Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 277

 

 Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language," by Christine Kenneally.

When you access the vast global network of computers we call the Internet, you can travel the world, find information, and interact with people in a way that was never before possible. The creation of the net was an awesome leap in technological evolution. Yet for all that it offers, it is the merest shadow of something much larger and much older. Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.

 

The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.



These findings suggest that gesture doesn’t simply precede language but is fundamentally tied to it.11 In fact gesture and speech are so integral to each other in children that researchers are able to predict a child’s language ability at three years of age based on its gesturing at one year. They can also diagnose delays or problems that children might be having with language by examining their gestures.

For a long time the trend was to regard infants, much like animals, as mute and unthinking. Until they learned their first few words, it was thought that not a lot was going on inside their heads. And certainly, if you removed gesture from the language acquisition picture, children did seem eventually to pull language out of thin air. But when you take gesture into account, you can see the preliminary scaffolding of language even before a child has spoken a word, and the acquisition of language, while still incredible, looks a little less mysterious. 

Developmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as imperfect speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time.



The beginning of speech is found in the babbling of babies. At about five months children start to make their first speech sounds. Researchers say that when babies babble, they produce all the possible sounds of all human languages, randomly generating phonemes from Japanese to English to Swahili. As children learn the language of their parents, they narrow their sound repertoire to fit the model to which they are exposed. They begin to produce not just the sound of their native language but also its classic intonation patterns. Children lose their polymath talents so effectively that they ultimately become unable to produce some language sounds. (Think about the difficulty Japanese speakers have pronouncing English l and r.)