Abstract

Language seems to pose a problem for ecological psychology. The problem is what kind of things linguistic objects, such as phonemes and words, might be? Speech, as well as written language, seems to be part of our physical environment, but language also seems to persuasively provide us all with abstract mental structures like words. In a recent special issue of this journal (Hodges and Baron, 2007) it was argued that the social aspects of ecological psychology have not received the attention they deserve since many aspects of motor and perceptual behavior reflect social processes. This essay will reinforce these observations about social perception and social action and further emphasize that societies are complex systems within which the speaker is simply one agent among many (Beckner et al, 2009). Language is essentially social and is probably not definable in terms of any individual psychological system. Language is a part of the culture of human communities that is shaped over historical time. Evidence for the structures of language can be found in the speech corpus but the structures are not physical, invariant tokens used psychologically by individual speakers (as in the

Citations