Love at first hearing

If, either from the title of the entry or from my track record (?), you thought i was gonna be writing about someone i met on the computer or over the phone... well, you'll be disappointed. Basically, i just feel on the clouds with my classes. They make me giddy sometimes! I may have finally found my vocation, or maybe it's still the buzz of being a student again after 7 years. And no, i'm not smoking anything.

Anyway, i'm taking three courses this term, one cooler than the next. The first one is First Language Acquisition, in which we study how the ability to communicate develops in people. To say something about it, consider how hard it is to learn a second language well; yet by the age of five children have already learnt almost everything there's to know about their native language/s (they will keep adding vocabulary throughout life, but that's pretty much it). Think of the contrast in beginning conditions, too! By the time you attempt to learn a second language you already know, at least, that the strings of sound you hear are made up of individual words, that there are certain ways in which these can be put together, and that words are associated with concrete meaning. But how do you figure this out when you're a baby? I mean, even if you notice that the sound "cat" is associated with that furry thing that wanders around the house, how do you know "cat" doesn't mean "furriness", or "wandering" or "stripes in a tabby pattern"?

Did you know that at 4 days of age children can already distinguish the main language spoken around them from others? That at two months, after hearing a few sentences in a language, they can distinguish that language from most others, but that later in life they seem to lose this ability? (by the way, can you think of any way in which you could test this info? After all, children that young cannot speak, right? So how can one figure out what they can and cannot do? Impossible? Well, think again...).

The other two classes i'm taking are phonology and syntax. Basically the two look at how languages are put together, but since languages have many different layers of structure, phonology focuses on the level of words, and syntax on the level of phrases or sentences (other levels are phonetics, which deals with individual sounds and their production, organization and reception; semantics, which looks at how meaning is created and transmitted... Plus, there are areas of linguistics that look at the interfaces between the different levels: phonetics-phonology-syntax-semantics). Basically, these disciplines both attempt to tease out the simplest and most explicit set of rules that can describe the structure of language, its reason for being, and its evolution. In fact, the intention is to find a set of rules that will do this for all languages together. Sounds crazy? Well, it certainly is a grandiose view. But then again, physics wants to describe the whole universe, and nobody's complaining...

All of this work is based on the assumption that the language ability is innate, codified in the human brain to quite a large extent. Therefore, all languages will share "mechanic" characteristics that cannot lay outside of certain parameters. The search for those parameters is another way of looking at the linguistics enterprise.

The linguistic revolution began in the 1950s with Noam Chomsky, who postulated much of the above. If you haven't heard of any linguistics revolution, well, right now you're staring at a product of it... I mean your computer, dummy! IT owes a lot to linguistics (i mean Information Technology in general, not your computer in particular). What happens is, if you understand the methodological rules behind such a big part of brain-output as language, then you are actually getting a very revealing look at the internal workings of the brain. Now, if you can somehow duplicate this mechanisms on a machine... Voilá! You have a computer program.

Those annoying squiggly green lines that appear underneath ungrammatical phrases when you're writing your ToK essays are the least of it, too! Speech recognition, programming languages...

Of course, there is also a lot of debate. Is language really innate? If so, to what extent?

Anyway, i'm pooped. Going to bed...