The Power of Words
Communication and language are not always synonymous. Gesticulations and facial expression can convey certain messages that often make verbal expression unnecessary. Although I appreciate the endless possibilities that are associated with speaking, our primary means of communication, I have discovered that the human capacity for speech might not be as extremely innate as the linguist Noam Chomsky claimed. A few years ago, I had the privilege of encountering a thirty-five year-old woman named Joann at a summer camp for adults with multiple disabilities. Being extremely autistic, Joann was unable to close her mouth, let alone form distinguishable words. Instead of talking, her principal method of communication was to make clicks and guttural noises when she was upset or wanted something. Unlike the case of Genie, who was reared in a small room without human contact, Joann and many other autistic people are not raised in silence and should have theoretically learned to talk (as per Chomsky's theory). The camp counselors encouraged Joann's attempts at speech and tried to build her verbal skills, but they were never able to progress beyond monosyllabic words. Why wasn't she able to speak and why did they fail?
To a certain extent, language is innate, but Daniel Dennett trivialized the depth and complexity of linguistics. He wrote, "...it's so effortless...for even 'slow' children to learn to speak. They aren't really learning at all, any more than birds learn their feathers. Language, and feathers, just develop in species..." (Dennett 388). This generalization is horribly arrogant and unfair to people like Joann, for whom any form of verbal communication is hardly 'effortless.' I think that some form of learn...
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...heoretically could be speaking or trying to covey some message when she makes those utterances, as if she had completely bypassed the evolution of clicks into words.
It has been suggested by psychologists that there is a "critical period" for language acquisition which theorizes that children lose the capacity to readily absorb new languages by the end of their toddler years. The fact that children are able to learn new languages so quickly shows that to some extent, language is innate, but speech is not acquired so easily. Joann will probably never be able to speak like other people, but there exists the possibility of her understanding much more than Dennett would give her credit for.
Works Cited:
Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1995.
Pennisi, Elizabeth. "The First Language?" Science 27 Feb. 2004: 1319-1320.
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Lee Dugard is an autobiography recounting the chilling memories that make up the author’s past. She abducted when she was eleven years old by a man named Phillip Garrido with the help of his wife Nancy. “I was kept in a backyard and not allowed to say my own name,” (Dugard ix). She began her life relatively normally. She had a wonderful loving mother, a beautiful baby sister,, and some really good friends at school. Her outlook on life was bright until June 10th, 1991, the day of her abduction. The story was published a little while after her liberation from the backyard nightmare. She attended multiple therapy sessions to help her cope before she had the courage to share her amazing story. For example she says, “My growth has not been an overnight phenomenon…it has slowly and surely come about,” (D 261). She finally began to put the pieces of her life back together and decided to go a leap further and reach out to other families in similar situations. She has founded the J A Y C Foundation or Just Ask Yourself to Care. One of her goals was, amazingly, to ensure that other families have the help that they need. Another motive for writing the book may have also been to become a concrete form of closure for Miss Dugard and her family. It shows her amazing recovery while also retelling of all of the hardships she had to endure and overcome. She also writes the memoir in a very powerful and curious way. She writes with very simple language and sentence structures. This becomes a constant reminder for the reader that she was a very young girl when she was taken. She was stripped of the knowledge many people take for granted. She writes for her last level of education. She also describes all of the even...
African Americans are still facing segregation today that was thought to have ended many years ago. Brown v. Board of Education declared the decision of having separate schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. As Brown v. Board of Education launches its case, we see how it sets the infrastructure to end racial segregation in all public spaces. Today, Brown v. Board of Education has made changes to our educational system and democracy, but hasn’t succeeded to end racial segregation due to the cases still being seen today. Brown v. Board of Education to this day remains one of the most important cases that African Americans have brought to the surface for the good of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education didn’t just focus on children and education, it also focused on how important equality is even when society claimed that African Americans were treated equal, when they weren’t. This was the case that opened the eyes of many American’s to notice that the separate but equal strategy was in fact unlawful.
When most people think of the process of language development in “normal” children, the concepts that come to mind are of babies imitating, picking up sounds and words from the speakers around them. Trying to imagine that a child who cannot hear one single sound a person makes can learn to speak a language is absolutely fascinating. These children range from amazin...
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On the nature side of the debate, every baby cried when they were trying to communicate to their caregiver. Crying is universal because it is the only way that babies can alert their caregiver that something is wrong. Furthermore, each baby cooed, babbled, and cried without prompting. Ponijao babbles when her mother pats her on the back because she likes the sound it makes. Bayar’s brother keeps putting a strip of fabric in his face, making him cry out of annoyance. Mari babbles and has a “conversation” with another baby on one of her visits to the park. Hattie also starts saying syllables on her own. However, nurture plays a huge role in language development as well. Each baby was read to, spoken to, sung to, or a mixture of the former. Without prompting from his mother, Bayar would not be able to copy the sounds that she makes to try to get him to speak. Hattie can say “no” and “uh oh”, which are English phrases. Her parents would have taught her how to say those words. In fact, her mother reads to her, and she imitates the sounds her mother makes while reading. This proves that without both heredity and environment, language would never develop in an infant. They need to have an inborn ability to quickly and easily learn vocabulary and grammar during the critical periods, but they also need to hear and interact with language in their
In the first years of life children transcend from infancy, in which they cannot speak nor comprehend language, to age four in which they begin to be able to express themselves in their own language (Hoff, 2006). Overall, the language acquisition process has the same endpoint for all capable children. The only difference in the language acquisition process between children is the different languages they learn, which is completely dependent upon the language the child hears. If the child were to only hear Klingon, the child would in theory learn Klingon, but the child would later reject this language because of the lack of acceptance of the fictional language in society (Clark, 1987). The first process of acquiring language is known as phonological development. In natural lan...
The consensus belief is that the capacity for language is innate, while others believe its environmental variables play a deciding role. In the end, it boils down to the nature versus nurture debate. Does the environment we are exposed to or our genetics’ play a larger role?
Nearly every member of the human race learns a language or more to the degree of proficiency only in the first few years of life. How children achieve this astonishing skill in such little time sparks controversial debates among linguists, psychologists, and scientists throughout centuries. Some believe that language is an innate ability possessed by all human beings due to the remarkable function of the brain while others maintain that language is learned from childhood experience. However, many are beginning to realize that nature and nurture go hand-in-hand when explaining how children develop their language(s). Despite the claims that language is either pre-learned or environmentally learned alone, the combination of both genes
... proposes LAD as the innate mental mechanism that makes language acquisition possible. Chomsky's linguistic competence is the underlying knowledge that enables individuals to speak and understand their language. A native speaker has access to knowledge about the structure of his language which guides him in his language use. Second, Chomsky distinguished linguistic knowledge from language performance which is the use of language in a particular social context. Third, a child must acquire linguistic competence in order to be able to use language successfully. Forth, also he suggested universals of language which is languages share certain features. Fifth, also he suggested a critical period for language acquisition which is by the age of five children acquire almost the structure of their language. Elliot, J. A. (1981). Child Language . Cambridge University Press.
Imitation is involved to some extent, of course, but the early words and sentences that children produce show that they are not simply imitating adult speech. Since there is an infinite number of potential sentences implied, children’s complex and creative utterances cannot be explained by a passive response to the language of the environment. In addition, imitation cannot account for common child language mistakes, which are highly unlikely to be failed imitations of what adults would say (Cattell, 2000).
According to Chomsky the children have a sort of natural and innate predisposition for acquiring the language and they own this ability from when they are born. This peculiarity distinguishes us and them from the other animals. Children do not copy the language they hear, but they learn a repertoire of infinite sentences.