The Child and the World: How the Child Acquires Language; How Language Mirrors the World

By Robin Allott

The Child and the World! There is nothing more wonderful
to watch than a small child, 2 or 3 years old, speaking to
its mother, holding a conversation with its mother. It
seems miraculous that in such a short period a child can reach
so far in its use of this most precious of human possessions,
language. In this book I consider how it is possible that a child
can acquire all the complexities of its parent language and amass
a large lexicon to refer to objects and actions of all kinds, through
language to mirror the world in which it fi nds itself. The miracle
can be explained by accepting that all aspects of language are
not arbitrary.
They derive from the brain systems controlling perception and action.
We internalise perceived patternings in the world and transfer them
from our eyes and other senses to the motor patternings of speech.
Children acquire words effortlessly because the motor programs
generated by perception of particular objects or actions are matched
instantaneously with the motor programs generated by the soundstructure
of the words for the given objects and actions. This is the
essence of the motor theory of language

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Dec 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781469138909

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Copyright © 2012 by Robin Allott.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4691-3889-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-3890-9

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303361

CONTENTS

PART I

HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE

Problems

THE MOTOR THEORY ACCOUNT OF CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Finding the phonemes

Finding the Words

Finding the objects and actions (to which words are to be attached)

Attaching the words to the objects or actions

The recognition of the appropriate word for an object

Action word acquisition by children

Acquisition of words by children for things or processes perceived by other senses than vision or action organization

Acquisition of closed class words

Acquisition of sentence-structure

Community acquisition of sentence structure

Acquiring the ability to construct the meaningful sentence:

CONCLUSION

NOTES

1. MOTOR THEORY 2

2. ARTICULATORY GESTURE

3. MOTOR EQUIVALENCE

5. WORD AND CONCEPT CORTICAL TOPOLOGY

6. VISION AND THOUGHT

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

VISION

MOTOR ASPECTS

NEUROIMAGING AND LESION STUDIES

SPEECH

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

PHILOSOPHY

PART II

LANGUAGE AS A MIRROR OF THE WORLD

Summary

INTRODUCTION

PICTURE THEORY

LANGUAGE GAMES AND MEANING AS USE

RECONCILING PICTURE THEORY, LANGUAGE-GAMES AND MEANING AS USE?

‘Meaning as use’ in the Tractatus and the Notebooks:

‘Picture theory’ in the Investigations and the Blue and Brown Books:

DEVELOPMENTS SINCE WITTGENSTEIN

Philosophy

Linguistics

Psychology

Brain-scanning32

Mirror neurons37

Motor control and the Motor theory of language

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDIX: FUNCTION WORDS IN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN

303361-ALLO manuscript-2 copy.jpg

How the child acquires language

How language mirrors the world

Robin Allott

PREFACE

The Child and the World! There is nothing more wonderful to watch than a small child, 2 or 3 years old, speaking to its mother, holding a conversation with its mother. It does seem miraculous, as many have said, that in such a short period a child can reach so far in its use of this most precious of human possessions, language. In this book I consider how it is possible that a child can acquire all the complexities of its parent language and amass a large lexicon to refer to things in the world, objects and actions of all kinds, begin to have a grasp on the world in which it finds itself. And, as Part II of this book explains, through language the child, and all of us, in time, build up a picture of the world; the world is reflected in us in the language we have acquired. Again, an almost miraculous power which only humans seem to have.

For many years, centuries and indeed millennia it has been almost universally believed that language for humanity is a gift of god or an astonishing cultural invention for which no satisfactory explanation can be given. The contention in this book, and in earlier books, and in papers for many conferences, is that the miracle can be explained by accepting that all aspects of language are not arbitrary objets trouvés but derive from and are modelled by pre-existing systems of our brains which shape and control the wonderful processes of perception and action. We accept that perception and action are part of our natural bodily and brain endowment, which we share with most other species.

If, as the motor theory of speech origin and function proposes, all the words we use and all the structures we employ to fit words together to convey complex meanings can be linked directly to the way in which our brains have evolved to perceive the world and to act upon the world, then there is nothing arbitrary about language. The immense power of the words we use and particularly the immense power shown in all forms of poetry, oratory and other literature which strike upon our hearts and minds, is natural. Elsewhere, I have discussed how one can explain the multitude of languages now existing or which have existed in the past, but the root point is that each human individual in the past, or now, has had the power to create language for himself. It is essentially a question of being able consciously to convert patterning from one brain system to another, to make a cross-modal transfer of patterning from the perceptual and action brain systems to the articulatory system. We internalise the perceived patterning which exists in the world, a transfer from our eyes and other senses to the motor patternings of speech. That we speak and have a complex language, and other creatures do not, must be explained by evolved differences in the structure of our brains, probably the establishment of a new direct link (not found in other primates) between the cortical motor control system controlling all aspects of bodily movement and the motor neuronal complex controlling all the complex movements of the tongue. This has been evolution’s precious gift to humanity.

Nowadays, often this gift of language is treated carelessly, almost with contempt. We allow our language to be degraded, to be simplified, to be constricted, to be under-used. This is a developing tragedy with dangerous effects for human society, for the particular community in which we live. Language, the prime instrument for social cohesion and social communication, is being allowed to waste away into crudeness and inarticulacy. A great task for the future is to recover language as the instrument for moulding society, to revive it from the debased state in which it exists in many sections of the community. May language flourish in a new era!

For the texts which follow, it may be helpful to set out the basic propositions of the motor theory of language function and evolutionary origin:

Words are the natural evolutionary product of the functioning of the brain. The forms of individual words are not arbitrary but directly derived from and related to the meaning of the words.

Speech is the result of an evolutionary exaptation: the establishment in humans of a direct connection between the cortical motor control system and the articulatory apparatus (as research has shown)

In the evolution of language, shapes or objects seen, sounds heard, and actions perceived or performed, generated neural motor programs which, on transfer to the vocal apparatus, produced words structurally correlated with the perceived shapes, objects, sounds and actions.

The motor program generating the word, an articulatory gesture, also generates an equivalent bodily gesture. Gesture mediates between word-structure and word-meaning. In the case of a different word in a different language for the same meaning, a similar final gesture is generated by a different intermediate trajectory associated with different speech-sound elements going to form the different word.

The gesture associated with the meaning of any word can be observed by mentally transferring the sound-structure of the word (the articulatory gesture) to the musculature of the arms.

Children are able to acquire words effortlessly, that is to link a word to an object or action, because, when the motor control system has hsufficiently matured, the neural motor program generated by the perception of the particular object or action is matched instantaneously with the equivalent motor program generated on hearing the word which, in the particular language community, is structurally derived from the perceived object or action.

PART I

HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE

Patricia Kuhl, in her Nature review article 37, surveys the research carried out over many years into all aspects of the acquisition of language by children. She recognizes that ‘the mystery’ is not yet solved; although substantive progress has been made on some aspects of infants’ speech development, notably of the phonology of the parent language. How far in fact has the extensive research program into child language taken us and how plausible and helpful so far are theories of child language acquisition? Over the last few decades research into child language acquisition has been revolutionized by the use of ingenious new techniques which allow one to investigate what in fact infants (that is children not yet able to speak) can perceive when exposed to a stream of speech sound, the discriminations they can make between different speech sounds, different speech sound sequences and different words. Infants’ perception of speech develops a good way ahead of their capacity to produce speech sounds, no doubt a reflection of the longer time it takes for the motor capacity for speech to mature.. However on the central features of the mystery, the extraordinarily rapid acquisition of lexicon and complex syntactic structures, little solid progress has been made.

Problems

As Saffran, Senghas, and Trueswell40 strikingly put it: "You must discover the internal structure of a system