Steven Crane

December 12, 2007

Language and Society introsem with Lera Boroditsky

Final Paper

Nicaraguan Sign Language: The Birth and Transmission of a New Language

Where Does Language Come From?

It is a remarkable ability of children to master language. Adults are usually those who master complex bodies of knowledge, that is, it takes years of experience and detailed, explicit instruction in classrooms to acquire similarly complex abilities such as programming a computer, reading and writing, or finding and incorporating academic sources in a scholarly paper. Explaining the ease with which children learn language, Noam Chomsky of MIT and many of his followers including Steven Pinker now of Harvard argue that there is something special and specific to language in the human brain that causes certain patterns and characteristics to arise in the learning and expression of individual languages, and among many languages. What that something is varies from source to source and is not yet something tangible like a specific chunk of brain or sequence of genes, but their theories are often well-articulated and accepted. Though Chomsky and Pinker are both powerful intellectuals in the arena of psycholinguistics, their claims are not without controversy or viable alternative.

Instead, it could very well be that children master language because they are typically exposed to it continually every day of their lives. To counter this, one might argue that children are also driven around in cars quite often, or see their caretakers cooking meals on a daily basis, yet they don’t spontaneously develop the ability to drive or cook without instruction; however, children lack the strength and motor control to accomplish either of these tasks until later in life. Perhaps if children were born with bodies powerful enough to drive cars, the symbolic understanding that certain colors of lights and squiggles on metal signs are meant to determine the behavior of the driver, and an understanding of Newtonian physics, then they would be able to drive without instruction at the age of five, but they don’t. Instead, most children are born with all the tools and abilities to receive language. The lack of innately skilled teenage drivers could also be explained by postulating, as Professor Boroditsky has done in discussion, that what is innate are certain learning modules that are applicable to certain things, but not others. Further, these learning modules are not specific to language; language just happens to be something that humans are particularly adept at learning, analyzing, and finding patterns in.

Do children have an innate knowledge of language structure and an instinct to express this inborn ability in a certain critical period of their early life? Or do they simply have a certain absorbency resulting from a stronger ability to draw information from their environments when they are younger? In other words, are children more like pre-programmed computers that only need a few switches thrown for language to develop, or are they more like selectively-permeable sponges that absorb linguistic stimuli especially adeptly? While children are neither computers or sponges, the purpose of this paper will be to distill from one specific example, Nicaraguan Sign Language, what linguistic evidence is and is not present and what conclusions are or aren’t valid as drawn from that evidence. As it turns out, the phenomena of Nicaraguan Sign Language creation is often misconstrued by many who neglect certain historical events. The language wasn’t as much a spontaneous creation from nothing, but more a gradual creation with a variety of inputs and influences, making the situation and subsequent experiments less ideal than some of the researchers working there present. Despite the complications surrounding the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language, and the situation of the birth of the language aside, there is strong evidence for the poverty of the stimulus argument. In other words, new signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language do express certain constructions to which they’ve not previously had experience. Therefore, the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, though it may not be a scientifically ideal situation, supports the theory that children create and solidify certain grammatical constructs to which they have never been exposed.

The History of the Deaf in Nicaragua

According to Steven Pinker’s understanding of the birth of ISN, “until recently there were no sign languages at all in Nicaragua because its deaf people remained isolated from one another” (36) and that it took the Sandinista Revolution to found a centralized school for the deaf. This school, Pinker admits, was dogmatic and tried to force deaf children to learn lip-reading and speech, and failed in these pursuits. However, Pinker maintains that it was on the playgrounds, between classes, and on the bus rides to and from school that formerly isolated and non-linguistic children spontaneously developed a pidgin sign language called LSN (el Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense). This language was a pidgin language in that it relied on many circumlocutions and indirect forms of expression without certain convenient grammatical devices. As new, younger deaf students came to the school, however, they picked up LSN, and actually changed the language in an amazingly enriching way. They took LSN, streamlined its circumlocutions, created grammatical devices, and made it a highly rich, expressive sign language known by a different name, ISN (el Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense or NSL, Nicaraguan Sign Language). To Pinker, it was “a language ... born before our eyes” (37) out of virtually nothing.

Pinker’s conclusions are based on the work of Judy Kegl and Ann Senghas. In the article “Children Creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar” by Ann Senghas and Marie Coppola of Barnard College of Columbia University and the University of Rochester, respectively, Senghas and Coppola conclude from their experimental evidence that “sequential cohorts of interacting young children collectively possess the capacity not only to learn, but also to create, language” (1). In other words, they argue that their results prove that young children have the ability to introduce and unify systems of grammar. Gary Morgan of the City University London and Judy Kegl of the University of Southern Maine also have an article, “Nicaraguan Sign Language and Theory of Mind: the issue of critical periods and abilities.” Of more pertinence to this paper than their conclusions on language and theory of mind is their description of the situation in Nicaragua surrounding the birth of ISN. Kegl first visited Nicaragua in 1986 and spent years studying ISN, especially with relation to the new learners of ISN. Her portrait of the birth of ISN is that which Pinker shares: a situation with an absence of language turning into a full language.

However, the historical accuracy of their account of Nicaraguan deaf education was put under question in 2005 when Laura Polich wrote her book The Emergence of the Deaf Community in Nicaragua. Polich of Lamar University spent a number of years doing field observations of deaf students in twenty different schools, conducted polls of deaf students and teachers of deaf students, and surveyed 225 deaf individuals regarding their backgrounds. Instead of the nearly ideal linguistic environment suggested by Pinker, Kegl, and Senghas, Polich proposes, “the sign language in Nicaragua did not develop in a vacuum, but owes a debt to multiple influences” (168). These influences were the various home-sign systems (simple systems of rudimentary gestures used around a home with a deaf child for day-to-day purposes) that students brought with them to schools, occasional Spanish and American signs picked up from dictionaries, Thomas Gibson, an American Peace Corps volunteer who taught ASL, and Adrian Perez, a deaf student who spent eight years in Spain using sign language. Further, while the Sandinista revolution did bring marginally more deaf pupils to schools for the deaf, Polich concludes from hundreds of interviews, “the pre-revolutionary schools… were much more eclectic and open to sign language than the post-revolutionary schools for deaf children, which were severely, adamantly, and dogmatically oral” (157). Polich argues that it was a matter of the huge community of deaf individuals that arose in the 1980s that gave birth to ISN, for there had been many instances of deaf individuals interacting and even attending the same school before then, but it was only after the number of deaf individuals in the community hit what she calls a “critical mass” (155) that ISN was born and generated.

The thoroughness with which Polich conducted her research lends credibility to what she presents as facts. ISN was not created in a vacuum, and it was perhaps out of the necessity of building a community that new learners took to the language with such gusto. The poverty of the stimulus argument (at least relative to language innateness) contends that there are certain characteristics that emerge in children’s speech which are not present in the speech of those from whom they learn. That is, the response provoked (new utterances) could not have been the result of external stimuli alone, something must be innate. The complications to the picture of how ISN was generated must be taken into account when considering scientific conclusions that depend on the poverty of the stimulus argument.

Experimental Evidence

Take two-hundred infants straight from their mothers’ wombs, raise them on a previously uninhabited island by caretakers who used no language, and then bring in some psycholinguists to track the development of their utterances from incoherent babble language, and from creation down through the generations. Scientifically rigorous as this experiment would be, the experiment facetiously proposed by Dr. Lera Boroditsky in class discussion clearly would be cost-prohibitive and morally questionable, plus it’s not clear that any language would ever develop, especially not in the first generation. That leaves psycholinguistic researchers with the dilemma of finding a situation that has certain traits similar to the “infant island” experiment that would make it ideal for the study of how languages are born, learned, and passed down to new learners. They look for the emergence of a new language, and a common place to do that is when a pidgin language, a fairly basic second-language used between two groups who do not speak the other’s language, becomes a creole language, a more advanced language that seems to arise out of nowhere with certain linguistic traits not inherited from any parent language.

While not as ideal an experiment as Infant Island, consider the experiment outlined in the article “Children Creating Language” Senghas and Coppola of Barnard College of Columbia University and the University of Rochester, respectively. This article, published in 2000 in the Journal of Psychological Science studied the emergence of spatial modulation. Spatial modulation is a grammatical structure common to all studied sign languages (Senghas referencing Supalla, 1995) in which the signer takes regular signs and instead of producing them neutrally in front of the chest, gives them certain grammatical distinctions such as person, number or location in time by modulating where the sign appears: left, right, up, or down relative to the chest. They focused on a particular type of spacial modulation: shared reference. Shared reference refers to the situation in which a signer places a sign in a specific spatial location and then further signs in that specific spatial location also refer to the previous sign which was placed there. For example, when outlining the characters in a narrative, a signer might sign a person into existence in the left of the signer’s field of vision. Later, transitive verb signs such as “hit,” “love,” and “thank” might all be produced to the left, in the same direction as the man in the narrative, indicating that he was the one hit, loved, and thanked.

In summary of the experiment, they took their twenty-four Nicaraguan experimental participants who had each had at least four and a half years of exposure to ISN. The test participants were split into two cohorts, one of the older generation of signers who learned ISN at an earlier stage, and one of the younger generation of signers who had learned ISN at a later stage in the language’s development. They had the participants view a two-minute animated cartoon, and then videotaped the participants signing the narrative of the story to a deaf peer. Using the data from the videotapes, they then analyzed them in a variety of ways, looking for overall levels of fluency, use of spatial modulation, and examples of shared reference.

The results of their experiment suggest that spatial modulations were used more often and more adeptly by signers who had been exposed to ISN at an earlier age than those who hadn’t, and further, when they did use spatial modulations, it was most likely to be in the context of shared reference and not just as a general increase in spatial modulation. Also, they found that the signers exposed earlier in life were also more fluent as judged by morphemes per minute than their counterparts who were exposed to ISN later in life, despite being younger and having had less overall practice and exposure than most of those in the older cohort.

Concluding, Senghas and Coppola postulate that this evidence supports the idea that each subsequent generation of signers of ISN are creating and shaping their language as they go along learning it. They argue that it is more than just a random mutation of language, or an accidental error. Instead, it is a positive influence on the language in a profound way, “enabl[ing] long-distance grammatical relationships among words” (5). Further, the greater prevalence of spatial modulations and shared reference in younger signers was not simply a matter of the children having grabbed on to one aspect of language and overusing it, because those same children were also the ones who had greater overall fluency. Also, more than just the regularization of a formerly inconsistently-applied rule, the changes the children made were permanent. That is, the situation was not analogous to an English-speaking child who says, “I holded the cat” because he heard the words “scolded,” and “folded” and regularized the irregular verb-form “held;” instead, the new signers took one small, rarely-used artifact from the language of their teachers and made it a far more universal rule. They allowed their language greater flexibility and efficiency, and made it similar to older, better-established sign languages such as ASL which also uses shared reference. Finally, the new cohort of ISN signers did indeed create a new interpretation to the language that was previously absent, Senghas and Coppola claim. They say, “only members of the second cohort interpret the modulations as limiting potential referents” (5). In other words, it’s only the new generation of signers who take spatial modulations to be indicative of any sort of specific, limited meaning. The old cohort may use spatial reference from time to time, but for them, the spatial reference might mean something, but it is not something specific, and it is not a hard and fast rule as it is for the new cohort.

Senghas and Coppola say they chose to study spatial modulation specifically because it was not present in the signers’ linguistic environment, that is, it was not present in spoken Spanish or in signs borrowed directly from common Nicaraguan gestures. A point of contention, however, is regarding their assertion that spatial modulation is not present in the linguistic environment. If my personal experiences with Spanish in Mexico and Costa Rica and with the English language are any indication, people speaking language often use their hands, even, sometimes, in spatially-referent ways. For example, I might point my hands at myself when emphasizing that I had done something, gesture to a “you” to whom I was speaking when emphasizing something that person had done, and (most importantly), I might extend an open hand in a third direction when introducing a third, absent person as a metaphorical representation of that person in relation to myself. Therefore, it is hard to accept the assertion that there were no-spatially referent stimuli available to the first generation of ISN creators and users.

However, what is clear from their experiment is that the second cohort of ISN signers did indeed employ advanced linguistic structures far more often than the first cohort. The new generation had and employed the ability to systematize their language, and affect it in a major way using newly-created grammatical structures and rules in their language. More than just introducing new slang or modifying individual words as are the contributions that most generations make to well-established languages, Nicaraguan children created a new grammatical construction, as if it were innate. What’s more, this construction, supposedly unbeknownst to the signers of cohort two, is a common characteristic that’s indeed universal to all known sign languages.

Toward Theories of Language Acquisition

Very rarely are psycholinguists granted the opportunity to study a language from its inception, but in Nicaragua over the course of a few decades there seemed to emerge a language where none existed before. There is virtual consensus that Nicaragua in the twentieth century is one of the richest sources on the emergence of a language available to researchers; however, rich as it may be, it is still not the infant island experiment and is full of possible theoretical holes. Further, the history of the deaf in Nicaragua is not as clear-cut as a scientific experiment would require. Laura Polich spent an entire book detailing the gradual emergence of a deaf community in Nicaragua over the course of seven decades, far more than the two decades that Pinker, Kegl, and Senghas usually reference. Further, it’s not clear (and probably never could be clear) whether the signers of cohort two all spontaneously developed spatial modulations with shared reference, or whether one particularly insightful signer thought to employ that construction one day, and people ended up copying him. In a sample size that’s so small, it’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about the nature of the language in general, let alone all languages in general and all brains which produce language.

Senghas and Coppola show the emergence of a new linguistic trait among a cohort of signers of ISN. This process is fairly common among the fairly uncommon phenomena of the emergence of creole languages from pidgin languages. Does the emergence of novel grammatical devices support the notion that there are certain linguistic traits that will arise in all languages? If that’s true, what is the origin of these universal characteristics? Is it an innate result, arising from a “distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains” (Pinker 18) or a “genetic basis for language acquisition?” (Chomsky viii). Or perhaps is it just a symptom of living on the same earth, traveling through the same three-dimensional space, feeling the same forces of gravity and power that give disparate languages universal structures?

In the end, neither Nicaraguan Sign Language nor any creole could provide exhaustive evidence for any universal truth regarding the level of innateness of language, the characteristics and qualifications of that innateness, or theories of a universal grammar or language instinct. In fact, any claim that something is “universal” whether on the level of individual brains or among the world’s languages is virtually impossible to prove conclusively. Further, theories that children possess learning modules that are widely applicable to multiple things, including language are also supported by the creolization process: children might simply pick up on an occasionally-used or accidentally-used structure, find it useful, use it often, and thereby add it to the language. However, the search of a theory consistent with the findings of the psycholinguistic study of ISN has led me to conclude that the birth and characteristics of ISN are indeed two small data points on the grand balance of competing linguistic theories that fall on the plate of the likes of Pinker and Chomsky. Granted, there are a number of books and articles on this topic not available through the Stanford library and database system, thus there are probably theories and interpretations not even addressed in this paper. Also, the main scientific work examined in this paper was chosen because it examined and attempted to draw conclusions about the innateness of language, while others exist which may offer different conclusions based on similar evidence. However, despite the flaws in the situation of ISN and in the theories of language innateness, if one suspends suspicion temporarily, he or she could safely draw the conclusion that ISN did emerge rather spontaneously, and that successive generations of ISN learners generate and shape the language in profound ways, as if to “bring it up to scratch” with other world sign languages.

Works Cited

Supalla, T. (1995). An implicational hierarchy in verb agreement in American Sign Language. Unpublished manuscript, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.

Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2001). Children creating language: “How Nicaraguan Sign Language acquired a spatial grammar.” Psychological Science, 12, 323-328.

Polich, L. 2005. The Emergence of the deaf community in Nicaragua: "With sign language you can learn so much." Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct: “How the Mind Creates Language.” New York, NY. Harper Perennial.

Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Language and Mind: Third Edition. Cambridge, NY. Cambridge University Press.

More Nicaraguan Sign Language Shtuff

The central article from Science by Ann Senghas and others. It's called

Children Creating Core Properties of Language: Evidence from an Emerging Sign Language in Nicaragua

After hunting around fruitlessly on ebscohost, I finally found the central paper which all the commentaries I read were commentating on. This is the original paper from 2004 that has spurred a lot of controversy, with some using it to support the "language instinct" theory and others refuting that claim. I will probably refer to it in depth in my paper, which will be the next blog. For now, let's set the scene:

So first the bare facts that (at least I consider to be) are minimally controversial. These come from The Emergence of the Deaf Community in Nicaragua which was written by Laura Polich who focused more on the society and the progression of the deaf community.

1. In 1979 a researcher named Thomas Gibson found no deaf community in the country, but by 1986, Laura Polich and Ann Senghas found an established deaf community.
   
2. In 1981 the Vocational Center for the Disabled (COD) and it adopted a heterogeneous system of communication which was an early collaboration of former, basic systems.
   
3. By 1986 it had become a full language in use at the COD, and this was when Judy Kegl, came onto the scene and started her study of NSL (Nicaraguan Sign Language) or ISN (Idioma de Senas de Nicaragua).

In the chapter on the emergence of language, Polich searches for the reason behind the language eruption in 1986. She considers the hypothesis that "simply bringing young deaf, previously isolated children together will produce and eruption of a language." But disproves it by pointing out that this had happened many times before in Nicaragua. She also points out that there must be sufficient numbers for a sign language to develop, a "critical mass" as she puts it, though does not define it. She does say it must be more than twenty, though. She also makes another surprising claim. I was under the impression that deaf education was made possible after the Sandinista revolution (in 1979), but she claims that "The pre-revolutionary schools in Managua were much more eclectic and open to sign language than the post-revolutionary schools for deaf children, which were severely, adamantly, and dogmatically oral." An oral environment clearly won't be conducive to sign language, so why the flourishing of ISN after the revolution? The chapter dwindles off after that and never really returns to this question, though it might have been implicated that the stronger formation of a deaf community at that point was the impetus for language.


Signs of Evolution - A Scientific News Source on ISN

A couple quotes that attempt to sum up Senghas's article:

"The researchers found that older users of the new language used a relatively simple form, without formal grammar — whereas younger students used discrete words to form sentences in a way that resembled other languages. “Their first pantomine-like gestures evolved into a grammar of increasing complexity as new children learned the signs and elaborated. Now it has a formal name: Nicaraguan Sign Language, and is so distinct that it would not be understood by American and British signers.”"

Steven Pinker's take: "It shows that children have sophisticated mechanisms of language analysis which give language many of its distinctive qualities."

I thought this Pinker quote to be very interesting, in that he doesn't use the opportunity to point to innate language, but rather something similar to what Lera articulated earlier this quarter, that of "innate learning modules" or something to that effect, which are powerful, innate tools of analysis that children use to analyze the world around them and which are particularly adept at statistical analysis of language that teaches children how to follow linguistic rules, which sort of refutes the poverty of the stimulus hypothesis.

Homesign, Chomsky, and Nicaragua again

Signs Support Chomsky

Marie Coppola and Elissa Newport of the University of Rochester have also jumped on the bandwagon of studying ISN (or did two years ago in 2005 when this paper came out.) The title basically says it all. They did a study on a rather small sample population, three people, who were never exposed to a real, formal sign language. They were home-signers, that is, they developed a system for use around the home with their parents and families, but were never able to learn a full language in the way that most people are. The study used little video clips of people either as "the subject" or "the topic" of an action verb, and then tested whether the people could identify the grammatical concept of a "subject." Apparently the test subjects knew to put the subject of the sentence at the beginning, as opposed to the "topic" of the sentence in a different position. This, the authors postulate, supports a Chomskian view of an innate grammar.

I don't know if Chomsky's theory of universal grammar mandates that subjects must go at the beginning of sentences, but if it does this evidence could be construed to support his theory. It does seem to make intuitive sense to me, a native English speaker, that subjects preceding verbs would be a linguistic universal. However, if one is going to take issue with the experiment, she will either seek to undermine the evidence, or refute the conclusions, and I could see how both could be done in this case. If you're a deaf person born to hearing parents who never learned and never will learn real sign language, one can imagine that your parents will develop their own signs, and those signs will probably mimic the speech patterns the parents already use, which in this case would probably be Spanish which does indeed put the subjects at the beginning of sentences, when a subject is included at all. A complexity that arises, however, is when there isn't a subject in a Spanish sentence, that is, when the subject pronoun (he, I, they, you, etc.) is implied by the ending of the verb. I don't know if Spanish-speaking parents would attempt to sign declarative, explicit subject-free sentences with a sign for the pronoun before or after the verb. Since Spanish marks the subject at the end of the verb, it seems certainly plausible that an "illiterate" Spanish signer would try to imply the subject of the sentence after the verb, because that's how it appears in regular syntax. Any native Spanish speakers are welcome to contribute as to whether they think of the subject in these instances as before or after the verb. As one who learned Spanish as a second language, I applied the English framework to Spanish sentences when I learned them, and for me, while I may not know the person and number of the pronoun until after the end of the verb, I think I "picture" the sentence in my head in a (subject) doing (verb) construction.

So, if the homesign systems used by these three individuals is and was indeed marked by (sign for verb) then (sign for subject), and these participants in the study correctly intuited from the experiment some sort of distinction about subjects being at the beginning of phrases, I probably would conclude, as did the authors of this paper, that these three cases do indeed support a Chomskian view of an innate, universal syntax. However, there are definitely some problems with this experiment. In addition to the ones already noted, these people were adults and thus have been exposed to language throughout their lives. While they may not have been able to hear it, they've had homesign systems which are certainly more than nothing; they've interacted with other people in their community who probably structure their gestures in a different way; they've probably seen picture books and have encountered sentences and words in print to some degree of comprehension.

In sum, I've yet to encounter strong evidence in direct contradiction to Chomsky (though possibly the Piraha language does refute certain tenets of the theory, but I'd need to learn more about both before I could make conclusions), and the scientific articles I've yet encountered with regards to sign language and especially ISN all draw conclusions that support Chomsky. This could be simply because Chomsky is arguably the prevailing psycholinguist of the time and it's scientifically unfashionable and risky to contradict him, or it could be because he makes some strong, supportable claims. If there are some scientific articles that any reader is aware of that refute Chomsky and disagree with him outright, I would love to read them and would appreciate if you would post them in the comment section.

Theory of Mind and Deaf Signers

Theory of Mind and Deaf Signers
Log into the Stanford system, then you can follow the link:
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=4&hid=8&sid=bea825b0-2349-4c92-afbd-6a9cf5226de8%40SRCSM1

This paper is a scientific look at the Nicaraguan Sign Language phenomena, which is, of course, the one we've referenced a few times in class. It looks at the development and abilities of children and adults who were exposed to formal sign language at different ages and how they score on various tests. One of them is the theory of mind test, which aims to determine how well an individual understands the difference between their own mind and the minds of others. In young children for example, they sometimes don't have very marked theory of mind abilities, thinking that what's in their heads is the same as what's in mommy and daddy's head as well. As might be expected, native or early-exposure signers do better with these sorts of things than signers who were exposed to sign language later in life. (For an example of one test in theory of mind, look here).

As the article asks, "By what process do deaf children build a ToM [Theory of Mind] in the absence of formal language exposure? What ToM abilities are robust enough to develop in situations of late language exposure?" These questions seem very interesting, and fairly central and applicable to our class. I'm not sure exactly, but there seem to be a couple ways that children can build ToM. If they are raised in a typical environment with language, they probably build ToM by learning through verbal interaction with their parents and siblings that what exists in their mind is not the same as what exists in others' minds. Verbs like "think, dream, imagine, wonder" are indicators of theory of mind, and when children begin to use these, I suspect that their scores on ToM tests would also go up. For children not raised in a normally lingual environment have to figure out ToM through introspection to their own thoughts, and observations about the world around them (visual ones, since most of these "language-less" children are deaf children raised without formal sign language.) However, one can imagine how difficult this would be, especially since sometimes people behave one way but are actually thinking something different. In a world without explanations and language, a child might not always realize through facial expression alone, for example, that somebody is doing something unwillingly.

There's also the question of whether or not ToM tests are sensitive enough to the range of expression in late-sign-learners, because as one might imagine, individual people and families have come up with a huge variety of expressive gestures and signs. From the article I learned that some use facial expression to indicate something like "confusion" in another person by expressing a confused look on the face. Can ToM tests be sensitive to expressions like this which may indeed indicate underlying ToM ability that's not explicitly shown in what formal sign language these people do know. Alternatively, there might be certain conditioned responses such as laughing when somebody falls over that are just conditioned responses to a stimulus without a real underlying mental understanding of other people's mental states. As the article notes, "Gesture and facial expression could equally sometimes be over-interpreted."

A small aside which I may explore further later (by reading the original study): "They
came to this situation at different ages spanning
development before, during and after those maturational
points at which the critical period for language
acquisition is said to be in effect (exposure before
6 years for native abilities and not later than
10 years for near native abilities – e.g., Newport,
Bavelier, & Neville, 2001; Senghas & Coppola, 2001)." This would be an example that Lera has countered in class, showing a steady decline in language acquisition abilities with age rather than sharply defined windows around particular ages.
The article goes on to assert that it may be true that there are "critical periods" (more on that later) for acquisition of ToM ability.

The Branches of Language Innateness Theories

My purpose in this next set of blog posts will be to do some preliminary research paper probing. While starting to write on a topic without yet having a thesis or solidified stance is a little awkward, I’m hoping that these explorations into language innateness theories will give me a well-read background into the topic of my paper, while giving the reader a chance to set me straight if I’ve come to a preliminary faulty conclusion, and a chance for education about the vast theories of language innateness beyond Lera, Pinker, and Chomsky.

I’ve chosen to examine language innateness because it’s the subject area of class that seems to be the least settled and most controversial. I could, of course, be entirely wrong in that assertion, but for me personally, I don’t have a problem accepting that language affects thought, thought affects language, thoughts are made in language at least sometimes, language shapes abilities (perfect pitch and Mandarin). After considering split-brain patients, patients with hemispherectomies, patients with massive stroke damage, and their ensuing recoveries in language-related areas, I’m also convinced of the amazing plasticity of the human brain, and willing to accept the notion that language does not have to be localized to any specific structures in the brain, that the “seat” of language (if something that specific could ever be pinned down) is more of a mobile wheelchair than a permanent throne. I hope to cover Chomsky, Pinker, Boroditsky, Jerry Fodor, Michael Tomasello, possibly Elizabeth Bates and Catherine Snow as well.

Noam Chomsky

While very active politically and in other cognitive disciplines, Chomsky essentially is the first foundational thinker on language in the twentieth century, at least beyond B.F. Skinner. Chomsky's language theories began as anti-Skinnerian, that is, anti-radical behaviorism. Behaviorism, as applied to language, argues that everything is a behavior, and that behaviors can be described and analyzed scientifically without reference to internal physiological events or undefined, questionable constructs such as the mind. Skinner, inventor of the famous Skinner box (or operant conditioning chamber) used to study operant or classical conditioning, took behaviorism further, into radical behaviorism. Radical behaviorism had the advantage that it could accept unobservable, private events like thought.
Instead of just a behavior as Skinner proposed in his book Verbal Behavior, Chomsky proposes that language has certain innate characteristics, particularly his famous universal grammar that allows children to generalize the grammatical rules of their language to an extent far greater than is possible through what they are exposed to alone. His universal grammar seems to suggest that a great deal of language is innate and there only need be a few switches thrown during the course of development before fully-fledged language emerges, such as whether you need an explicit subject as in English, or if the subject is sometimes optional, as in Spanish. This, as I understand, is essentially his "Principles and Parameters" approach. Recently (1995) Chomsky has revised some of his former theories in the Minimalist Program, keeping the central concepts of generative grammar, but emphasizing instead the economy of the design of language learning.
Further analysis of Chomsky's theories would require a look at evidence and counter-evidence for his theories. Perhaps in my final paper, I might examine the case studies of the Nicaraguan sign language phenomena by Judy Kegl, or alternatively, the Piraha people of Brazil who were studied by Daniel Everett and apparently are a counter-example to universal grammar. I hope to go deeper into Chomsky's theories, and explore those of the other aformentioned language theorists as well.

My New Language, all you need is a symphonic voice

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

Music as a language. This article relates some anecdotes of "Here are tales of a man possessed with an insatiable desire to hear piano music after being struck by lightning, of another whose epileptic seizure created permanent music “playing” inside his head, of an eminent musicologist (the English conductor Clive Wearing) whose musical powers were unimpaired even though amnesia blotted out everything else, and of a severely retarded man able to recall hundreds of operas and play Debussy from ear after hearing it once." This got me thinking about the origins of music, and how they might be related to language. From these stories, it seems it is something that our mind spends quite a bit of resources on. Evolutionarily, music as we know it seems to be a rather recent invention, a by-product of human intellect. How did it get there? Why? As the article asks why "meaningless vibrations have such an effect on our mental state."

My roomate and I often compare elaborate pieces of classical music to novels: they both lend themselves to analysis in similar ways. For example, the overall tone of a book or a piece of music can be described as hopeful, gloomy, excited. Both can be complex, simple, elaborate, or eloquent in their overall perception by the reader/listener. There are motifs that are revisited. In language, certain phrases have what is described as a "lyrical" quality. Poetry lends itself to a certain rhythm. Certain languages in particular have elaborate use of different tonalities in pronunciation to differentiate words, as in Mandarin. In music, different instruments or instrument sections are often played off one another as if they were characters in a narrative: they echo one another, they contrast one another, and sometimes they all work together in harmony.

Because of all these similarities, I suspect that the evolutionary "fluke" of music is directly related to language. Music, I think, could also potentially be used as its own language. The reason it probably has not been used as such yet is because any human who has functioning ears and voice finds those to be a more convenient mode of expression than finding a piano or whipping out a flute every time he or she wants to express something to another person. However, consider how musical our language could be if we had vocal chords that could produce all the tones, dynamics, and timbres of a symphony simultaneously, as a symphony could. Tongues would clearly be unnecessary, and this hypothetical language would instead sound like compositions of music rather than the mechanical clicks, hisses, and bursts of words as we know them.

Dynamics would largely be the same, with higher volume used for emphasis, in times of great emotion, or when communicating over a large area. Tonal shifts would, of course, be far more elaborate than in any language currently spoken. The speed at which one note shifts to another, the type of shift (a gradual slide like a trombone, or a pure interval like a piano), and the tonal interval (a first, a third, an octave) could all be different communicative devices. The real power of a language like this (which is essentially present in great orchestral compositions) is the simultaneity of communication possible. That is, with dozens or hundreds of musicians, playing scores of different instruments, there are simultaneous levels to every instant of a piece of music. Some sections are silent, this means something. Some are voiced, this means something else. Some are excited and carry the melody; some voice occasional bass notes which ground the melody; some pulse the tempo; some simply add a flourish here and there. Every instrument can be used for a variety of purposes, and favoring one over the other in different circumstances would be analogous to the level of formality that we use in speech. In more formal situations, it would be proper to follow the expected norms (have the violins carry the tune, the basses throb the underlying foundation), but in more informal situations one could experiment with new combinations; people could find more efficient ways of expressing things, and thus a musical shift would emerge just as lingual shifts (new words are born, old words die) happen in our spoken language.

Music and language share so many aspects, I'm fairly sure we would not have music were it not for our lingual abilities. If there be scientific work in this area, I'd love to hear about it.

Animal Language? New Encounters; War.

Australian Scientists Say Humpback Whales Have Their Own Language

So it seems chimpanzees aren't the only ones... But upon further investigation it looks like the chimps win in the language competition. "The scientists identified at least 34 distinctive sounds made by these remarkable ocean creatures" the article states. 34 distinctive sounds is far fewer than the 200+ communicative actions that Washoe could make. While it may be exciting to think of whales and their gargantuan brains as these incredible philosophers of the deep, the evidence is still too thin to make that conclusion.

Sometimes, you need universal language made for a fairly comical read. It talks of oil companies who are penetrating South American rain forests, reaching villages that have been mostly undisturbed. While it may be a rude awakening to the Westernized world for these villages, the oil companies use megaphones and a phrase book to make certain things clear such as "We haven't come here to look for women. We have women in our own village."

This also makes me wonder about these tribes or villages and what they are thinking of heavy machines crashing through the forest. These Peruvian tribes, which are described as "people living in isolated Amazonian forests" are presumably fairly primitive with regards to industrialization, and they may have not even seen motorized vehicles before. When exposing new people to new things, these oil companies are the introducers and they thus have the power to shape the language of the tribes they encounter. If this tribe has never seen something like a car or truck before, they might make up some word that is a combination of existing words in their language ("rolling box" or something), or the bringers of these novel objects will introduce new vocabulary for their new objects. I bet these oil-seekers never expected to have the power to shape a tribe's language for all time.

So how good of a window IS language into human nature? Language as Human Insight: Our Many Words for Fighting When a language has such a plethora of synonyms for one aspect, one word, one idea, it seems to show that that language, those speakers, value or care about that idea very much. This article emphasizes the wide range of words we have for fighting. Is fighting inherent in human nature; is it really that central and important? Over the course of our evolutionary history, it seems that there would be an advantage to those who would (if they could) kill off all their neighbors and take their resources rather than work together for a common cause. As time has proceeded, the groups banding together for common protection of each other and common attack on others have grown larger. No longer is it a Feudal unit of peasants and lord, but it's an entire country that's invading other countries for their resources. We've learned it's not always necessary to kill everybody, but we really haven't come that far.

Book Reviews, Learning New Languages Through the Internet

It looks like the jury's starting to come back on Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought and things look pretty favorable for our East-coast counter-theorist. Pinker examines language, 'facts' and truths in 'The Stuff of Thought' portrays the new book as insightful, and packed with interesting information. Mind your language, professor also hails it in largely glorifying terms, though admits that "the Harvard professor demonstrates a frustrating reluctance to go from A to B if there's any chance of a detour to Z." I'm busily listening to the book myself in my free time (audio CDs if anybody wants to borrow them...), and can definitely attest to this latter point. It truly is a very interesting, enlightening book, but is also very complicated and is sometimes hard to follow (especially if you're listening to fragments while riding between classes). The youtube lecture he gives at Google is probably the most accessible summary of his points available, the most entertaining of which is his section on swearing. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to discuss language innateness so much in this book, considering he already wrote The Language Instinct to cover that topic, but one might say he's making huge strides in further definition and expansion of concepts of universal grammar, or something similar. This something similar might be further from the system of limited innate systems across humanity that Chomsky's "universal grammar" would imply, and closer to the topic of our class, which is how language shapes thought. Pinker would probably turn that around and use his discussions to make the case that thought shapes language, that thought is the broader category and that language is just one window into the far vaster complexities of thought.

One small category I wanted to comment on comes from this short, nonacademic blog entry: Language and violence. In it the author claims that violent crime has increased because of a lack of verbal outlet for frustration. He says that because words like "fuck" are so overused, they've lost their power so people resort to violence to express their anger. Beyond being unsubstantiated, short, and without citation, this article errs in that language is so plastic that it would fill any linguistic gap that appeared. If people wanted or needed words for their anger, they would (and sometimes do) invent them.

Finally, I was very interested by these two sites: Livemocha: A Social Language Learning Experience
and Learn a language without shelling out for a class
I wasn't formerly aware of sites like these. The first aims to connect people who speak different languages for quasi-tutoring sessions online, and the second links to a BBC website that offers free language lessons in a variety of different languages. These free language-learning-based websites are yet more great online resources and places I could spend hours of time if only I had them. But more than that, they offer the benefits of learning a language to those who might not otherwise get it. If a migrant worker wants to learn English and can spend half an hour at the library in the internet on his way home, these sorts of websites could open a lot of doors to him.

Fooling the Brain

How Ventriloquists Trick The Brain: Sight, Sound Processed Together And Earlier Than Previously Thought

Does Your Brain Play Tricks On You? Note, this one doesn't look very scholarly, but it is relevant.

I always find it interesting when things "fool"our brains, like this link that Steve posted a few days ago with a myriad of optical illusions. The first article here talks about a recent discovery in sensory processing. The article from Science Daily relates a discovery by the Duke University Medical Center which apparently did much of its work on chimpanzees, but is extrapolating their findings to humans as well. They discovered that there is sensory integration much earlier than previously thought. Before, scientists believed that sensory information coming in through the eyes or ears was sent virtually separately to the cortex where the information was integrated and we made sense of it.

However, their new discovery suggests otherwise. Their work focused on a very small brain region in a very primitive part of the brain (primitive in the sense that it is thought to have evolved a very very long time ago relative to the evolution of our cortex and other higher processing centers) called the inferior colliculus. The article claims that this early combination of sensory information is what causes us to perceive ventriloquism as realistically as we do. This can also be applied to movies: even though the speakers producing the sound are at the sides of the screen or behind the receiver, the receiver perceives the voice as coming from the mouth of the actor or actress on the screen. It also seems to be a process that magicians take advantage of.

What the larger psycholinguistic ramifications of this are, I'm not entirely sure, but it does lead me to some questions. Firstly, what evolutionary significance does this have? Does processing and integration that happens earlier in the cognitive process save the higher regions of the brain from having to bother with it, making us more efficient? That is, is it better the we automatically perceive the growl of a predatory animal and the sight of a predatory animal as originating from the same beast rather than thinking about them separately? Is it just brain economics? Or does this earlier processing an evolutionary structure that benefitted earlier, more primitive brains which didn't have much of a cortex at all, and the inferior colliculus did the integration for whatever higher system sensed it?

Whatever the causes or reasons (or lack thereof), I find it fascinating when we humans devise ways of fooling each other, of tricking our brains. How it is done and for what reasons we are evolutionarily inclined to be susceptible are very interesting questions to me, and have larger ramifications for society such as using eyewitness testimony as rock hard evidence in court when the senses can be fooled fairly easily.

Language and Thought: DO the languages we speak shape the way we think?

"How the Languages we Speak Shape the Way We Think" seems to take for granted the answer to the question "DO languages shape the way we think?". From our discussions and the evidence exhibited so far, that would seem to be the case, but not everybody is entirely convinced of that.

Thoughts can clearly be abstract, and when recalling pictures or music people clearly do not analyze the content of the thought in words, but rather re-create the sensory experience in their minds. If asked to describe a picture or a piece of music, one has the ability to take the thought from its abstract sensory medium and turn it into words, which can give a rough approximation of the thought to another person. The other person then, in turn, attempts to recreate the thought in his own head, to varying degrees of success depending on the quality of the description and the receiver's experience with the topic. So is it true that "language is a way for getting a thought from one head into another; it's not a way of having a thought" as Steven Pinker claims?

A quick side-note, the definition of "thought" could well encompass many books, but for the purpose of this post, I'll just go with something from the Oxford English Dictionary, thought is "exercise of the mental faculty; formation and arrangement of ideas in the mind." That, of course, begs the question of what constitutes an "idea," but we'll let that one sit for now.

Pinker offers some evidence for the assertion that language is utterly unnecessary for thought(this comes from the video available in the library in which Pinker is giving a lecture in Britain about The Language Instinct):
1. Other creatures, dogs or chimps for example, certainly appear to have thoughts in the absence of language. The same goes for babies early in development: they can think, remember, make associations, experience sensations and communicate their inner state without the use of any formal language.
2. While they are limited in number, there are deaf adults who never learned a formal sign language and are apparently "without language." They also clearly are capable of thoughts and ideas and creativity. They can do things like repair bike locks which not only shows technical skill, but suggests that they know of the function of a bike lock: two pieces of metal that should stick together sometimes and come apart at others depending on who is accessing it.
3. Even for those who have language, the process from thought to speech is often a treacherous one. What we say is often different from what we mean; further, it's very difficult to express thoughts in words. (This just got me thinking, it often seems, at least for myself, that I have an understanding of something, or I have some complex idea in my head that doesn't lend itself to explanation. However, when forced to transmit this idea from myself to another person and I endeavor to put the thought/idea into words, it solidifies my understanding of it, storing it more effectively in memory. Perhaps it is more advanced thoughts, more accessible and communicable thoughts that rely on language while baser or more abstract thoughts/ideas exist at a prelingual level.)
4. Our thoughts are very unambiguous (at least to ourselves) while language is highly ambiguous as seen by our unsuccessful attempts to teach computers to speak. (Think back to the alternative meanings that the computer gave to "Time flies like an arrow") Language's ambiguity is also shown by the endless lists of ambiguous, comical headlines
. The authors of these headlines weren't being ambiguous on purpose, they had a very clear idea in their head, but when that idea is translated into language, ambiguity arises.
5. Language is very sketchy. There are not enough words for full lines of reasoning. The husband in the " 'I'm leaving you.' 'Who is he?' " sketch had a huge series of thoughts in one instance between what his wife said and what he said. He could elaborate them into words if need be, but what happened in his head was not based in language, it was a chain of nonverbal reasoning.

The only conclusion I can really draw from this limited discussion is that there are clearly "thoughts" that one can have without language. Is the title of our seminar inaccurate? I really don't think so. It is also just as clear that plenty of thoughts happen WITH the help of language, and it might even be that they are the most useful, solid, fully-understood thoughts that we have which are based in language. As mentioned, one (or a few) could go on for ages discussing what constitutes real "thoughts" anyway.

My main source for all this was the video in the library (source info in the post below), but an excellent source for information on psycholinguistics (or many other cognitive studies) is here.



Another language acquisition link. This is another youtube video; they start discussing language around 22:00 if you're interested. It's Steven Pinker and Gene Searchinger, author of "The Human Language" speaking on some show from what appears to be the 1980's. In it, Pinker says, "I believe we think in images, we think in abstract propositions... I believe that the thoughts underlying language are not themselves words, but that we use words as the primary means from getting ideas from one head to another."


A random article. Do video games that "train" your brain work? Looks like there's some minimal evidence:
Video game brain training works?

Into the scientific realm

Now that our introsem has taken a turn towards the formally articulated theories of language with relation to acquisition, innateness, its effects on thought, and thoughts effects on it, I'm finding it necessary to reevaluate my own beliefs about this topic. Lera Boroditsky and Steven Pinker both seem very intelligent and articulate, and I respect both of them intellectually, but they have different beliefs on some of these aspects of language. I need to figure out how to square their ideas with my own beliefs. In order to do so, I've just begun to do some background research. So if anybody (especially Steve) wants to point me in the right direction for some background reading on the subject of language acquisition and innateness, please comment away, or email me at stevenmcrane@gmail.com.

For this post, most of my information comes from this link:
All about the innateness of language

Are there genetically-specified aspects of language, or aren't there? Pinker and Chomsky would say there are, but our own esteemed professor would argue otherwise, claiming (I think) that what is innate is an astounding ability to learn, which can just as well be applied to language as to most anything else. Lera's argument does seem to be simpler, more straightforward, more intuitive. Occam's razor would lead us to believe that this is correct, as would plenty of other evidence I'm sure (which I hope to dig up later.)

However, I'm sure Chomsky and Pinker would have considered this, yet they seem to have found the evidence that there IS something innate about language more compelling than the evidence otherwise. A simplified line of reasoning from the Chomskian camp goes as follows:

1. Language is incredibly, incredibly complex.
2. Children learning language are exposed to certain aspects of it from which they can learn.
3. In the end, the amount of incredibly complex language that a child knows far superceedes the amount he or she has been exposed to.

Essentially this argues that at some given point, children will know more language than they have ever been exposed to, more than they could have ever learned through ordinary learning mechanisms. (This is a type of "poverty of the stimulus" argument, by the way).

Other support (sorry, not specific studies yet) for the innateness theory:
1. Different languages across the globe which are unrelated historically share a number of similarities without any apparent cause.
2. Children learn language so quickly and so well that they would be dubbed prodigies were they learning anything besides language. Basically, they claim children learn language without any explicit instruction while many other things (reading, writing, math, music) take years of explicit instruction which often ends up failing in the end.

These lines of reasoning also seems quite convincing, with the proper proof to back them up, of course. I'm sure our professor has well-reasoned responses to all of these arguments, and I'm eager to hear them. Clearly, the debate on the innateness of language must be over the evidence itself, the individual studies and scenarios. Unfortunately, time does not permit me to seek out all those sources now, but maybe for the next post... Perhaps a preview:

"Language is a way for getting a thought from one head into another; it's not a way of having a thought." -- Steven Pinker



Future posts might focus on one or some of the following, but they seemed like good links to share right now in the first place:

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/erefs/mitecs/bickerton.html
All about creoles and their facets.

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/erefs/mitecs/clark.html
All about psycholinguistics, the main focus of our introsem.

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/erefs/mitecs/gleitman.html
All about language acquisition.

http://content.apa.org/journals/sjp/66/2/129a
Review of a book, From molecules to metaphor. A neural theory of language.

Hey look! Youtube! No reading!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU
Steven Pinker at Google talking about The Stuff of Thought.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=LjQM8PzCEY0
Steven Pinker before The Stuff of Thought came out.

There's also a recorded talk Steven Pinker gave in England on video cassette in the library that explains many of the concepts from The Language Instinct (call no: ZVC 14476, be sure to play it in the PAL tape player)

Language as "visual" art?

Paintings, photography, sculpture -- these are what most people think of when they think of art. And if asked to consider how words might be used as art, they think of novels, poems, maybe even clever advertisements. But simple, virtually unformatted phrases or sentences? Language, words, specifically printed words as art? I had trouble grasping what this artist might be after, but a quote from the article,"Though Mr. Weiner considers himself a sculptor, he says that imposing his specific personal vision for a work upon a viewer is akin to 'aesthetic fascism.' " opened my eyes to a deeper meaning behind this unorthodox display. I think the artist, Lawrence Weiner, has hit on something more than just "new and different" as so many artistic breakthroughs are: it actually makes sense.

Normally I tend to dismiss bizarre new art forms as positively ridiculous, but this one smacks of something a bit deeper. The medium of words. There's so much potential! Far more than a spoon-fed image, words create an abstract concept, picture, or idea in somebody's mind far more beautiful and elaborate, more multi-faceted and complex than anything static and of substance in the physical world. Words give rise to different thoughts from person to person, and even different thoughts in the same person, depending on his mood when viewing this unorthodox "art." Instead of imposing his own mandates on his viewers, Lawrence Weiner is truly leaving the beauty of his work to the mental faculties of his viewers, or more accurately, thinkers.

Because we use language every day, almost every second in our thoughts, Weiner's work is something that becomes constant in life. As he puts it, "If it's successful, the work really becomes part of people's lives," because the effort one puts into appreciating Weiner's work is a series of thoughts based on words, and if those very words are brought up in the course of daily thought or communication, it's a direct link to that former process.


One extra strange, slightly perplexing link you probably didn't see. I wonder about the scientific evidence behind perceiving this naked-woman silhouette's spin direction and left and right brainedness:

Spinning Naked Woman Silhouette.

This one's rather interesting; a novel approach to foreign language learning. It seems like a fatal flaw, however, is that adults can't learn language as easily or in the same way as young children, whom they constantly reference.

Censorship... does it even work?

Language problems: Oh sheesh

This link represents an interesting intersection between my Ihum class on sex, pleasure, and culture; and this class on Language and Society. That intersection focuses on the question of censorship and freedom of expression between Europe and America. In Ihum the thesis has been put forward that America is a much more reserved culture that shuns explicit content from its daily life relative to Europe which has nude beaches, naked statues everywhere, and what would be considered explicit content on regular cable television. This brief article about a woman who was screaming profanities while her toilet overflowed got me thinking about whether what was true in Ihum would be true for language too. Does America curtail language in ways other countries don't? My immediate reaction would be to note that there are many comparisons one could make that emphasize the freedom of expression in America, and do so with good reason. Freedom of speech, expression, and the press, while subjected to many tests over the course of American history, are still central concepts in American ideology and are essentially written into the central ideological document, The Constitution.

However, are there other ways that the United States curtails the use of language, or of certain language, and what really is the intention behind that curtailment? Are we subjected to political manipulation of language in order to keep us, the American public, deluded as in George Orwell's Animal Farm? Are there language-related trends that we don't consciously create, but exist nonetheless like condensation symbols from Murray Edelman's Symbolic Uses of Politics. Are there vast government conspiracies to control the way we think and behave? As to the last question, it wouldn't be a very good conspiracy if I'd heard about it, but I can't really be sure one way or the other...

This Article from CNN makes it clear that, at least relative to China, the US is a marketplace very open to ideas. In fact, we're so open about our ideas, and so firm in our belief that that's how things should be that we're trying to circumvent the Chinese government to provide the Chinese people with access to forbidden websites.

Not incredibly surprisingly, we didn't make the list of the ten most censored countries, (North Korea, Burma, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Eritrea, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Belarus). However, in the same article , Rue Freeman argues that the American obsession with "balance," or as he puts it "the truth must be watered down by equal space afforded the lies," then his conclusion that "we are living in a country where censorship is rife and growing" is certainly arguable.

But more applicably, what are the ramifications of language censorship on thought? If there are no words, as in 1984 by George Orwell, for negative things, for dissent, the question arises whether or not you block out those feelings or just the ability to express those feelings, and is there much of a difference? I don't believe it would block out feelings of dissent and rebellion. Think about it, one hears all the time about the inability to express a feeling or emotion in words, whether it be love or hatred that is "beyond words." So in this hypothetical society, negative feelings would still exist, but would the government have succeeded in ridding themselves of rebellion forever? I think they wouldn't. All around the world people have evolved thousands of different languages, and those languages are in constant flux and change. No matter how heroic the government's efforts, I don't think they could ever entirely squash human communication about any given topic unless every citizen were subject to solitary confinement. As long as two humans with working cognitive and sensory faculties are together, they will find a way to communicate about anything.

internet, leaving children behind, a new Pinker book!

Web domains get language lesson

So what happens when something like the internet is invented in one country under one language and, by necessity, spreads to the rest of the world with all its varied languages? I think that's one of the common themes I noted in my last post: the globalization of the internet and the necessary language-related adaptations. Through this article we see that the rest of the world is finally asking that it not have to use the traditional Roman alphabet for its .com and .edu and .net. Seems like it's about time.


Language X helps students learn reading and writing

Ah, No Child Left Behind. It's always been important to be good at reading and writing, and for some reason math snuck in there too somewhere in the decades of the space race. With NCLB, more schools are under more and more pressure every year. It's interesting to be in a collegiate atmosphere; people really don't seem to care that much about it anymore, but that's beside the point. Now schools are employing special programs and paying for all these extra resources to try to get more kids to graduate in order to keep their minimal funding in the first place. It strikes me as kind of backwards. I suppose it is a good thing to have a high graduation rate and good test scores, but I know I'm not alone in wondering if NCLB is really the best way to go about it.

Have TV shows gone too far with raunchy language?

Ah, censorship. It's curious how over even just a few decades words like "hell" and "darn" can go from forbidden to commonplace on primetime television. By the way, I'm not sure what the Price is Right video is illustrating; I wouldn't bother with it if you visit the site.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

If ever there were a book written specifically for this class... So it looks like Steven Pinker has come out with yet another long, yet insightful book into the workings of the human mind, specifically through the vehicle of language. I think I'll buy it and hopefully have read some of it by the end of this quarter to be able to discuss it further! This other article seems to take his evolutionary perspective to the extreme, possibly as sensationalist writing to attract a larger audience. It doesn't really seem that anybody educated in this field REALLY thinks that "everything from road rage to adultery can be explained by genes." Nor do I suspect Steven Pinker knows what's going on inside my head to any scary degree.

Emergencies and Beauty in Language

Language barriers in emergencies

Emergency situations. If ever one really threatens his livelihood by not learning the language of the area he's in, this would be it. As the article says, "It is frustrating to have someone that is in dire need of help, but you have to have specific information to move on to the next step of medical treatment," For the most part, I generally think that an immigrant may chose to learn or not to learn the language of his new home, knowing that he will miss certain opportunities for it, but when it comes to emergency situations, a language barrier can be a deadly thing. Personally, I'm planning on becoming a doctor and I plan to maintain Spanish fluency throughout that whole process, hopefully allowing me to help those who I might not be able to otherwise.

If one took our class as a microcosm of language variety and fluency, it is unfortunate that the outlook for multilingualism would be disproportionately high compared to the general population of America. We are becoming a global society in many ways, and there is no substitute for multilingualism on a personal level. It'll get a citizen more jobs, more friends, and allow him more freedom and intillectual stimulation on a global basis.

Now for something a little more beautiful...

Italian: The Language That Sings

Italian--the language of music. This NPR commentary makes clear the reason why Italian is ALWAYS used as the language of music. It's on the sheet music, it's what conductors use to communicate to their orchestra. It's a lyrical language and the Italian musicians were often the finest in Europe, so perhaps it's not just the beauty of the language that makes it the lingua franca of music. But what makes it beautiful? What makes it lyrical? What linguistic traits give it this beauty? If there were an Italian speaker in the class (sorry, I don't remember), he or she would probably be most qualified to analyze the melodiousness of the language, but I do have some small experience with it.

This is all conjecture, but it seems to me that Italian uses a pleasant juxtaposition of hard consonants and long, soft vowels. It also often compacts many vowel sounds into one syllable (a diphthong?) in words such as ciabatta or piano. The "t" sound also comes across fairly hard in most words, for example, molto or forte. Then again, maybe it just takes a native Italian speaker to make the beauty come out.

AT&T

Just a quick note on this one, it caught my eye because when I signed up for a cell phone I actually went through and read all the horrible terms of service and whatnot, and commented on this exact example of how absurd and confusing it seemed. It looks like I'm not the only one, and AT&T actually changed some of their agreement to be "more clear." Horray.

Pros and Cons of Language Learning

Language immersion schools hiring some English-only teachers


I think it's a good sign that the number of language immersion schools for English-speaking Americans have gone from fewer than fifty to nearly three hundred. It's good evidence that we're becoming more worldly and conscious of the benefits of learning foreign languages. The world is becoming more and more connected and no matter how efficient the translators (electronic or human), there is no replacement for fluency in a foreign language if one wants to have a conversation with somebody or read literature or travel in the country.

I've enjoyed the class discussions on the topic; and what I glean from them is that nobody really should be forced to learn any language as a prerequisite to geographical movement, but that the individual should be fully aware of the opportunities he may lose if he chose not to learn a given language. I tend to agree with this generalization, though I'm sure specific circumstances might prove otherwise.

I think it's also important to note the opposite, the situation of the permanent institutions adapting to an immigration of a foreign-language-speaking populace. By the simple process of competition for limited resources, if one fast food chain decides to employ bilingual cashiers while others feel that this new population "should learn the language," the latter businesses will flounder while the former will flourish. So really language learning goes both ways, and people on both sides of the language barrier have things to gain by adapting to the new situation.

Reading my twelfth batch of language-related news articles, I'm beginning to see trends and categories of the topics addressed. Some articles focus on one particular line of text (referring to it as "language") in a bill or from a speech and the reactions that people have had to that text. Others focus on language learning and instruction, often regarding public schools or public policy and how it should or shouldn't react to language. A third group focuses on immigration and the language issues that that entails, which ties back in to earlier paragraphs of this very post.

I hope in class that we might be able to learn specifically about some neural processes regarding language, and I really enjoy the examples of language shaping thoughts (i.e. the absence or abundance of certain words or concepts in a language and the consequences, good or bad, for the speakers of that language).

The Battle of Ages on the Language Front

What Language Barrier?


Women talk too much. Men and women deal with language differently. This difference is inherent and genetic and there's nothing to be done about it. Men and women will forever be at an impasse of communication because they interpret language differently. Are any of these popular myths true?

Deborah Cameron of Oxford has written a book about the differences (or more accurately, lack thereof) between male and female language use. She discusses the shift in thought and approach to gender differences in language from taboo to common knowledge. However, she challenges this "common knowledge" as a myth, a common misconception to a certain degree. She calls it the "myth of Mars and Venus." To summarize the stereotypes she's talking about, women excel at verbal communication and empathy, and have better language skills overall. Alternatively, men deal better with spacial concepts and are a gender of actions rather than words, and have a firmer grasp of complex systems.

It is often thought that women talk more (possibly too much), but upon closer inspection Deborah Cameron found that the opposite may indeed be true, but the matter of "who talks more" is really a matter of circumstance instead of an overarching gender difference that's ingrained from birth.

Are these stereotypes self-propegating? As Cameron puts it,"Psychologists have found in experimental studies that when interpreting situations people typically pay most attention to things that match their expectations, and often fail to register counter-examples." So if a study participant is asked to recall all the instances of the loquacity of women, they'll more readily classify women as more talkative and negate the experiences where men have been the more talkative sex.

Do these stereotypes have some basis in reality? As Cameron mentions, it has been shown that the person who talks more in a conversation is generally the person who has a higher rank, or is a greater authority on the topic at hand. So women might indeed talk more if the topic of conversation is pregnancy, for example.

To the questions at the beginning of this post, it seems absurd to try to make such broad classifications. For every woman exemplifying some stereotype of language usage, there are also men who share the same characteristics. Language, it turns out, is not a hugely significant sex difference, especially compared to some of the other sex differences which have indeed been proven quite thoroughly (like throwing ability, for example).

This is an exciting topic within language study, and I think it's important to keep an open mind about it in order to keep the discussion moving and uninhibited. It's a great opportunity to be in a stage in history where people are uncertain about such things, as opposed to the fifties where stereotypes were the rule, or slightly earlier in history when saying that there were ANY significant differences between men and women were taboo.

body language, and many other interesting links

http://mediamatters.org/items/200709250011?f=h_topic

This article got me started on a long path of exploration lasting the better part of the last hour. I also liked it because it had a convenient video to accompany it. It's from a segment of The O'Riley Factor with a body language expert analyzing Hillary Clinton's interview. It led me to a many questions: what evolutionary forces have given rise to "body language" or "kinesics" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics)? What are the good and bad implications of the fact that most all of us consciously AND unconsciously display things about our states of mind? And more practically, what are some of the body language cues that I might be able to pick up on and what do they mean?

An interesting paper (http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/awconlang.html) gave a quick answer to the first question. Dr. Charlton states that it was our ape ancestors who first communicated largely through facial expressions and gestures, so perhaps our body language is a reminant of simpler times before complex language. (Also, something I randomly picked up from his paper was the uniqueness of human language in its displacement abilities.)

The second and third questions blended together a bit as I perused wikipedia articles on the subject of nonverbal communication, and checked one of the original sources cited (http://www.gcastrategies.com/books_articles/article_06_11.php), an interesting article aimed at some sort of governmental communicator it seems. I think there's a lot to be said for nonverbal communication and maybe I'd take a class on it in the future. It seems it would give one an edge on anybody who isn't trained in such matters.

A couple tidbits from the most recently cited article:

"Body language is a product of both genetic and environmental influences. Blind children will smile and laugh even though they have never seen a smile."
This seems to be the typical answer to questions of nature vs. nurture within psychology; I suppose it only follows reason that it would apply here as well.

"the idea of mirroring body language to put people at ease is commonly used in interviews. It sets the person being interviewed at ease. Mirroring the body language of someone else indicates that they are understood."
This is simply an example of one type of body language, what it expresses, and how it might be applied. I find these things very interesting, but I understand there must be some limits to what one can infer from nonverbal communication alone.

All this talk of body language begs the question of what email, im, and blogs are all doing to human communication, and the rise of : ) : ( ; ) and ~~^~<@ (a rose)... But that's something entirely different.

This link (same as a previous one) discusses some specific body language communications and what they imply:
http://www.gcastrategies.com/books_articles/article_06_11.php



A few other links I don't have time to blog fully about, yet still found interesting follow

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/30/news/edsafire.php
Language: Translating the lingo of adultaescence.
This one was particularly interesting seeing as I would qualify as one of these people, propagating this alternative vocabulary, yet there are still some of these expressions that I'm not familiar with. Why not? How am I different from "my generation" which is inventing these things. Perhaps some discussion in class might be in order...

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/irish-language-glue-for-our-new-nation-1092836.html
Language as a political tool to unify the people of Ireland.

http://www.hindu.com/2007/09/25/stories/2007092550830200.htm
The measure of how well a language will do these days is how adaptable it is to technology.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2189820,00.html
After reading the Language Instinct and learning how incredibly sponge-like children are in their ability to learn language, it's definitely a very indicative sign of abuse if your children can't even speak beyond a baby's level (at least in the absence of learning deficiencies.) Also, an interesting line: "when they were offered McDonald's food by social workers, they did not know what it was" It's notable that McDonald's food is the measure of being part of society.

http://www.startribune.com/west/story/1440921.html
The changing face of education, especially how languages are taught. Upsides and downsides of computers as language teachers?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/09/25/entertainment/e122915D48.DTL
Shakespeare is absolutely filthy, and we can't appreciate it!

Finally, let me say that it's very enjoyable to have a homework assignment that's open-ended, educational (not necessarily simple practice), and very engaging.

Why I'm in this Class

Hi, I'm Steven. I've taken Spanish for many years, and I'm pretty much fluent. I love traveling so I've been exposed to many more languages as well. I've loved psychology for a long time, and ever since I read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker I've taken a particular affinity to language. I love language learning, language use, so this course jumped out at me as just about perfect. I plan to major in psychology and I'm interested in doing research, perhaps with professor Fernald and her child language development lab. I'm also interested in the rhetoric aspect of this course, and how different institutions develop their approach to specific words to influence others. The "prune" example was a good example of this.

My Map

create your own visited country map

Testing Things Out

Because I don't have the assignment right in front of me, I'm just going to do a quick test blog to see how it shows up.