LanguageLanguage is an essential thing necessary to communicate and develop the skills one needs to be a complete, whole and intelligent individual. Language is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Here we will define language and lexicon, evaluate key characteristics of language, describe the four levels of language structure and processing, and analyze the role of language processing in cognitive psychology. To begin, we will define the language. How to define language can be quite complex, but it is important to understand for the sake of human communication. Language has many different elements that are necessary for understanding it. To understand how language processing works in cognitive psychology, one must examine it and have a clear view of cognitive psychology (Boroditsky 2001). Basically, language is a complex process of communication that follows each person's thoughts. The lexicon can be defined as a kind of mental dictionary. It can contain many representations of known words, including spelling, the part of speech of each word, and the way a word is pronounced (Boroditsky 2001). Lexicons help match the spoken word with that of the meaning of the word. Therefore, people will begin to view words through this way of doing things because spoken words are similar to a lexicon (Boroditsky 2001). Next, we will evaluate the key characteristics of language which are: communicative, arbitrary, structured, generative and dynamic. Communicative, language can allow you to interact with another. According to Willingham (2007), the link established between language elements and their meaning is arbitrary. The way the language is structured shows how symbols are not arbitrary. The language put in place shows precisely how complex this can be. Generative, we are capable of constructing an innumerable number of meanings from words. Dynamic, the language never stays the same, it can therefore be described as sporadic. According to Willingham (2007), changes are constantly being made as new words are added and grammar methods change. These elements can be very critical when it comes to language. To continue with the key characteristics, language is known to be special because of the way children are able to learn in a different way than learning other things. (Willingham, 2007). Strong evidence shows how well-prepared the human brain is to learn a language with very little stimulation. The results that show this view to be true are known to be the global consistency of language learning..