From: markodegard@...
Message: 256
Date: 1999-11-13
"ivanovas/milatos" <ivanova-@...> wrote:
Mark wrote:
Without real language, you cannot exchange information except by physically showing someone else what it is you want to tell them. With language, you can tell your grandchildren what your grandmother told you her grandmother said about food and water sources at some distance. With language, you can discuss hunting and gathering strategies
I think there is one important addition to this. My husband - as a doctor and psychotherapist - has been working in the field of reception-theory lately and made me aware of some important facts in the theories of language acquisition (basically by Neurologists and Neurophysiologists). From working with deaf and aphasic people they learnt that language and thinking are connected in a very basic way. Someone who is deaf and hasn't learnt any language
German AltaVista English "ist außers 6;ande, die Ei&# 103;enschaft od 1;r Handlungen vom aktuell&# 101;n Gegenstand z&# 117; abstrahiere ;n, also abst 4;akte Begriff e zu bilden und die Phän&# 111;mene der Au 3;enwelt mit H ilfe der dur& #99;h die Sprache geli 01;ferten abstr ;akten Signal&# 101; zu systema 6;isieren; den ;n diese Signal&# 101; sind der v 5;suell oder p ;raktisch erw& #111;rbenen Erfa 4;rung nicht von Na 6;ur aus eigen " (cf. Lurija& #47;Judowitsch, ;Die Funktion& #32;der Sprache in d 1;r geistigen ;Entwicklung & #100;es Kindes, F ;rankfurt 198 0;, in: Oliver Sacks: ; Stumme Stim&# 109;en, Reinbek 1997, p. 73). "is unable to abstract the characteristic or actions of the current article to thus form abstract terms and to systematize the phenomena of the external world with the help of the abstract signals supplied by the language; because these signals are that visually or practically acquired experience not from nature own" (cf. Lurija/Judowitsch, the function of the language in the mental development of the child, Frankfurt 1982, in: Olive bag: Mute voices, Reinbek 1997, p. 73). The fact that without language there is no abstract thought shows us that not only, as Mark said, there was no communication about facts and realities, but there wasn't even any kind of conceptual perception of these realities before there was language. Deaf people without language also have no realization of future or past, they can't conceptualize their reality (cf. Sacks p. 68), even if they are intelligent (that's why they are often treated as dumb: they can't express their intellect until they learn to 'speak' - meaning gesture-languages, too.)
This is for me the best proof why speaking individuals developed so much better: speaking gave their best tool, their brain, the ability to form abstract concepts and with that only founded the possibility to tell each other about the things Mark wrote about (possibilities for food, places, options, dangers, futures).
Who doesn't speak, doesn't make plans and doesn't have a future.
Sabine
What Sabine says is somewhat controversial, mostly because the (sighted) subjects on which such observations are made have, one the whole, also been the subjects of atrocious child neglect (any attempt to set up a scientifically valid experiment to investigate this would be equally atrocious, and would constitute a crime against humanity).In the case of those born blind and deaf, I have heard, second-hand, that yes, this is the case. Unless extraordinary, continuous (and extremely expensive) intervention is done with the child from day one, such a child will not develop language, and that PET studies of the individual (at adulthood) will show great differences in neurological development, and such a person will be pre-linguistic, a-linguistic.
In the case of the sighted deaf who have not been educated in sign, the question is more complex. Such children, when given the care and attention any good mother will give her child, do develop a kind of sign language, a very rudimentary one, one that expresses basic needs. It's the mother and others in the child's family that invent this; since the child's family is linguistic, the family teaches the child, in a crude way, a basic language. Such children even learn to 'read', in a rudimentary way, seeing certain words as 'pictures' which symbolize something.
But, from what I've read, such people on the whole do lack a capability for abstraction. What is this called: realis? I'm thinking of the ability to conceptualize unreal things, imaginary things, and realize these are unreal and imaginary, but can be creatively harnessed to making something new and different. You have to see the wheel in your head, and how it would work, before you could think of a way to invent it.
I'm speaking of highly abstract cause-and-effect relationships; it is one thing to throw a rock at prey, and thus bring down dinner. This is immediate cause-and-effect. But to invent a sling shot, which is a better way of throwing a rock, you have to conceptualize in your head what you want, and have to plan what you will do to make it a concrete reality.
The first miracle is that we are born with the capacity to learn language. The second is that our ancestors developed it. Intuitively, I find the idea that it might have developed more than once difficult to believe, in that it is children who would have had to propel the development. Pre-linguistic adults cannot learn language.
Mark Odegard.
PS. I've left the AltaVista translation intact. It's interesting that Oliver Sacks' name comes out as 'olive bag'. It shows you the limits, as well as the possibilities of machine translation.