First off, I want to say that I enjoyed listening to the podcast but preferred reading the transcript a lot more than actually listening to it. The podcast brought me back to a conversation I had with my TESOL professor about learning language and if humans can be taught it when they haven’t been exposed to it from the beginning. There are several studies involved with feral children, children who have had little or no human contact, and how whether it is possible for them to learn a language when they have not been exposed to the sound system, the phonemes. Some of the studies show that they can learn the sounds and may make simple sentences but their progression stops there and they can’t move on to making complex sentences. The stories in the podcast offer another point of view in which the person is deaf and is language-less but that’s not completely true. They have a language that is different from speaking or signing and have not learned a common language to communicate in. Just as when Ildefonso learns the other language and that things have name, his view point changes. I believe what he had was a point of view change. He went from seeing things in pictures and signs to seeing them with words that became symbols for those pictures and signs. His thinking as they believed is what changed, I think became a perspective change. On the other hand, feral children, who can hear, have little or no exposure to human language which in turn prevents them from communicating altogether. Just as psychologist said, when they turn six, a switch flips and children are able to for spatial sentences, they same applies to feral children. If they are not exposed to human language and the sounds that make it before a certain age, then it becomes progressively harder to teach them language or to teach them past the early stages of language acquisition.
Sep 082016