal says. “Apparently I get very affectionate, whatever that means.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” you say. You idly wonder about this girl that’s captured your friend’s heart—who is she, and what does she look like? Ah well, it’s none of your business.

“Cool, that’s one set of readings down. Onto the next!”

You and Vishal spend a couple more hours pouring through the readings, until you finally make your way through the list. It’s about time you took a break.

Vishal +5

A question for you, dear reader: How much detail do you want for a chapter that basically amounts to ‘study psychology’? Put another way, it takes me time to flesh out the details and to fact-check when I write these chapters; if people are mostly skipping the text and not really interested in the ideas, then I’ll save time and shorten these types of chapters and expand the ‘relationship’ type ones more. Otherwise, though, I’m happy to continue writing longer ‘study’-type chapters.