Babies and Babel

Yesterday was International Mother Language Day. We were invited to celebrate our own unique mother tongue, the one we learned as infants after losing our pre-linguistic ability to understand all language.

I am no expert on the development of speech cognition in babies. But the subject came up in a recent discussion I had with a colleague about software architecture and data processing ‘pathways’. The issue was the notion that when specific pathways are repeatedly called upon to deal with specific tasks they become embedded as preferences, they become more robust. And after a while other pathways which might have been conceivable in the state of processing innocence decay.

And the babies in all this?

The Seattle Post Intelligencer has more and it is fascinating stuff.

For 25 years, a steady stream of mothers and infants has trickled into a low-rise building on the edge of Portage Bay at the University of Washington. One sunny Monday this month, Janine Dodd and her 11-month-old son, Samuel, took their turn, making their way to a cramped room equipped with a chair, a loudspeaker and a darkened glass box set on a small table.

Samuel sat on his mother's lap as a research technician crouched across the table and entertained him with some simple plastic toys. A sequence of computer-generated syllables beeped from the loudspeaker. Occasionally, Samuel turned his head toward the box, which lighted up to reveal a stuffed bear beating merrily on a tiny drum.

It is, of course, an experiment, one that professor Patricia Kuhl has conducted thousands of times.

The syllables piped through the speaker for Samuel to hear are individual speech sounds, or phonemes, from languages all over the world. A string of identical syllables is played, and then the sound changes; a second or two later, the darkened box lights up and the bear briefly dances and drums.

It's a classic conditioned-response setup: If the baby turns his head to look at the box as soon as he notices the sound changing, he is rewarded by the performance of the bear.

Researchers can figure out what sound changes the baby recognizes by seeing when he turns his head. At 6 months of age, babies notice when the sounds change most of the time, no matter what language the syllables are from. But over the next six months of life, the babies get even better at perceiving the changes in sounds from their "own" language, the one their parents speak -- yet they gradually lose the ability to recognize changes in sounds that don't exist in their native tongue.

"Babies' brains are like computers without the printers hooked up," Kuhl said. Research indicates that babies track how often certain sounds occur in their parents' speech, where stresses fall on syllables and other complex patterns. They focus on the sounds that are significant and turn a deaf ear to others, and in the process prune or nurture different neural connections.

"By 6 months," Kuhl said, "babies' brains are being wired."

I thought back to the conversation about this experimentation yesterday. Will the baby merit a luxury suite in the Tower of Babel or have to settle for a broom cupboard?

What struck me as so unfair is the fact that the babies had no choice with regard to which of the world’s 6,000 languages their brains would be wired to.

To one of the languages spoken by only 4% of the world’s population? An incredible 96% of all languages fall into that disadvantaged category.

Some additional facts were in yesterday’s edition of the Gulf News.

·Over half of world's languages are endangered

·Over 50 per cent of the world's 6,000 languages are endangered

·90 per cent of the world's languages are not represented on the internet.

·One language disappears on average every two weeks.

·80 per cent of the African languages have no orthography.

The fact that my mother tongue is English is tantamount to saying that at the age of about six months I drew a winning ticket in the language lottery. Not the top prize, not the silver medal either. But bronze, given that English is the third most widely spoken language according to recent statistics.

1. Chinese* (937,132,000)

2. Spanish (332,000,000)

3. English (322,000,000)

4. Bengali (189,000,000)

5. Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)

6. Arabic* (174,950,000)

7. Portuguese (170,000,000)

8. Russian (170,000,000)

9. Japanese (125,000,000)

10.German (98,000,000)

11. French* (79,572,000)

Being an English speaker here in the Sandlands is helpful, of course. Nevertheless I feel a twinge of guilt, having promised myself that I would never settle in a country where I did not speak the language.

But I feel also relief. If I had been destined to have Arabic as my mother tongue I would have become one among 175 million. And if my only language were Arabic I might have cause for concern.

Yesterday’s article in the Gulf News also contained this paragraph:

The status of Arabic has recently been in the spotlight. Pointing to the language's decline, the 2003 UN Arab Human Development Report said that only 10,000 books were translated into Arabic in the last millennium - equivalent to the number translated into Spanish every year.

I cannot say I celebrated International Mother Language Day.

But it certainly gave me a lot to think about.