Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1988-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The child, then, is not taught grammar; nor does he learn it; he constructs it from the ‘meager and degenerate data’ at his disposal. And this would not be possible were the grammar, or its possibility, not already within him, in some latent form that is waiting to be actualized. There must be, as Chomsky puts it, ‘an innate structure that is rich enough to account for the disparity between experience and knowledge.’

This innate structure, this latent structure, is not fully developed at birth, nor is it too obvious at the age of eighteen months. But then, suddenly, and in the most dramatic way, the developing child becomes open to language, becomes able to construct a grammar from the utterances of his parents. He shows a spectacular ability, a genius for language, between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six months (this period is the same in all neurologically normal human beings, deaf as well as hearing; it is somewhat delayed, along with other developmental landmarks, in the retarded), and then a diminishing capacity, which ends at childhood’s end (roughly at the age of twelve or thirteen). 89

89. The notion of a ‘critical age’ for acquiring language was introduced by Lenneberg: the hypothesis that if language were not acquired by puberty it would never be acquired thereafter, at least not with real, native-like proficiency (Lenneberg, 1967). Questions of critical age hardly arise with the hearing population, for virtually all the hearing (even the retarded) acquire competent speech in the first five years of life. It is a major problem for the deaf, who may be unable to hear, or at least make any sense out of, their parents’ voices, and who may also be denied any exposure to Sign. There is evidence, indeed, that those who learn Sign late (that is, after the age of five) never acquire the effortless fluency and flawless grammar of those who learn it from the start (especially those who acquire it earliest, from their deaf parents).

There may be exceptions to this, but they are exceptions. It may be accepted, in general, that the preschool years are crucial for the acquisition of good language, and that indeed, first exposure to language should come as early as possible – and that those born deaf should go to nursery schools where Sign is taught. It might be said that Massieu, at the age of thirteen and nine months, was still within this critical age, but clearly Ildefonso was far beyond this. Their very late acquisition of language could be explained simply by an unusual retention of neuronal plasticity; but a more interesting hypothesis is that the gestural systems (or ‘home signs’) set up by Ildefonso and his brother, or by Massieu and his deaf siblings, could have functioned as a ‘proto-language,’ inaugurating, so to speak, a linguistic competence in the brain, which was only fired to full activity with exposure to genuine sign language many years later. (Itard, the physician-teacher of Victor, the Wild Boy [see pp. 9-10],

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