I am not sure if that is unique for bilingual people or it's common. And I can't help thinking "if i'm not thinking in either language, what am I thinking with? Piyush Ranjan - You have interesting questions about being productive without language. Language is something that's taught to us after we born. It is not innate.
I was wondering if there's an alternative to languages? Could we have been more productive without words? As English is not my first language, I find difficult to put my thoughts into words, and this makes me wonder - is language really required? We could have improved non-verbal communication technique which is more universal. Leekley - That's a good example of alternatives to using words and full sentences.
The languages you refer to that make it difficult to label or judge might not have a need for that based on their social norms. This is a fascinating topic. Google on Buzan Mind Mapping for a way to take notes—to save the main ideas of a lecture, a meeting, a phone call, etc.
I have heard of languages that have no to be verbs. This makes it difficult to label and judge others.
Sue Adams - I didn't know what you meant by being a very lonely existence if we don't need language to think. The way I see it, it would be very lonely if we didn't have language to communicate. Any language would do. Even sign language for the deaf provides the ability to communicate and socialize.
But that's getting off the subject since my focus here was about thinking, not communicating. I did just read your article dealing with communicating with different languages and I found it very interesting. I think we all agree that, since the thought come first, to then, if necessary, be communicated in language, we don't need language to think. But that would be a very lonely existence.
Check out my latest article, just published yesterday: Hidden Secrets of Languages. Sue Adams - These are true points you brought up. But how does that relate to using some form of language to think?
You're kind of contradicting your comment you left a year ago. Sure, animals make their needs known. But do they actually use sentences in their thinking process? Do they have fully formed thoughts and concerns? Or are they functioning on instinct? What about Koko the Gorilla who learned sign language? Birds too chatter away endlessly in the large tree beside my house at dusk. Of course animals can think. On the other hand, animals don't see time as we do.
They have no concept of past and future. They always live in the present. And even after formal language began, it continues to develop and change.
Webster constantly has to add new words to the dictionary. And the same goes for any language. Fascinating article, Glenn. If you go far back in time, you learn that human beings communicated long before they developed formal languages, and they managed just fine..
Concepts comes first, then language. It is really that simple. For instance, I am one of those people who didn't start talking until I was like 3 or 4. I communicated in the following fashion as my mothers has told me. If I wanted to say the Cat Drank Water. I would make the meow sound of a cat. This equals the concept of cat that was formed in my mind through my perception, a cat meowed, so I meowed. To say drink I actually did the lapping motion with my tongue, that is how a cat drank, so that is what I did.
Then finally and this might sound the oddest, is to say water, I did a burping a sound, as that was the sound that occurred when water came out of a hose, thus I associated that sound with water since I heard it and water came out. This process and relation of concept formation and language is actually studied quite extensively if you are interested, and are don't go in with preconceived bias, by Ayn Rand in her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
Danette, I find that very interesting. But it makes sense that both you and your son have similar ways of thinking since he is from your genes. I think faster than I can type. A variation of what you said. But for the same reason. My thoughts are sometimes conceptual and I have to translate it into grammatical phrases when I type. As humans evolve, maybe someday we'll have keyboards with concepts rather than letters. Thanks for your delightful comment.
Sue Adams said, "the process of thinking is much quicker than language. My younger son and I both talk very fast. I've managed to slow down somewhat because I've started teaching a couple years ago and had to for my students.
He's planning to go into teaching too so I hope he slows down. But I commented to him one day that I think a lot faster than I can talk. I often think in "phrases," concepts, images and he agreed he does the same thing.
Very interesting topic. Language is not an easy subject to grasp because it can be so philosophical and abstract. Nicely done. I love your idea that "Words translate thought into language. In addition, words help us organize our thoughts that were already initiated in our brains.
Being that you had learned several languages, your account of that is testimony to the fact that we think, first, without words. I enjoyed reading your entire explanation.
Your comment adds a whole lot of useful examples to my Hub. Thanks so much for adding your insight. I am sure it will help others understand what I had been trying to explain. The lost art of being reasonable. Damon Linker. How the Founding Fathers encourage political violence. Bonnie Kristian. Why banning 'harmful' online speech is a slippery slope.
Cathy Young. Most Popular. If you find yourself in that category, I have a surprise for you — research has established that not everybody has inner speech experiences. Therefore, even inner speech does not appear to be necessary for thought. Have we solved the mystery then? Can we claim that language and thought are completely independent and Bertrand Russell was wrong?
Only to some extent. We have shown that damage to the language system within an adult human brain leaves most other cognitive functions intact. However, when it comes to the language-thought link across the entire lifespan, the picture is far less clear.
While available evidence is scarce, it does indicate that some of the cognitive functions discussed above are, at least to some extent, acquired through language. Perhaps the clearest case is numbers. Even after language, however, some ways of seeing the world were difficult to grasp. Time was the hardest thing for him to learn.
Think about it. For twenty-seven years, he followed the sun. He followed cows. He followed the seasons. As the interviewer points out, many languages do not treat time as an abstract, spatialized, undifferentiated flow but highlight differentiation, seasonality and sequence. Some conceptualize time as necessarily sequential today is not like tomorrow or as inherently differentiated summer is fundamentally not like winter.
Time is a classic example discussed by Whorf to highlight the links between culture, language and perception, and even though his account of time has been criticized on a number of grounds, anthropologists still tend to agree that understandings of time can differ, and that Western treatment of time as a kind of flow through undifferentiated, measurable durations is just one version or inflection of the sense of time with its own distinctive emphases.
Time, for example, may be difficult to perceive in certain ways if you are not culturally trained to habitually conducting yourself in relation to time appropriately: certainly, there is deep cultural difference in the degree to which people orient themselves by the clock, and varying emphases that societies place on recurrence or irreversibility of time. But what about those without language? He had survived into adulthood, crossed into the US, kept himself from being mowed down in traffic or starving to death.
Schaller highlights that learning language isolated Ildefonso from other languageless individuals. Schaller explains:. The only thing he said, which I think is fascinating and raises more questions than answers, is that he used to be able to talk to his other languageless friends. They found each other over the years. I agree with Schaller, and I suspect that Ildefonso might be suggesting a way in which certain cognitive skills and communicative channels had actually atrophied with the incursion of language into his life, or even become impossible once language had intruded upon them.
Language was not simply an addition to his cognitive repertoire; it may have displaced or disrupted other forms of thought and interaction. From the perspective of a language-saturated world this seems improbable; we tend to think of ourselves as cognitively complete, profoundly abled, without limit.
But clearly Ildefonso and other languageless individuals had to find some way to compensate for their deficits, whether it was through mimetic thinking which is one possibility or through some other constellation of adaptations. This languageless cognition would not be simply prelinguistic, childlike thought because adult languageless individuals function much more adeptly than four-year-olds.
But how this non-linguistic, adult cognition might operate, what it might include, is a bit of a mystery and seems fragile in the face of language learning. Likewise, we find other primates who are non-linguistic are often good problem solvers without imitating or imitating much less adeptly than humans.
So can people have thought without words? Ildefonso had managed to survive, and clearly had thoughts, but he was also obviously confused by some basic qualities of the language-saturated world in which he had to live, not least of which was social interaction. The evidence that Schaller presents on the relationship of language to different cognitive skills correlates also with the evidence from child development, widely recognized as demonstrating a progression through skills of varying complexity.
Not all words are equally easy to learn, nor is every cognitive ability equally dependent upon language although some functions might be accomplished both pre-linguistically and post-linguistically using different mechanisms, so that continuity of function masks discontinuity of means.
To be honest, I wish I could write something deeper and more interesting about the case. Even when I find that I have not been engaged in an inner dialogue, it is like waking from a sleep, unable to recall a dream that fast slips away.
A Talk With Daniel L. Everett on Edge: The Third Culture. Stumble It! Image of Susan Schaller from her website. Frank, Michael C. Everett, Evelina Fedorenko, and Edward Gibson. Cognition 3 : Hespos, Susan J. Conceptual precursors to language. Nature Schaller, Susan. A Man Without Words. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whorf, Benjamin.
John B. Carroll, ed. MIT Press. Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, I have gone on to do fieldwork in Brazil and the United States, and look forward to a new project in New Zealand. I have also co-edited several books, including, with Dr. My research interests include psychological anthropology, sport, dance, human rights, neuroscience, phenomenology, economic anthropology, and just about anything else that catches my attention.
View all posts by gregdowney. It reminds me of the Darmok episode on Star Trek. The language barrier prevents anyone on the Enterprise from understanding what the Tamarians are talking about even though they can understand the actual words. Federation Universal Translators, although they successfully translate the words, present the syntax as almost nonsensical, because the Tamarians speak entirely by metaphor, referencing mythological and historical people and events from their culture.
The problem with communicating in this fashion is that without knowing the meaning of the reference, the metaphor becomes meaningless. One of the best indicators for progress in Autism is language ability. In some individuals I have wondered if the mental retardation causes the language deficits of if a damaged or limited language center creates the presentation of mental retardation.
I have seen mute kids who had excellent symbolic language ability who could make it in a regular classroom but never said a word for years. Conversely I have seen severely autistic kids just sit and rock, completely oblivious to the world around them even though their vision and hearing was ok. They would sit and howl for hours so they made noise, but had virtually no concept of language and symbolic communication.
So I agree: It is the symbols that make us human not our speech. I remember that episode! The drama is deeply reliant on the intricacies of theory of language. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in linguistics. It was recommended to me by a linguist; Russell herself is an anthropologist.
I i came to this after a conversation i came across and not really being able to convey why complexity seemingly requires language and that hits the nail. It is languege through which thought complexity comes about, but languege is the symbolism for any concept. So deaf people process in visual simbols of words or letters, i wonder what that is like?
My 23 year old son is somewhere in between your two descriptions of autistic people. He has some language. He also does quite a lot of stimming and may do some nonsensical movement for hours if I let him. He matters. I am sure they enjoy something. My son, though limited, likes to take long walks, absolutely loves listening to music.
His interests are very limited. If you give birth to someone without language, you still see them as human. I guess I am lucky because my son smiles at us and with his eyes he connects. He always has. The people you saw sitting and howling may have been very different at home with their parents. That said, I remember being a young speech-language pathologist before I had my son and seeing the most severely and profoundly impaired children and adults and pretty much thinking the same thing you were thinking.
Time and experience have changed my mind about what makes us human. Regarding the idea of entering into the language-less zone, have you ever considered psychedelic experiences?
I have experienced moments of languagelessness, which were also moments of conceptlessness. It became hard to interact with things because they have no names or purposes.
And yet I could take care of my self and follow people around. As a neuroscience grad student I manage sometimes to turn on the scientist even in or around! It strikes me that language is a grid that invisibly overlays action and perception, helping us navigate, but is nonlinear in that it enhances certain aspects of the world and diminishes others.
0コメント