Infographic displaying languages by number of speakersThere’s a quality I’ve experienced during the years in some people who work lovingly with children across a long life. They nurture and retain an exuberance, a playfulness, in themselves. And they merge that with a delving intellect and spirit. Robert Coles, the psychiatrist who wrote famously about the moral, political, and spiritual lives of children, gave me the phrase “delving spirit” and embodied it:

“It’s our effort on this planet as creatures who have a mind and use language to ask questions and answer them through speculation, through story-telling, to explore the universe and answer those fundamental questions: Where do we come from? What are we? And where, if any place, are we going?”

It interests me, looking back now, to see how Robert Coles stressed language as inextricably bound with spirit. Jean Berko Gleason is, like him, a wisely child-like delver. A professor emerita of psychology, she continues to imprint and expand the field of psycholinguistics that she helped to create — the exploration of how human beings acquire language and what this says about who we are.

She began to make her mark on linguistics decades ago with a test that looks, on the surface, like it’s about basic grammar. She created the wug, a simply drawn mythical creature. This, it turned out, was a savvy tool for demonstrating that young children could apply complex grammatical rules and form new words that no one had ever tried to teach them. Even after 50 years in her field, Jean Berko Gleason remains amazed and delighted at the extremely ordinary human capacity to learn language and work with it. She infects me with that amazement.

She also brings us up to speed on the evolution of this scientific field’s “nature versus nurture” debate. Every discipline, it seems, has one. When I was in college, the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky had taken the intellectual world by storm with his suggestion that we are born with universal, innate language templates that only need to be triggered for humans to speak.

Looking at the “wug test,” you might suspect that it tells some of the same story — of an innate skill that is biologically, not socially, rooted. But as Jean Berko Gleason has grown in her field and watched it grow with her, she has become increasingly fascinated by what we are learning about the intense interaction that draws forth, inspires, and hones that biologically-rooted capacity in all of us as children.

Moreover, Jean Berko Gleason suspects, there is something instructive in the adult human’s compulsion to speak with children, to engage them in language. In ways we’ve barely begun to scrutinize and study, she says, we are unfolding with children as we help them unfold language. The technologies we now have to study the brain are showing us remarkable things — like the physical markers of babies born in bilingual households with bilingual brains. But these technologies, Jean Berko Gleason insists, will never replace our need to observe the miraculous results of mothers talking to their babies.

While we were producing this week’s show “Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life,” a number of us tested this theory on our kids, with varying results. Putting a microphone in front of a five year old, or a thirteen year old, is not the straightest route to natural interaction. But I was amazed, for example, when my teenager, after he’d stopped being reluctant and sarcastic, began to reflect in quite a sophisticated way on the word “human” as “plural” — as pegging us not just as individuals but as part of something, as part of humanity. Which means, he says, that we also “have to do our part.”

This is a fascinating echo of a big idea Jean Berko Gleason leaves me with. In recent years, she’s delved into the fact that children in every language and culture studied by linguists have huge animal vocabularies. She’s puzzling, these days, over what that says about us as human beings. Certainly, we are drawn to life, to living beings. And more and more, we are aware that these beings think and may be conscious. We can’t fathom that, because they can’t tell us about it. But we are given a vast gift in our ordinary, inborn skill of language. Alone among the creatures, as Jean Berko Gleason puts it, we are able to reflect, to be conscious of ourselves, and to comment on that.

I’m grateful that she is out there studying the deepest meaning of human language, and I now appreciate it in a new way in my ordinary, day-to-day life.

Infographic courtesy of John Pasden/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0.

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Where do we come from?- a single cell. Why? - we can't know. What are we? - humans. Why? - we can't know. Where are we going? - there are two possible destinations, self-realization, the continuation of the process that created human beings from the single cell, or self-destruction. Where are we? The scientific consensus is we are very close to self-destruction. Why? When 'Eve' realized the ability to ask "Why am I?" 'Adam' began to think there had to be more to being human than self-realization. Over the millennia since, humans tried to add more meaning to being human but instead subtracted from humanity. Do we have time to change directions? We won't know unless we try; but if we do we may discover why. What's happening? -

Reading this reminded me of seeing Lisel Mueller read "Naming the Animals" on the News Hour. 
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Would you read "Naming the Animals" for us.

LISEL MUELLER: Yes. "Naming the Animals."

Until he named the horse 'horse,' hoofs left no print on the earth, manes had not been invented, swiftness and grace were not married.

Until he named the cow 'cow,' no one slept standing up, no one saw through opaque eyes, food was chewed only once.

Only after he named the fish 'fish,' did the light put on skins of yellow and silver oils, revealing itself as a dancer and high jump champion of the world.

Just as later he had to name the woman 'love,' before he could put on the knowledge of who she was with her small hands."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What a tribute to words and the power of language.


"Alone among the creatures, as Jean Berko Gleason puts it, we are able to reflect, to be conscious of ourselves, and to comment on that."  This was a fascinating essay that made me reflect and want to know more about the ability of children to reflect on being, and on their identification with animals.  It's too bad you chose to end it with the quote above.  We have no way of knowing this.  All we can say is that we humans are unable to grasp what other creatures might be experiencing cognitively, and how they might share that sense of themselves among themselves.  We cannot say that we are the only ones who do this, whether absolutely or in degree. 

I feel delighted to read such a good post. This post is good with regards of both knowledge and information. I appreciates that learning another language can be difficult, and maintaining motivation or even getting started is never an easy task.
Our brain is limitless and we should do whatever we like. This is so true: all languages are beautiful and suck at some point. Just like real world languages. But you don’t need 10 years to learn a language (you don’t need also to become an expert)… Because the funny part is not to know the language or to become something but to learn and make money each time in a easier way.