I'm looking forward to observing this more closely in the near future. :)
We tend to think of language as separate from the rest of life, maybe because it's so transportable, but in a way it's strange to imagine an intelligence that only deals in language, and not even the language of "its own species."
A baby babbles I guess for fun but also because it's part of the process of playing with the world to learn to cope with it and to become an effective person. So talking, walking, eating, etc, are all part of the same general activity of life, and they all have their own forms of "grammar."
The semantic connections and associations go all across embodied life; you can't really use human language without being a person who also sees, moves, eats, loves, etc.
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations starts from the first paragraph by quoting Augustine:
> ‘When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.’ (Augustine, Confessions, 1. 8.)
Wittgenstein thinks this is a good example of a misunderstanding of how language and language acquisition works. Then he formulates an understanding of language that focuses less on meaning and signification and more on social activity and speech acts.
I have a feeling that I myself am babbling right now, I don't know exactly what my point is and I'm hungry for breakfast...
> A baby babbles I guess for fun but also because it's part of the process of playing with the world to learn to cope with it and to become an effective person. So talking, walking, eating, etc, are all part of the same general activity of life, and they all have their own forms of "grammar."
Yeah, exactly. Almost everything a small child does is a directed attempt to generate training data, whether they're talking to you or talking to themselves or grabbing random things or trying to crawl into traffic.
A baby also babbles more if they get positive reinforcement.
I am not finding the link right now, but there were some researchers who attached a mic to very young babies that could pick up very faint sounds and an earphone to their caregivers and the researchers listened carefully to the baby and signaled the caregiver to touch the baby every time the baby made a (basically inaudible) intentional speech sound. After a short time the baby started producing a lot more of those sounds.
Similarly, since babies can’t really talk, caregivers can advance their communication by a few months by teaching them a simple sign language.
(Disclaimer: I didn’t do either of these things with my 2 year old. Just read about it.)
> I'm looking forward to observing this more closely in the near future. :)
There's something I remember reading about, years ago, by I think a linguist: there's a point during a child's development where their language skills appear to suddenly get worse, which they thought was because the kid stops just rote repeating and instead is trying to conjugate words themselves (and getting it wrong because it's so new).
They actually do this all the time in all sorts of things, it's fascinating. One day they'll be proficiently grabbing things with a full-paw grasp and the next they'll be dropping stuff left right and center because they started using pincer grip or something.
We tend to think of language as separate from the rest of life, maybe because it's so transportable, but in a way it's strange to imagine an intelligence that only deals in language, and not even the language of "its own species."
A baby babbles I guess for fun but also because it's part of the process of playing with the world to learn to cope with it and to become an effective person. So talking, walking, eating, etc, are all part of the same general activity of life, and they all have their own forms of "grammar."
The semantic connections and associations go all across embodied life; you can't really use human language without being a person who also sees, moves, eats, loves, etc.
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations starts from the first paragraph by quoting Augustine:
> ‘When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.’ (Augustine, Confessions, 1. 8.)
Wittgenstein thinks this is a good example of a misunderstanding of how language and language acquisition works. Then he formulates an understanding of language that focuses less on meaning and signification and more on social activity and speech acts.
I have a feeling that I myself am babbling right now, I don't know exactly what my point is and I'm hungry for breakfast...