LAD plays a part in second language teaching

I've just stumbled across this article that talks about a new method for teaching adults a second language that draws on the nativist theory that we all have an innate capacity for language development. The process outlined mirrors precisely the stages of language development that children go through when acquiring their 'native tongue'.

In theory, there is every reason why this method should work - if learners have already gone through these processes of acquisition as a baby, then it seems reasonable to assume that they will be able to repeat their successes as an adult learning a second language. An interesting idea...

Language is out of this world

No, that's not an observation on what a cracking course A level English Language is (although now you come to mention it...), but instead a comment relating to this report on the development of software that will allow linguists to decode alien language. "What?" I hear you cry, "Aliens? As in little green men?" (Actually the majority of people claiming to have seen aliens concur that they are in fact grey and not green... and not really 'little' at all... and there are probably female aliens too, when you think about it... but I digress). "Since when did alien language become fair game on an English Language course?" you continue, and not without justification. But it's what the article says about language in general that is interesting for us as linguists:

[Dr Elliott] believes that even an alien language far removed from any on Earth
is likely to have recognisable patterns that could help reveal how intelligent
the life forms are. "Language has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it
will be inefficient and unwieldy," he told New Scientist magazine.

This idea that all languages have a common basic structure (or 'deep structure' as it is sometimes known) is not a new one - linguist Noam Chomsky is well known for his theories in this area. The report goes on to explain:

All human languages have "functional terms" that bracket phrases - words like
"if" and "but" in English. According to Dr Elliott, such terms in any language,
are separated by up to nine words or characters. This limit on phrase length
seems to correspond to the level of human cognition - how much information we
are able to process at once.

Whether we apply this to alien languages or not (and I suggest that we don't spend too long on that one), this basic principle of (human) languages would seem to point to a definite link between language and cognition (mental agility and ability), which lends weight to at least one of the main theories of language acquisition that we will be debating later on this year.

Early signs of language

It is a widely-made observation among language acquisition specialists that babies who are deaf and/or whose parents are deaf frequently sign their first word at a much earlier age than hearing children speak theirs. The average age at which hearing children say their first word is about 12 months, whilst deaf children have been known to make their first meaningful sign as young as 3 months old. According to this article published in today's Sun newspaper that 'record' has now been broken by a two-month-old baby who reportedly makes the sign for 'milk' when she is hungry.

It is not entirely clear why deaf babies generally sign earlier than hearing babies speak, but for my money one of the most plausible arguments centres on issues to do with basic articulation: as a baby having to learn how to control the various parts of your own body, it is arguably far easier to co-ordinate your hands and make meaningful signs than it is to position all of the 'precision apparatus' that makes up your vocal tract (tongue, teeth, lips etc.) and make accurate, meaningful speech sounds.

On the other hand...

In yesterday's Relatively Speaking post I talked about some research that seemed to offer evidence in support of the theory of linguistic relativity. As part of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, this theory makes the assumption that language and thought are inextricably linked and that one cannot exist (in the form that we know it) without the other. The evidence from the study pointed towards the conclusion that language and thought cannot be separated.

Simple enough? Apparently not. An article appearing yesterday on the Wired Science blog network reports on the findings of a recent language study carried out by psychologist Susan Goldwin-Meadow. The study focuses on the translation of simple sentences into hand gestures and observes that speakers of SVO language (those whose sentences follow the order of subject-verb-object - e.g. Bill eats cake) almost universally switch the order to subject-object-verb when communicating with their hands only. So in the example I've just given, someone communicating by gesture would probably point at Bill, then point at cake, then mimic the action of eating. Goldwin-Meadow claims that this suggests "the independence of language from thought". What she's saying is that the structure of language cannot be an immediate product of our thought processes because our gestures almost always fall back on a different structure. This, of course, completely contradicts the conclusions of the study I was discussing in yesterday's blog - but it does support some of the key theories of language acquisition that we're going to be exploring for Unit 6 (ENA6) of the A2 course and in Unit 1 (ENGA1) of the new AS level course. Have a look at the article and see what you think.