Well, there are feelings and tastes that I have no words for, but I think
they are outside the scope. (01)
To me, I thought immediately of the experiences of my sister teaching in
inner-city Albany in the 80's, and how well the book reviewed in the link
resonated with her at the time... (02)
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/19/books/books-of-the-times-696487.html (03)
It speaks how language that handles relationships between things in
imprecise ways makes learning Math harder... (04)
tc (05)
"If something is not worth doing, it`s not worth doing well" - Peter Drucker (06)
Toby Considine
TC9, Inc
TC Chair: oBIX & WS-Calendar
TC Editor: EMIX, EnergyInterop
U.S. National Inst. of Standards and Tech. Smart Grid Architecture Committee (07)
Email: Toby.Considine@xxxxxxxxx
Phone: (919)619-2104
http://www.tcnine.com/
blog: www.NewDaedalus.com (08)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ed Barkmeyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 3:40 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] language and thinking (09)
John Bottoms wrote:
> et al passim,
>
> The responses to my statement have gone a bit astray. I very carefully
> said, "...learning speech...", not language.
> (010)
I see. Yes, I was completely off base. OTOH, I can accuse you of leading
us astray by following the statement about learning speech with a statement
about teaching the Pirahã children to count. (011)
I don't see in anything you write about feral children that you are drawing
any conclusion with respect to the original topic: Whorf's assertion that
thought processes are limited by language. The Everett discussion is not
about children who lack speech, but rather children and adults who lack both
counting terms and the concept of counting. (012)
It does seem that the feral children might be a very strong counterexample
to Whorf. Feral children clearly don't completely lack thought processes,
in spite of lacking speech -- and therefore language?
-- entirely. But that opens a different can of worms, which is the
relationship between language and speech. We know that language exists
without speech -- we have the examples of American Sign, ideographs and
text. So, what is the relevance of feral children to the Whorf thesis? (013)
-Ed (014)
> Serena DuBois writes in "Feral Children in Fiction and Fact":
> "Almost all of factual literature regarding feral children indicates
> that if children do not learn human speech at an early age, and if
> they are not living in the vicinity of human beings that have speech
> and talk to them, they never learn to talk. As we shall see, the
> ability to speak is critical to a feral child’s living as a
> functioning adult member of a human community—the usual definition of
> "human." This lack of speech in most feral children appears to have
> nothing to do with lack of intelligence, autism or neurological
> impairment. Rather, speech is learned, and learned at a certain time
> in a child’s life, with repetition being a good part of the learning
> process.2, 3
>
> 2. Peter Hobson. The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of
> Thinking, Oxford University Press, USA, 2004.
>
> 3. Jonah Weston. Wild Child: The Story of Feral Children, Optomen TV,
> 2002, an interesting documentary on isolated children and also how all
> children learn language. This film is often shown on the Learning
> Channel [TLC], and deals with several modern feral children, including
> Genie, a 20th century child tied down and isolated by her parents for
> 13 years. It is not available in VHS or DVD at the present time.
>
> And, while I agree with Everett's valuation of the learning abilities
> of the Piraha˜ being incommensurate with that of outsiders, it appears
> to conflate the cultural causes with those of early learning. To
> refute my notion with a statement on language acquisition does not, in
> my opinion, address my statement concerning speech acquisition.
>
> It appears that ascribing linguistic learning differences to a
> cultural difference overlooks temporal and age considerations that
> should be included. Maybe we should leave the issue to the
anthropologists.
>
> -John Bottoms
> FirstStar
> Concord, MA
> T: 978-505-9878
>
> On 8/31/2010 12:44 PM, Ed Barkmeyer wrote:
>
>> John Bottoms wrote:
>>
>>> We know that the window for learning speech closes pretty tightly by
>>> 15 years of age.
>>>
>> I wrote:
>>
>>>> This is a bit oversimplified. The window that closes in most
>>>> individuals is the ability to learn to hear, distinguish and create
>>>> language _sounds_. The Army Language School and diplomatic schools
>>>> have been quite successful teaching persons as old as 40 new
>>>> languages ...
>>>>
>>>>
>> Randall Schulz wrote:
>>
>>
>>> 40 seems like an oddly arbitrary age, to me. My understanding of our
>>> brains is that from the mid 20s on (when development of our frontal
>>> cortex is complete) there are no real developmental or senescence
>>> boundaries or inflection points in any performance metric, just very
>>> slow shifts in some parameters of neurological function (pathologies
>>> aside, of course).
>>>
>>>
>> I only mentioned age 40 because the Army Language School has very few
>> students older than that. Most of the trainees are Special Ops
>> personnel. I expect that the State Department schools have a much
>> wider range of ages.
>>
>> Chris wrote:
>>
>>> It's just empirically false. Many people become reasonably fluent
>>> in languages they are only first exposed to in college.
>>>
>>>
>> Chris takes the logician's view that John Bottoms' thesis is
>> demonstrably false, because there are common counterexamples. And I
>> agree with "reasonably fluent".
>>
>> Nonetheless, the ability to learn new languages at age 20 or 30 is
>> not general; it is a "talent", possessed by some minority of the
>> population. The Language School folk screen their candidates before
>> investing in them and take less than 1 in 3, and still wash out some
>> percentage of their students. Many college students learn only to
>> read a foreign language and write it adequately, and do both by
>> thinking in their native tongue and translating to/from the foreign
>> language. That is a distinct skill from hear/speak, which involves
>> the connection of concept with utterance without an intermediate
>> alternative verbalization. Conversely, I know a number of tradesmen
>> who have learned to speak Spanish out of workplace necessity, mostly
>> by exposure and perhaps some Berlitz CD. So the 'talent' may be
>> broader-based than is apparent, and "social/cultural value" as the
>> driver may really be what distinguishes the successes and failures.
>>
>> John Sowa may well be right that the "talent" is influenced by
>> nurture
>> -- early encounters with non-native phonemes -- as well as nature.
>> Certainly that view has been offered by many 'amateur linguists' to
>> explain the ability of British and Americans to speak their language
>> without recognizable accent: "You must have been exposed to<language
>> (group)> when you were small." But I also know several individuals
>> who were not exposed to the specific language in question, e.g.,
>> Japanese or Russian, before age 20, although they were exposed to
>> French or German or Spanish in their community. So John's
>> generalization to "foreign phonemes" is more likely to be true. What
>> is created in the young mind is the experience of hearing, interpreting
and producing non-native sounds.
>>
>> -Ed
>>
>>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/ Community Wiki:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ To join:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
> To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> (015)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology Manufacturing Systems
Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (016)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST, and have
not been reviewed by any Government authority." (017)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/ Community Wiki:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ To join:
http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (018)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (019)
|