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I am studying hard for this upcoming French test. So I won't be able to read and therefore write in here, for at least one more week.

"Mind Design"

The last chapter of Steven Pinker's "valuable" book; deals with how some of the major social sciences have based their recent theories on what Pinker has introduced as the brain's ability to produce language through an innate "mind design".

Margaret Mead, anthropologist and John Watson, psychologist are the two founders of the "Standard Social Science Model" (SSSM) which asserts that the human nature is changeable to different personalities through social upbringing. Pinker in fact sets forth a more coherent version of such model suggesting that at the beginning heredity builds an "innate psychological mechanisms" such as "learning mechanisms". Meanwhile the "environment" provides input for this hereditary innate system. The interface between the environment and these innate mechanisms results in the human behavior. It also helps humans develop skills and values and access the knowledge.

A recent alternative to SSSM is the "Integrated Causal Model" in which some psychologists or anthropologists embark on the evolution theory to form their own science-related hypothesis. For example, Tooby and Cosmides pioneered the "psychological foundations of culture". This "evolutionary psychology" announces the emergence of brain as a result of evolution. The brain in turn produces the psychological processes such as knowing and learning. These two developments in the human psyche lead to the acquisition of "values and knowledge" which make up a person's culture.

Computational linguists like Ray Jackendoff have used this substitute model to enhance this part of the language science.

Pinker believes that the "evolutional psychology" takes its lessons from human language. The psychology that is based on the evolution considers the existence of mental softwares for reasoning and perception and supposes that some "innate mechanism" involves that makes the learning happen when it works at cross-purposes through different modules each with provisions to learn in its own way. Like the languages, these mental mechanisms in turn have evolved from the "natural selection"; but not all aspects of mind are adaptations. The mind's adaptations are not necessarily beneficial in the evolutionary novel environments like the twenthieth-century cities.

Just like how the languages have spread among humans through the years; particular kinds of learning have contagiously spread in a community and the minds of people have become coordinated into shared patterns to form a certain culture.

Meta Culture is a Universal Pattern shared by all human beings. An example of an innate module is "folk biology" in which humans are believed to be born with basic intuitions about plants and animals. According to this module, stone-age people were both botanists and zoologists who had special instincts about living things that began early in life.

The question is how the difference in the biochemistry of people helps the natural selection and consequently the evolution?

The Language Evolution

The next chapter of Language Instinct is about how the language evolved. It sets forth questions answered in detail, through this part of the book. Pinker believes that language evolved gradually in what he calls "a sequence of intermediate forms" which were useful for its possessor's survival.

Who the first "grammar mutants" interacted with, What an intermediate form of language looks like, and how these intermediate language's evolution provided the survival means for the human being; are the three questions asked and answered by Pinker.

There are two possibilities for the answer to the first question:

1) The first men could have used their language instinct to communicate with the family members who inherited the same gene and instinct.

2) They could have talked with their neighbors who despite the lack of the "new fangled circuitry" understood them using the "overall intelligence". An example of the use of the mental ability and background knowledge to appreciate a language is when native speakers of English intuitively grasp the gist of the news on an Italian newspaper with the additional mercy of common words in both the languages.

The effort these neighbors took to decode the language of their cohabitants led to such ability being wired in their brains by the "natural selection".

The answer to the second question-the possible structure of an intermediate grammar-would be some kind of "grammar with intermediate complexity" in which for example"symbols would have a narrower range, rules would be less reliably applied or modules would have fewer rules". This language would look something like the"protolanguage of the chimps signing, pidgings, child language in the two-word stage, the language of immigrants and the unsuccessful partial language of Genie and other wolf-children learned after puberty".

Here, I came up with a question myself: If the intermediate language looks like the language of the immigrants and if the language evolves; does this mean that the spread of immigrants in a country and the use of their language is going to change or deteriorate the use of the native language of the country in which they live now? Or on another level is it possible that the desperate need to learn a second language for survival after the puberty change the "critical period" by "natural selection"? Later Pinker hints that living in the modern times and having everything needed for survival at hand, the humans have ceased to evolve by natural selection.

The author has found the way out of the third question by providing us with four reasons why the evolution of the human language is not as absurd as one might think:

1) We need to know that the small advantages will do for the natural selection to take place. For example a natural selection rule in a mouse that changes its size by one percent each generation will result in a mouse the size of an elephant by a few thousand generations. The author apparently fails to explain clearly how this works in the language evolution. Though, one might guess that a coined word or a change in a word order at a time would lead to what we see as language today.

2) Using the language to trade hard-won knowledge (biology, crafts, tools, ecology, animal and plants' behavior with kin and friends makes a big difference in conveying the "exact message" through more complex grammar. This conveyance of knowledge of the environment, tools, animals and so on serves as a fitness enhancer and therefor leads to better survival of the human race.

3) Using the language for "cooperative efforts for survival" like forming alliances and exchanging information and commitments could have led to its evolution. In Pinker words:"A cognitive arms race could propel a linguistic one." In other more clear words he explains: " There could easily have been a selection for any edge in the ability to frame an offer so that it appears to present maximal benefit and minimal cost to the negotiating partner and in the ability to see through such endeavors and to formulate attractive counter proposals."

4) According to the anthropologists the tribal chiefs were both "gifted orators" and "highly polygynous". They would have easily and effectively woven the language into the politics, economics, tech, family, sex and friendship which were the key roles in the "individual reproductive success.

Three final learnings

Yesterday I finished this book: How Languages Are Learned and here are the last pieces of information I learned from it:

1. That the best time to have my child srart learning a second language is around the age of 10 when (s)he has already improved gramatically in his/her first language. The question is considering that my husband and I speak persian as our first language living in a country where the first language of people is English; which language would be my child's first?
2. That teachers like parents tend to change the structure of their spoken language intuitively according to the progress their students make in learning the second language. To me, that was an interesting finding.
3. That when teaching a second language, especially in the immersion contexts, teacher's correction of students' errors in the form of "recasts" often is received unnoticed and as part of the conversation. So the teachers should grab the students' attention by indicating directly before the correction what they are going to do; like the following suggested interaction: "I understand what you say, but here is how you can say it better...".
   

Babies language and Grammar gene

At the beginning of the language instinct's chapter 9, one gets flabbergasted at the possibility of babies starting to talk right out of their mommies' wombs. But somehow the author leaves the matter unsolved after mentioning two or three such incidents reported in some magazines. He simply dismisses the possibility for some scientific reasons that are tied to how languages are learned by children. Through the rest of the chapter we are introduced to a clear sketch of different stages a child go through in his mission to develop what is already embedded in him as language instinct. Our assumptions about the true effects of motherese on helping the child fix his incorrect grammar are adjusted when the author puts forward the idea that motherese is useful insofar as it provides a two way collaboration in using the language helping the child develop his own language system. The child does this through a process of trial and error building up the language trees in his mind starting from simple branches. For this he needs to reach into his innate repertoire of grammar and use the most general forms in all languages. He would notice them by hearing his parents' speech. So correcting a child's language would show no effect unless the child realizes the underlying grammar through the aforementioned process.

When the assumption of the child language development processes is done with, the author turns our attention to an interesting evolutionary question:"Why is that the ability to learn the language fades away as one matures. The answer has to do with how the evolution theory works. The evolution premise chooses which benefits should stay with humans at what costs. For example the old age is the cost we pay for the benefit of youth. Likewise the ability to learn a language in an early age is the benefit we get (so we enjoy having the language for a longer time during our life span) at the cost of not being to speak a second language fluently at a later age.

In chapter 10, we get to learn which parts of the brain are involved in storing and producing the language so far as the science can say. It is interesting to know that all the tiniest parts of the language from the words, phonemes, sounds and so on each with their subgroups have different locations allocated to them in different parts of the brain. These locations that vary in different individuals are interconnected through a very organized network of neurons and synopses which act as paths for transferring language data. These paths get strengthened in the child's brain each time they are correctly used to convey a message through language. The language instinct containing the general language grammar guides the correct use of the language and therefore forms the correct paths. So contrary to the wrong assumption mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, there is no grammar gene making all that to happen, but a network of neurons and synopses reinforced through the use of correct grammar made possible by the language instinct.

This hypothetical sophisticated circuitry and its highly organized utility explained by Pinker has hugely contributed to my quest on how languages are learned. Although it might not be true for second language learning, at least it gives me some understanding as how the brain might also work in the case of SLL. So if before I suspected that the memory does all the job, now I have a wider perspective thanks to Pinker.

As far as genes are concerned, we know with a high probability that some genes interfere with the language "circuitry" and its function in brain and produce Specific Language Impairments (SLI). The linguists say so, because they find no environmental evidence to affect the patients with SLI.

Having read these two chapters I have found myself curious to know more about the effect of evolution on language learning ability. As well I would like to follow more closely any scientific advances made on the neorolinguistics.

A look at the past

Principles of Language Learning and Teaching by H. Douglas Brown



This was the book I read thoroughly once I was getting my EFL certificate from Cavendish College of England. Now I would like to re-read parts of it to help me in writing my own book.

The three phenomena in effect

The author in Chapter 8 (The Tower of Babel) goes on, in three consecutive parts to elaborate on the three major factors (learning, innovation and migration) responsible for the variations of the language throughout the world despite the conviction that there is one innate language all the others drive from. Somehow the author manages to explain the third phenomenon in more irrelevant or unnecessary details than is either fathomable or memorable by the average mind. In my opinion he fails to present more scientific facts to support or elucidate the two others which deserve more attention. Or simply they are more fascinating phenomena than the third one in my mind's eye. I might try to find other sources either from the back of the book or the internet to follow up on them.

The learning trend declares that only some parts of a certain grammar would become innate through the human evolution and the rest remain to be learned by the children born into those languages through interactions with the community and it is even learned within a community itself when some inventions or use of a natural thingamabob requires them to invent a word as well. Another reason for not having the whole codes of language innately placed in our brains is that the language by nature is a sharing code event within people. It according to the author is useless to be possessed by only one person and it will soon "fall out of register with everyone else's". "It would be like a Tango for one", Pinker says.

Anyhow, it still somehow falls short of my clearest comprehension. I need to read more on this one.

The innovation experience is even more intriguing and although more explained than the first one, some details of it still evades my understanding. Perhaps I need to read it or explore it more , too.

To put it simply this event initially happens when some language speaker "starts to speak differently" and then it spreads like a contagious incident. The change in speech can happen for a variety of reasons: a word coined, a borrowed term, a stretch in meaning, new jargon or styles that seemed too cool to let go of and gradually penetrated the "mainstream". Language innovation also happens for a more fascinating reason as the author professes: it can occur when a person's brain "reanalyzes" part of a language he mishears or is vague or incomplete. In doing so, he produces something quite new. This trend can be established in different linguistic context: syntactic, phonological, morphological and so on. (P.243-246)

The third phenomenon relates to the history of languages' origin which is not fully solved or explored and has resulted in controversial theories. It also contains the issue of language families which in turn are not fully discovered. This third factor or the way it was explored by the author did not quite charm me. It was either the long display of unfamiliar linguistic terms or the undeveloped and contentious research on the families of the language and their origin that made me lose interest. However, the alarming notion of some languages' extinction due to our modern ways of life, migration and extinction of some ancient cultures is what to which Pinker succeeds to draw the attention.

What if only one language remains at the end?

Should we intervene in the process of language extinction?

What if the natives of such languages don't want the intervention?

What happens to all that literature and language produced?

There is some hope, Pinker confesses: We could still record it. We could produce instructional material in those languages. This seems inadequate to me, as the author himself in a preceding paragraph declares that only children born to those languages can save them from elimination. With the facts above, we can say that children probably can save the oral part of the language more thoroughly.

Languages and Mammals!

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

I can't help but wowing each time I read this book. The range, the depth, the exactness, the details and finally the clarity with which the author describes the languages just goes beyond imagination. Or maybe what fascinates me is the real dimensions of this phenomenon called "language" which unfolds itself by each explanation, comparison or intuition.

In the chapter called: "The Tower of Babel" (p.238-239), he most admirably and point to pointedly compares the diversity of languages to the diversity of mammals as a sub-specie descendants of animals. There is one and only one universal language from which all the other languages of the world come from. The grammar of this universal language is innately curved into our brains and is what we call the language instinct. Just as the mammals have a number of unchangeable shared characteristics among them, so do the languages.They all have subjects, verbs, objects; they all possess derivatives (to form new words) and inflections (to fit a word into its role in a sentence); they all deal with flexible and non-flexible word positions in a sentence and so on and so forth.

Through the centuries as the humans evolve (Darwinism), so do the languages of the world, getting its stamina or substance from three phenomena:innovation, learning and immigration. People of different cultures most strongly identify themselves with the language they speak. They evolve and they make the language evolve accordingly.

WOw...

Some hope and hints

What I failed to mention in my previous post was my conclusion to one of the second language theories cited in the book. My reckoning could be auspicious for non native teachers of the second language ( NNS). According to the interactionist theory, one of the recent psychological ones; second language learners advance in levels of a language more effectively by interacting with those who are more knowledgable than them. This is where the theory of the "zone of proximal developement" by Vygotsky comes to attention.(P.44) This very theory coupled with the interactionist position entice me to resolve that the NNS teachers, contarary to the general belief, can be and are the reliable candidates for instructiong SLLs (Second Language Learners). They can simply be considered as more knowledgable interlocutors- the critical part to the efficiency of this theory. This, however, cannot overlook the other positive aspects of having a NNS teacher, like self-experience, sympathy, structural knowledge and so forth.

On the whole I beleive that a native speaker becomes eligible to be compared to an NNS teacher in other aspects of teaching, only if he has acquired at least a second language and is knowledgable in the structure of the language he is teaching (It is anecdotal that some native speakers of the language due to the lack of grammatical studies of the language, are ignorant of the grammar rules and therefore not neccessarily suitable for teaching their native language.). Otherwise, an NNS teacher is no less than a native one.

Other valuable material in this book for me is the areas of study which the authors claim have not been yet fully explored. These reports can be a source for me to start my own research in the future:

As stated by the authors, although much has been done on the expansion of the learning style assessment instruments; far less research has studied the interaction between different learning styles and success in SLA. (P. 58)

Also, little research investigates the effect of learners' choice of strategy on how successful they would be in learning. The authors though emphasise that a non-flexibale belief in a certain startegy is detrimental to the process of learning. They suggest that teachers showcase an array of strategies and encourage the students to use them along with their self-chosen ones. This point was especially valuable to me to make sure I provide a variety of strategies in my book for the teachers of a second language. Because personally I believe that taking advantage of as many sources as available is the key to successful learning. (P. 59)

And prolonging my learning process, here are the other points I found worth knowing:

*The differences in aptitude of SLLs and their effect on second language learning has cuased the educators to introduce the special programms for the learners of French in Canadian schools in which different apptitudes are treated by their accordingly designed programms. This, although not financially possible for every school, can give a hint to the teachers to consider varying their teaching strategies and their classroom activities to cover the range of aptitudes in their classes. (P.54)

**"...early intensive exposure to the second language" as said by the authors may result in the "loss or incomplete development of the child's first language." (P.68) Mothers! Be aware!

And over to my final analysis and wondering:

In the section dedicated to the effect of age in SLA, extensive research (including that of Johnson and Newport 1989) shows that the learners of English who started their learning at a relatively young age of 10 to 15 have shown significant success compared to those who started it at an older age. What these reaserches neglect,and in my eyes are very substantial is the decision for determining the starting point of the process of learning. In these studies they have completely ignored the amount of English to which the candidates were already exposed before entering the United States. They assume that the learning have simply been started as they have entered the United States as immigrants.

Another thing that makes me wonder is that I think the effect of four to five years of study in an exclusively English environmnet like that of a high school is also ignored in these researches. (P.64)

The elephant in the dark

How Languages Are Learned by Patsy Lightbown

It is mainly an academic book and useful to have a quick brush up on theories of language learning as it does not go much into the details but provides excellent list of books on the areas mentioned for further reading.

So I only needed to know the theories of the second language learning for two reasons:
1) For my own curiosity as a second and third language learner and 2)To have a better idea and plan for how I want my book to look like. It definitely would not look like any thing like these sort of books. It would be mostly about my experience as a learner peppered with some relevant theories. So I started reading it from page 38 after having reviewed the first part through the list of the contents.

As I was reading the different theories, it sounded like all the theoreticians were standing in the same dark room with an elephant, each touching and discovering one part of it using their intuition. Being a successful language learner myself, I could clearly see the significance of each of these theories in my learning.

Friends-making with dry subjects

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Finally got the chance to put the link of the book here. It seems Pinker is in a mission to make the dry parts of the language science, like syntax, morphology and phonology juicier in three consecutive chapters (4,5,6).

As an NNS (non-native speaker) the word "cognoscenti" has captured my attention;so has the word: "curmudgeonly". I love encountering interesting words like these. Still I wonder if the native speakers can pronounce the first one correctly? Most probably yes.

I wonder how a second language learner's brain works around the rules of morphemes and sound production. I need to find some literature on that. I am so inquisitive about it.

Mentalese

I forgot to squeeze in the two fundamental attributes of Mentalese: one is that the language it produces is arbitrary and the words in the language have no connection whatsoever to their underlying meaning. (We drive in the parkway and we park in the driveway.)

The other specification of Mentalese is that it can produce meaningful sentences containing infinite number of words.

An outsider's conclusion

Two days a go, I read this research paper called: "How can SLA researchers contribute to teacher's practice?"
by Julie Kerekes.* She had done a thorough action research during which she had observed, taught and questioned some 12 American teachers within a specific time frame.

Although initially she mentions that ESL teachers due to their extensive experience in the field, tend to be non-responsive to the SLA researchers' attempt to tell them how to teach; she finds out at the end that her action research has resulted to some if not overwhelming changes in the attitudes of teachers in her study towards SLA and subcequently their teaching.

She also mentions that ESL teachers due to their heavy workload are not able to study the new SLA researches on their own. So this coupled with the fact cited above about their unwillingness to learn through SLA researchers; makes me think of an alternative solution. If some experienced ESL teachers will be given some incentives like a raise in Salary and a reduction of the course load; then they would be able to devote their time to studying the SLA researches and match them with their experience and produce lesson plans and unit plans for teachers to use in their ESL classes. I wonder if such jobs already exist in let's say ministry of Education or Ontario College of teachers.

* From: "Research and Practice in Language Teacher Education: Voices from the field"; University of Minnesota

The language instinct 1

Wow , I had never thought I would blog about this. It is only recently that I have decided to do so. I felt I need to register my insights from my linguistics readings somewhere. I thought talking about a science should be done in the language of science; since the language itself as Pinker (1994) has prophesied is considered beginning to "submit"to this phenomenon.

Currently I am reading "The language Instinct"by Steven Pinker. I finished chapter four last night.

The feeling I get after finishing each chapter is one of astonishment and awe-struck and it is more due to the awe-inspiring topic (language) than to Mr. Pinker's style of writing. I know I am not much better.

It seems to me that in each chapter he has a brief introduction after which he starts throwing in a bunch of seemingly unrelated ideas which makes the text hard to follow. Then finally, after pages of trailing breathlessly, you stumble over the conclusion explained in a clear language.

He starts his book by sketching a not complete but fathomable picture of what Chomsky has said before, on the Universal Grammar as a system on which all the languages of the world are based. Then in chapter two he goes on, amid interesting and funny examples, to profess that language is an instinct.

In chapter three, it was interesting to me that I could come up with the same conclusion plus a question that was raised after reading his.

He had invented the term "Mentalese" as the underlying language system in the brains of all human beings. Initially I guessed the same thing as I was monitoring him. The Mentalese is a language system installed in human brain since birth. This system allows the children to produce language even if they have not been exposed to one or in case of pidgin languages, to improve them into more structured and understandable ones.

What remains as a question to me is the possibility of producing new languages by placing children in a controlled environment where they are only exposed to a certain predetermined factors. My idea is extremely raw. I know. I can't argue the moral aspects of it either. At this point it is more of an intellectual retailing of my mind that might or might not go anywhere. After all I am only beginning to develop a researcher's mind.

And finally, what amazes me in chapter four is the universal grammar, anatomized in an understandable language which makes me like syntax as a linguistics subject.

In one part he proves that the function words form their own "closed club" that makes it impossible for people to generate new ones. That's why the attempts to produce "gender-neutral" pronouns ("hesh, thon",etc) have failed. This prompts my second muse: If this is true; then considering the existence of Mentalese; it must be a sexist language system. But then what about the languages without such gender-distinct pronouns? Is our mind sexist?
Maybe children being raised in such languages environments, not hearning them at all, will dismiss this part of predetermined grammar in their minds.

To be continued...