Learning languages was easy when I was a tot. I have three ‘native tongues’. For the most part, they don’t interfere with each other. As an adult, learning a new language has been difficult. I’ve tried two thus far – I estimate I have the competency and speed of a six-year old kid in both cases – while my vocabulary is probably a little larger than a typical kindergartener, my listening comprehension isn’t great especially when something is said with great speed. Why, oh why, was it so much easier to learn a language as a tot?
An intriguing answer comes from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species. In Chapter 4 (“Outside the Brain”), Deacon suggests that language has evolved to best adapt to our brain development at the immature age of toddlers! Previously, if you had asked me why humans have language, I would say our brains evolved to accommodate language. That’s still partially true, but as Deacon argues, languages evolve faster than brains so it’s much more likely that once rudimentary language developed, that it was the languages doing more of the adapting. I suspect he’s right.
Instead of Chomsky’s view that “the source of prior support for language acquisition must originate from inside the brain”, Deacon argues that the support comes from outside brains and resides in language itself. The analogy he provides is the evolution of desktop microcomputers from being command-line DOS-based to the Windows-based systems we are familiar with in today’s Macs and PCs. Why the adaptation? To be more user-friendly! Who wants to remember lists of commands and read manuals when you can intuitively point-and-click? The same is true for coding. We do object-oriented programming instead of old-school assembly language (which I attempted to teach myself and mostly failed). And modern ‘smart’ phones are designed to be intuitive, although admittedly I fail to intuit some things and it reminds me that I have become an old fogey.
So, how do tots learn language? Certainly not the way I have systematically tried to learn languages as an adult with the help of Duo, the green owl. Deacon argues that “it is discovered, though not by introspection of rules already available in the brain. On the surface, it simply appears that children have an uncanny ability to make ‘lucky guesses’ about grammar and syntax… this appearance of lucky coincidence accurately captures what happens, though it is not luck that is responsible.” Deacon thinks that “language regularities are not just any set of associations… [but] arranged so that [tots’] intuitive guesses are more likely to work.”
If you didn’t buy the above argument, I recommend reading the entire chapter of Deacon’s book. He has more examples and analogies, and I find his arguments compelling. To boil it down: “Languages are under powerful selection pressure to fit children’s likely guesses, because children are the vehicle by which a language gets reproduced. Languages have had to adapt to children’s spontaneous assumptions about communication, learning, social interaction, and even symbolic reference, because children are the only game in town.”
Deacon’s view provides, in my opinion, a better explanation for what previously seemed idiosyncratic about languages. Our computer-designed languages which are math-like or machine-lie and not like natural languages which seem organism-like. Therefore, argues Deacon, “the proper tool for analyzing language structure may not be to discover how best to model them as axiomatic rule systems but rather to study them the way we study organism structure: in evolutionary terms. The structure of a language is under intense selection because in its reproduction from generation to generation, it must pass through a narrow bottleneck: children’s minds.”
When I first started learning chemistry, it made no sense to me whatsoever. At some point, something clicked. I can’t explain it. Actually, it was likely a series of gestalt moments separated in time rather than one glorious illumination. When I teach chemistry, I attempt to pre-digest some bits for my students, help nudge them to focus on what I think are the key aspects, and build up their chemical intuition through many examples. How effective is all this? Honestly, I don’t know, although I think I’m getting better at it with practice. There is a method to the madness. Could tots learn chemistry just like they learn language? Unfortunately, there’s no evolutionary advantage to knowing chemistry, and so I expect one has to slog through the hard work. Learning how to read and write. Learning math. Learning chemistry. All these biologically secondary aspects of education won’t materialize as knowledge in our brains in a gestalt swoop. The slog is necessary.
Deacon provides a very interesting vignette about Kanzi, a bonobo who demonstrated significant ability to understand human language – not just at an associative level but by manipulating (lexigram) symbols. But what made Kanzi so adept might be the early exposure as a bonobo-tot literally hanging around. The researchers were trying to teach Kanzi’s mother with not much success, and were amazed that when Kanzi was older (and able to focus without being so easily distractable), he showed tremendous abilities. Deacon thinks there’s something about the immature still-developing brain that is particularly amenable to language-learning. I can’t tell you what it is yet, because I’m only a third of the way through Deacon’s book, but forgetting might also be important in learning. Parts of it are a slog but there are golden nuggets! And it’s making me think a lot about the brain, learning, and teaching!
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