The tongues in our heads: natural or learned?

Jen's post earlier today, "When English is not our mother tougue," helped me decide to post on an article in The Economist last week. When we learn a language, are we learning everything, or is a lot of the basic grammar already in our heads?

"A word in the hand" reports that high levels of correct guesses about the elements of the meaning of words used in sign language by observers who do not know the language suggest that some grammatical functions and aspects of words meaning are naturally built into our brains, which "challenges the long-standing notion in linguistics that the relation between a symbol and its meaning is arbitrary" (2015).

I had already read this article before I wrote my reply to Pomm's comment on Jen's stimulating post, and I think, along with many others, that the naturalness, the build in language wiring, in our brains sounds right when  we consider that almost every single child easily learns their native language without any teaching. I could speak and understand English pretty well by age three, and certainly had a solid understanding before I started kindergarten at age four. And for most of human history, most people never went to school, but they all learned their native language very well.

I think that there is a role for teaching in language: most people need to be taught to read. Unlike speaking English, reading it did not come so naturally to me, but again, I'm not sure how helpful my primary school teachers were, except to push me to read regularly. Happily, I fell in love with reading. And I'm sure that my obsessive reading helped my writing in English.

But I don't want to entirely undermine the role of teachers - I do want you think it's worthwhile to come to my own classes. To be honest, although they worked hard and were kind, loving people the Catholic nuns who taught me in primary school were not that great as teachers. What they did do was encourage and let me largely explore the world, and our small school library, by myself. And since that had a pretty good outcome, maybe they really were great teachers. I certainly have fond memories of them: they were old and frail, they didn't give much homework, and they didn't get upset when I didn't do it. And they encouraged reading for pleasure.

My teachers at high school, both the religious brothers and the lay teachers, were all well qualified, and they taught things like grammar, but they related it to the material and to outcomes. For example, how to combine ideas that mattered to us, that interested us, together into the more complex sentences than are usual in spoken language so that we could state and explore the ideas in history, science, economics and of course English. They also showed how knowledge of words and how they worked allowed greater pleasure from good writing: I remember struggling through my first Shakespeare at age 12, when all the excitement of bloody ghosts, a murdered king, an insane wife bent on power and moving forests were needed to keep us going through the difficulties of understanding Shakespeare's version of English. By the time we got to Hamlet some years later, the effort reading Macbeth in Mr. Taylor's class was really paying off.

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Reference

A word in the hand. (2015, April 30). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21650114-sign-languages-might-hint-something-universal-human-mind-word-hand