Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley

Author:Matt Ridley [Matt Ridley ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007380855
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

YOUNG TONGUES

Critical-period imprinting is everywhere. There are a thousand ways in which human beings are malleable in their youth, but fixed once adult. Just as a gosling is imprinted with an image of its mother during the hours after birth, so a child is imprinted with everything from the number of sweat glands on its body and a preference for certain foods to an appreciation of the rituals and patterns of its own culture. Neither the gosling’s mother-image nor the child’s culture is in any sense innate. But the ability to absorb them is.

An obvious example is accent. People change their accents easily during youth, generally adopting the accent of people of their own own age in the surrounding society. But some time between about 15 and 25, this flexibility simply vanishes. From then on, even if somebody emigrates to a different country and lives there for many years, his accent will change very little. He may pick up a few inflections and habits from his new linguistic surroundings, but not many. This is true of regional as well as national accents: adults retain the accent of their youths; youths adopt the accent of the surrounding society. Take Henry Kissinger and his younger brother Walter. Henry was born on 27 May 1923, while Walter was born just over a year later on 21 June 1924. They both moved to the United States as refugees from Germany in 1938. Today Walter sounds like an American, whereas Henry has a characteristic European accent. A reporter once asked Walter why Henry had a German accent but he did not. ‘Because Henry doesn’t listen,’ came the facetious reply. It seems more likely that when they arrived in American Henry was just old enough to be losing the flexibility of imprinting his accent on his surroundings; he was leaving the critical period.

In 1967 a Harvard psychologist, Eric Lenneberg, published a book in which he argued that the ability to learn language is itself subject to a critical period that ends abruptly at puberty. Evidence for Lenneberg’s theory now abounds on all sides, not least in the phenomenon of creole and pidgin languages. Pidgins are languages used by adults of several different linguistic backgrounds to communicate with each other. They lack consistent or sophisticated grammar. But once they have been learnt by a generation of children still in their critical period, they change into creoles – new languages with full grammar. In one case in Nicaragua, deaf children sent to new deaf schools together for the first time in 1979 simply invented a new sign-language creole of remarkable sophistication.26

But the most direct test of the critical period in language learning would be to deprive a child of all language until the age of 13 and then try to teach the poor creature to speak. Deliberate experiments of this kind are thankfully rare, though at least three monarchs – King Psamtik of Egypt in the seventh century BC, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth

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