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« Boooooks: October 2012 | Main | Boooooks: December 2012 » BoooooksLanguage and the brain Bear with me on this. I'm quoting at length from Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, a book that i highly recommend to lay people interested in human development (Diamond also wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, another book i recommend). But the subject of language often comes up in conversation and i wanted this as a reference for people too ... As for grammar, early-stage pidgin discourse typically consists of short strings of words with little phrase construction, no regularity in word order , no subordinate clauses, and no inflection endings on words. Along with that impoverishment, variability of speech within and between individuals is a hallmark of early-stage pidgins, which approximate an anarchic linguistic free-for-all. ...pidgins evolve rapidly into creoles whenever a generation of the groups contributing to a pidgin begins to adopt the pidgin itself as the native language... Compared to pidgins, creoles have a larger vocabulary, much more complex grammar, and consistency within and between individuals. Creoles can express virtually any thought expressively in a normal language, whereas trying to say anything even slightly complex is a desperate struggle in pidgin. Somehow, without any equivalent of the Academie Fancaise to lay down explicit rules, a pidgin expands and stabilizes to become a uniform and fuller language. ...What is striking is that the linguistic outcomes of all these independent natural experiments share so many similarities, both in what they lack and in what they possess. On the negative side, creoles are simpler than normal languages in mostly lacking conjugations of verbs for tense and person, declensions of nouns for case and number, most prepositions, and agreement of words for gender. On the positive side, creoles are advanced over pidgins in many respect: consistent word order, singular and plural pronouns for the first, second, and third person, relative clauses [etc.]... The factors responsible for this remarkable convergence are still controversial amongst linguists... The interpretation I find most convincing is that of linguist Derek Bickerton, who views many of the similarities among creoles as resulting from our possessing a genetic blueprint for language... These similarities among creoles seem likely to stem from a genetic blueprint that the human brain possesses for learning language during childhood. Such a blueprint has been widely assumed ever since the linguist Noam Chomsky argued that the structure of human language is far too complex for a child to learn within just a few years, in the absence of any hard-wired instructions. ...Such difficulties convinced Chomsky that children learning their first language would face an impossible task unless much of language's structure was already preprogrammed into them. Chomsky concluded that we are born with a "universal grammar" already wired into our brains to give us a spectrum of grammatical models encompassing the range of grammars in actual languages. This prewired universal grammar would be like a set of switches, each with various alternative positions. The switch positions would then become fixed to match the grammar of the local language that the growing child hears. However, Bickerton goes further than Chomsky and concludes that we are preprogrammed not just to a universal grammar with adjustable switches, but to a particular set of switch settings: the settings that surface again and again in creole grammars. The preprogrammed settings can be overridden if they turn out to conflict with what a child hears in the local language around it... If Bickerton is correct that we really are preprogrammed at birth with creole settings that can be overridden by later experience, then one would expect children to learn creolelike features of their local languages earlier and more easily than features conflicting with creole grammar. This reasoning might explain the notorious difficulty of English-speaking children in learning how to express negatives: they insist on creolelike double negatives such as "Nobody don't have this." The same reasoning could explain the difficulties of English-speaking children with word order in questions. To pursue this latter example, English happens to be among the languages that uses the creloe order of subject, verb, and object for statement: for instance, "I want juice." Many languages, including creoles, preserve this word order in questions, which are merely distinguished by an altered tone of voice ("You want juice?"). However, the English language does not treat questions in this way. Instead, our questions deviate from creole word order by inverting the subject and verb ("Where are you?," not "You are where?"), or by placing the subject between an auxiliary verb (such as "do") and the main verb ("Do you want juice?"). My wife and I have been barraging our sons from early infancy onward with grammatically correct English questions and statements. My sons quickly picked up the correct order for statements, but both of them are still persisting in the incorrect creolelike order for questions... It's as if they're still convinced that their preprogrammed creolelike rules are correct. A related topic is about raising kids to be multi-lingual. While you can derive theories from things quoted above, i'll also reference this Noam Chomsky interview with Forbes on Why Kids Learn Languages Easily, which is annoyingly audio-only, so i'll quote from an eHow article summarizing it: Total Acceptance I should note that (as with all science), Chomsky and Bickerton's theories have their detractors, and Diamond is what i'll call a "universal explainer", not a linguist. So don't take anything here as definitive fact. By fnord12 | November 26, 2012, 9:49 AM | Boooooks & Science | Link I know what you're thinking. Inconceivable! But just watch! Anybody who makes Princess Bride references can't be all bad. By min | November 14, 2012, 4:55 PM | Boooooks & Movies | Link |