The podcasts Words made some very interesting connections with language that raises a lot of questions. I took a psychology course at FAU and we briefly went over the phase in a child’s life where they start to develop spatial reasoning, but the child is supposed to develop language way before this. The idea that language as we know it doesn’t actually develop in a child’s brain until they reach 6 was eye opening to me. I’ve always heard the saying that children are like sponges. They repeat whatever you say right back to you. Sometimes they will make small connections to words and the things that they want, but do they truly understand who they are and what the world around them is?
Moving on to the the boy without language, here we find another astounding discovery. When Julia told us to, “Think about something outside of language,” I honestly didn’t think to hard about it. I thought to myself “That’s impossible.” Everything we think about involves language. However, what about for people who were born deaf and were never introduced to sign language. I never even considered this and I was utterly surprised to learn the answer. They don’t have language! They have this long process of describing an event without words, symbols or signs. They never understood that everything has a word or symbol and their brains never made the connection. The truly astonishing part is how once this connection is made, they can’t go back. It’s like the brain learned an easier way to communicate and it left the other method behind. This begs the question, are their other skills or ways of processing information that we just simply forget because our brains don’t need them anymore. I took a linguistics course and I learned that linguistics believe that over time, languages become simpler. Conjunctions are formed, words symplified, grammar simplifies and so on so forth. Is it possible that their is a correlation between these two concepts. What if the same part of our brain that simplifies language is also responsible for making necessary connections between parts of our brain to simplify our own understanding of language.
Language should no longer be looked at as tools, because tools aren’t necessary. Tools can be used, exchanged, forgotten and disposed of. Language is nothing like this. Once you learn language, you can’t unlearn it and once you do use it, language changes the way you see the world. I believe to truly understand what it means to be human, one must understand what language is and how much of a role it plays in developing our brains.