I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth Read Free Book Online

discovered in 1970 after she had been kept locked in a bedroom and tied to the furniture for the first fourteen years of her life. These unfortunate children had almost no exposure to language, among other things, and provided an unusual opportunity for study. Neither ever achieved normal language skills. The fact that deaf babies do not automatically learn to talk also tells us that the skill is not purely innate. Yet if a deaf baby’s parents are fluent signers, he or she becomes a native user of sign language, which adheres to universal grammar, and the baby will follow the same path to fluency with visual language as hearing babies do with spoken language. So while speech may not be innate, certain patterns of language learning seem to be.
    â€œLanguage is a super-interesting learning problem,” neuroscientist Elissa Newport told me as we sat in her new, somewhat bare office at Georgetown University Medical Center. Newport specializes in the acquisition of language. For twenty-three years, she was at the University of Rochester, the last twelve as chair of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. When I met her, she had just moved to Washington to head a new center for brain plasticity and recovery, where she is studying how young children who suffer a certain kind of stroke recover their language. Her straightforward, no-nonsense style is evident in everything from her short hair to her scientific approach. “We know that languages of the world have a certain type of organization that you don’t see in any other species’ communication system, and languages of the world have a lot of interesting profound similarities to one another. So there’s a very interesting problem to explain: How did we get languages like that, and how do you learn them, and what kind of brain mechanisms are required to do that?”
    When Alex was turning two, I hadn’t yet realized how important the question of brain mechanisms would be. I was fixated on the second of Newport’s questions: How do you learn language? I sought out Newport because I wanted to understand not just what Alex couldn’t do but also what other children could do and why. Following the lead of scientists, I knew I needed to understand what was typical in order to better make sense of what was atypical. What I found was worrisome—for what it was clear Alex didn’t get as a baby—but also a little bit reassuring, as I began to appreciate that he had managed to learn some important things about language with very little help from sound.
    One fact scientists agree on isn’t surprising anymore: To learn a language, it’s best to start young. “We certainly learn languages as adults but not to the same degree of proficiency,” says Newport, “and there’s much more variation among individuals as we get older.” To say that children are “better” is too simplistic. “Young children don’t really learn faster or better,” says Newport. “They learn more slowly. It’s kind of tortoise and hare. If you look at people who move to a new country, adults are generally faster, they just don’t get as far. They do it differently and they don’t end up as good.”
    Newport gave me an intriguing example. She has spent much of the past ten years making up what she calls “miniature languages.” In different studies, the same eight verbs and fifteen nouns carry different meanings. So “kleidum” means “drag” in one instance and “head-butt” in another (one can only imagine the story that language will tell). Words like “tombat,” “nagid,” and “melnawg” might mean “singer” or “baby carriage” or “shopping cart.” Newport teaches these limited strings of invented words to babies, children, and adults in her laboratory using pictures and videos. They are then tested on