Читать книгу The Secret Life of the Mind: How Our Brain Thinks, Feels and Decides - Mariano Sigman - Страница 16

In addition to being connected for concept formation, a newborn’s brain is also predisposed for language. That may sound odd. Is it predisposed for French, Japanese or Russian? Actually, the brain is predisposed for all languages because they all have – in the vast realm of sounds – many things in common. This was the linguist Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary idea.

All languages have similar structural properties. They are organized in an auditory hierarchy of phonemes that are grouped into words, which in turn are linked to form sentences. And these sentences are organized syntactically, with a property of recursion that gives the language its wide versatility and effectiveness. On this empirical premise, Chomsky proposed that language acquisition in infancy is limited and guided by the constitutional organization of the human brain. This is another argument against the notion of the tabula rasa: the brain has a very precise architecture that, among other things, makes it ideal for language. Chomsky’s argument has another advantage, since it explains why children can learn language so easily despite its being filled with very sophisticated and almost always implicit grammatical rules.

This idea has now been validated by many demonstrations. One of the most intriguing was presented by Jacques Mehler, who had French babies younger than five days old listen to a succession of various phrases spoken by different people, both male and female. The only thing common to all the phrases was that they were in Dutch. Every once in a while the phrases abruptly changed to Japanese. He was trying to see if that change would surprise a baby, which would show that babies are able to codify and recognize a language.

In this case, the way to measure their surprise wasn’t the persistence of their gaze but the intensity with which they sucked on their dummies. Mehler found that when the language changed, the babies sucked harder – like Maggie Simpson – indicating that they perceived that something relevant or different was occurring. The key is that this did not happen when he repeated the same experiment with the sound of all the phrases reversed, like a record played backwards. That means that the babies didn’t have the ability to recognize categories from just any sort of sound but rather they were specifically tuned to process languages.

We usually think that innate is the opposite of learned. Another way of looking at it is thinking of the innate as actually something learned in the slow cooker of human evolutionary history. Following this line of reasoning, since the human brain is already predisposed for language at birth, we should expect to find precursors of language in our evolutionary cousins.

This is precisely what Mehler’s group proved by showing that monkeys also have auditory sensibilities attuned to language. Just like babies, tamarin monkeys reacted with the same surprise every time the language they were hearing in the experiment changed. As with babies, this was specific to language, and did not happen when phrases were played backwards.

This was a spectacular revelation, not to mention a gift for the media … ‘Monkeys Speak Japanese’ is a prime example of how to destroy an important scientific finding with a lousy headline. What this experiment proves is that languages are built upon a sensitivity of the primate brain to certain combinations of sounds This in turn may explain in part why most of us learn to understand spoken language so easily at a very young age.