and even more striking, see the tremendous power of the sense of touch in this very touching scenario!
So, this is perhaps the most important window of opportunity we have, to lay down for the child a neural system that is maximally rich in connections and learning potential!
As you can see, every minute in the child(tm)s life at this age brings a momentous opportunity for brain growth through stimulation.
Hence frequent, intense one-to-one interaction between the child and the caretaker during this period of time is a must!
It is my opinion that only a stay-at-home mom and/or dad can best provide this essential treatment.
Another mega-window of opportunity appears to be birth until puberty.
According to the Nativists (E. Lenneberg for example) if one(tm)s first language is not established by puberty, then ability to develop language is lost!
The theory, that changes occur in the brain which...(next page please)
(continued from the previous page)...make language impossible to learn after puberty, seems to be born out in cases of individuals with severe brain damage.
If the left cerebral hemisphere is removed from infants, they can still develop language. But should the same damage occur in adults, recovery of language is impossible.
We are concluding that the nature of the stimulation children receive during this window will have a major impact on their language development.
There are, of course, intriguing reports of cases of stimulation at the extremes of the continuum. On the low end would have to be the wild boy of Avyron.
This was a homeless boy around 12 years of age, who at the beginning of the 18th century was captured in France.
He had apparently been abandoned, after his throat had been cut, at a very young age.
He differed from the many other street children that lived in the streets in those days, in that he had survived, not in town, but in the forests around Avyron.
He was truly a wild child, and aroused a lot of interest! Hence, he was sent to Paris to be examined.
He had no language nor any concepts associated typically with society and culture. A young medical student by the name of Itard received a government grant to try and teach him language.
The challenge was classic. Could a boy near puberty without any linguistic or cultural foundation be taught to speak?
Itard kept an excellent record of his attempts and techniques to teach "Victor," as the boy was called.
Although he was very creative and made significant advances, the effort in terms of its goals was fruitless.
While this outcome is what the nativists would have predicted, it does not, of course, prove the "Language by "Puberty" theory.
A similar, although more recent, episode involved a young girl in Los Angeles.
She was locked in a single room by an oppressive father and submissive mother for her pre puberty years.
Like Victor, Genie (that was the name they gave her) had no language, and yet no evidence of hearing loss or autistic behaviors.
After several years of intense training, attempts to make her a linguistic communicator failed. And the slim progress that had been achieved quickly deteriorated.
There was, of course, no control element for either of these cases.
Hence, one can not say for sure that other factors may not have been major contributors to the failure of language to develop.
Perhaps in the best of homes Victor and Genie would not have acquired language.
On the other hand, there are many interesting reports on the high end of the scale, involving intense early stimulation.
A very early account (1800) was given by a Dr. Witte about his son who appeared to be slow.
As a result of Witte(tm)s program of stimulation, the boy at six was now described as precocious.
He entered the University of Leipzig by nine, got his Ph.D. by fourteen, and became a Doctor of Law by sixteen.
Similar accounts can be obtained from the lives of famous men like Lord Kelvin (physicist), John Stuart Mill (philosopher), Mozart (musician), and Alexander the Great (general).
Caesar, that famous Roman Conqueror, had the special early experiences of riding into battle at the age of 3 with his uncle. However, we don't recommend for anyone to try this one at home!
More recently, an account appeared in the Tribune which exemplifies a philosophy of intense stimulation before kindergarten by one Los Angeles family.
Here is an excerpt from the article (in the notes) that describes their schedule of stimulation.
Whether or not this is an ideal regimen is open to a good bit of discussion.
I suspect, however, that when all is said and done, many parents (myself included) will recognize that they have had a tendency to error too much toward too little stimulation.
Hence this is a matter that deserves serious thought and planning by present and prospective parents.
Concepts are the second link in the language chain. Originally they occur as a direct result of stimulation. They are basically the brain's record of our contacts with reality.
Sometimes they are sparse and/or concrete (like our recognition of a pebble); but they can become abstract and involved (like our knowledge of superman).
If there is one thing we, as a species excel in, it is storing these bits of information in great volume.
Our recognition of countless items (from specks to planets) in our environment is a testimony to our awesome capacity to store concepts.
As amazing as some other primates are in their intelligence, they are no better at storing concepts than most of us are at swinging through the trees.
This alone for them would be a severely limiting factor, by human standards, for language development and its use as an communication bridge.
But for humans, the retention capacity for concepts, appears to be without end.
Whereas even the best computers will eventually declare that their storage capacity is full, I have never heard anyone say that their brain is full and they can not learn another thing!
Equally impressive to our amazing storage capacity for concepts, is our ability to retrieve them. I look out the window and see a rose.
How long did it take me to recognize it? It seems to me to be instantaneous. Yet there was a surge of electro-chemical activity in my brain prior to recognition.
In this brief activity the brain formulated a pattern and found a match for the rose from among hundreds of thousands of stored possible concepts.
These are all processes, however, and they can and do fail!
When this process fails, and we are unable to retrieve concepts for things we see or hear, they become unrecognizable to us.
This condition, which is receptive, is referred to as Agnosia.
It may be total, in which case the patients may seem deaf or blind, although their ears and eyes are functional. It may be partial. For example patients may recognize utensils as eating implements but not be able to discriminate between a fork and a spoon.
On the expressive side, is the process of retrieving information (concepts) to formulate a thought or an idea worth communicating.
When this process fails, one can experience an inability to think.
Even normal individuals experience a total blank under heightened stress.
Sometimes when giving a lecture, for example, I lose my train of thought and experience a mental void for what seems like hours. In this lapse I must struggle to draw up a concept to discuss.
This experience, however, even, when pathologically severe, is NOT called agnosia. Remember, Agnosia is a receptive problem.
When it's expressive it is called the, "I can't think of a thing to say!" feeling.
These conceptual thought processes alone (when they work) are skills enough to make humans masters of their world.
But humans take it one step further. They substitute in their minds fragments of sounds or sights for many if not most of these concepts. We call this the symbolic process.
Symbolization, the next link in our communication chain, at first glance seems like a totally useless cognitive skill with no survival value.
Upon closer examination, however, it can be seen to be an exceedingly effective currency for the transmission of our thoughts.
It is estimated that college students have around 100,000 words in their lexicon.
This number of words alone would avail humans of a fine grain of communication.
But the practice of putting words into combinations to express thoughts lifts any limits to its power.
With just a small number of words, the possible number of sentences that can be generated is astronomical.
Of course, equal to the prowess of humans to store symbols is their ability to quickly retrieve them.
When we hear words in running discourse, despite the need for the brain to search it's store of retained words (around 100,000) for each match, recognition seems instantaneous.
There is furious activity, however, in the brain as the processes of retrieval occurs with lightning speed. Listening is a very active and fatiguing activity. It requires as much attention and care, if not more, than weight lifting.
It is interesting to note, that neurons require more protein than muscle fibers to function effectively.
Like any process, the symbolic processes of retrieval can be disrupted. When this happens, we may be unable to substitute symbols for our thoughts, or derive meaning from symbols we receive.
This is a condition called aphasia.
If I have lost the ability to understand spoken, written or signed words, it is called receptive aphasia.
In this case, I have an additional problem in that I don't understand my own speech as well. The lack of feedback will cause my speech to steadily deteriorate into jargon.
Ironically, I may not be aware of these deficits and hence, see no need for speech rehabilitation.
In expressive aphasia we may wish to speak, but we can't remember the words, and/or the grammar/ and/or their pronunciation.
It can be a total inability, but more often it is a partial loss (dysphasia).
In a situation like this moreover, verbage stored in the right hemisphere may rush to fill the void.
Hence, swear words and familiar expressions like "I know," or "I wanna," may involuntarily be spoken.
The person, who is propositionally speechless, may nevertheless, be able to count to ten, and/or sing old songs.
Aphasia is not synonymous with mental retardation. I know an aphasic who can dismantle and reassemble a TV set, which I can't do.
But he can't utter a single sentence. For children, in particular, aphasia is a significant learning disability.
These children may be mistaken for being retarded and treated accordingly. This can create a self fulfilling prophecy.
Continuing now with the discussion of the Langauge Bridge, the thoughts and their symbols in our consciousness exist in the form of spatial and temporal patterns of electro-chemical energy.
It is those patterns that we somehow need to transmit to another person in order to communicate. Two more processes are involved here.
One process is performed by a transducer--a mechanism that changes energy from one form to another (eg., the speech mechanisms).
The other is performed by the mixer--a memory bank of pre-packaged neural blue prints for most voluntary motor movements. The mixer tells the transducer how to do it.
The Mixer is a process involving the storage and retrieval of motor patterns (like dances). It helps to explain a major mystery... how do we talk?
We do it a lot but we can(tm)t describe the actual motor sequences. That(tm)s because they are automatic and activated at a subliminal level from the mixer.
We started learning them when we were born. We built them from simple reflexive (involuntary) movements.
Bit by bit we added and combined short motor patterns, like "pa" into longer ones like "pa pa."
From there it was a short leap to,"pa pa give..." And then, "Papa please give me the keys to the car!"
Of course, mixer patterns are not restricted to speech acts.
They relate to all motor activities like eating, dressing, walking, playing an instrument, performing a dance, sports, etc.
Obviously this is a major memory commitment with its processes of retention and retrieval, and if problems occur in this area, strange and debilitating behaviors may result.
Disorders of the mixer, where the wrong motor pattern is elicited is called Apraxia.
It's analogous to having a jukebox retrieve the wrong record. You can get a tiny feel for this problem with the following exercise.
Cross your hands, palms touching and fingers meshed, and then rotate them back under and up keeping the fingers clasped.
Now have someone point to one of your fingers at random.
You may find momentarily that you can't move it. Other fingers may move as you search to make the connection.
Now imagine that this is how it is for you 100% of the time for your arms and/or legs.
This would be called a limb apraxia. If it involved your jaw, tongue and soft palate, however, it would be an oral apraxia.
There are children at all levels of school who have oral apraxia.
In some cases it is so severe that they never will learn to talk.
It is also important that they receive the opportunity to use alternate forms of communication, which includes computer technology.
This will enable them to fulfill their intellectual potential in school, and to play a more independent role in the social melieu.
The motor patterns from the mixer enervate the transducers to perform a delicate dance -- sequences of intricate, precise movements.
Transducers actually convert the electro-chemical impulses into mechanical, push-pull, energy.
In oral communication, these patterns consist of sound waves--expanding bubbles of compressed molecules.
We will be talking about the expressive and receptive transducers for oral communication in some detail later.
For now, I just want to discuss in general two parameters of transducers: structure and function.
Obviously, the structure has got to be there for the transducer to work.
For speech, you have to have a larynx (voice box), velum (soft palate), tongue, jaw and lips to articulate (not to mention a vast array of muscles).
If we didn't have a tongue, speech would be difficult, to say the least.
Now if you run your tongue along the roof of the mouth you encounter another structure vital to speech--the hard palate.
These structures form as the result of processes. It's a curious saga, for example how, the palate forms.
Unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy, who appears to have a nose and mouth pop neatly into existence, in humans the process is more bizarre.
At about 7 weeks after fertilization, lumpy growths have appeared at the head of the growing cell mass that is the baby.
They expand rapidly from above and from the sides splitting into several segments.
The segments quickly join and fuse, like a well machined puzzle, to form the face.
Hence, the upper lip and gum ridge, for example, is formed from three different segments.
If something interferes with the timing of this process, the face may fail to join or fuse.
In this case the child may be born with a cleft lip (right, left or both)--or worse. This occurs in 1 of 1000 births.
Regardless, at this point, baby has no roof to his mouth. The next growths to occur appear on each side of the oral cavity.
These proceed to develop into shelves that meet, first in the front and then progressively towards the rear.
By twelve weeks the fusion is complete and baby has a roof to her mouth (palate).
The front part will develop into immovable bone tissue called the hard palate.
The back part, will consist of flexible connective, and muscle tissue, called the soft palate (also called the velum).
It is the velum which moves to open and shut off the nasal cavity.
Failure of the palate to fuse by the twelfth week results in the birth of a baby with no roof to his mouth (cleft palate).
Without this structure, the child is unable create any oral pressure.
Negative oral pressure is typically necessary for sucking, although food intake can be achieved, with difficulty, using an assist from gravity.
Positive oral pressure, however, is totally necessary to the production of most consonants...and consonants, more than vowels, are critical for speech intelligibility.
As severe as this structural problem is on the development of speech, it is equally threatening to the development of language. The impact on the parent- child relationship is potentially disastrous, if not understandable. The mother has been enduring much discomfort in the anticipation of a tiny "cherub." Instead, she is presented with a child having an awesome hole where his/her face should be!
The overpowering disappointment may result in an initial rejection of the child by the mother.
In some cases the family may even disintegrate.
The end result is a serious reduction in referents (interaction with the mother) in those important first hours of life.
This can have measurable consequences months down the line.
This disorder can be more extensive than just a cleft lip or palate.
The openings can extend clear up to the eye sockets, which themselves, may be located on the side of the head, like a rabbit.
Despite these anomolies in structure, this would be my disorder of choice if I had to make such a decision. With today's medical advancement, the position of the eyes can be corrected surgically.
Most clefts can be repaired. Those that can(tm)t be closed can be prosthetically corrected.
Teams of specialists are available in hospitals that will coordinate all the services the child will need.
Included is a social worker, who will seek out funding sources for the child(tm)s rehabilitation.
Providing that the clefts are not part of a greater syndrome associated with other problems, the prognosis for a normal adult life for the child is outstanding.
When armed with this knowledge, parents can perhaps overcome their disappointment and be able to appreciate and accept the good qualities that their child possesses.
This will help to insure that the child will get those important early referents that help to create a strong cognitive and language base.
Even if the structures are all present, the transducer must also be able to function. The major impediment to function is paralysis.
Two kinds of paralysis are flaccidity and spastisity. Flaccid paralysis is a loss of strength in muscle movement.
A mild example (and a temporary one, I hope) is when I sleep on my arm and find it immobile in the morning.
I couldn't even make the sign for "help" in sign language because it takes two hands.
More serious examples are Infantile paralysis (which effected President Franklin D. Roosevelt) and Amy Lateral Sclerosis (which effects Steven Hawkings today).
In the latter case, speech eventually became impossible and communication must be accomplished through a man made transducer--a computer.
Equally debilitating is spastic paralysis. For just about every movement in the body, there are two sets of muscles involved--the agonists and the antagonists.
They must coordinate in perfect balance for each movement, no matter how small, to occur smoothly. When this process fails, the movements become jerky or locked.
Cerebral palsy is an example of childhood spacticity. This can be so severe that the child may never even learn to walk or crawl, let alone learn to talk.
Again, computers may be the only means available to communicate.
Continuing now, our discussion of transducers, the expressive transducer (speech) changes patterns of electro-chemical impulses in the speaker(tm)s nervous system into patterns of mechanical energy (sound waves) in the environment.
It takes a second (receptive transducer) to convert it back into electro-chemical impulses in the listener(tm)s brain.
The receptive transducer, that converts sound waves back into electro-chemical impulses, is the ear.
As remarkable as the ear is (and we will talk about it in depth later), it is nothing more than a transducer. It simply changes energy form.
Hence we do not really hear with our ears. Hearing is even a more complex process left to the devices of the brain itself. That is basically the realm of perception.
Perception is the structuring and organizing of those impulses that have been transduced.
It is the interpretation of those impulse patterns by the brain which become the NOW of our existence.
It is a bundle of neurological processes that work together to give us the experiences of sight, sound and touch.
We will be talking in detail about many of these processes later, but let me give one example now.
The energy of the signal for vision is electro-magnetic waves. Short waves are transduced to be experienced as a violate color and long waves as red.
There are shorter waves than violate, however, that our transducers aren(tm)t equipped to convert (eg., xrays and gamma rays) and likewise longer waves (eg., radio waves).
Lined up on a football field from shortest to longest electro-magnetic waves, the light spectrum we are sensitive to would occupy the width of a...blade of grass! We are, in an absolute sense, severely visually impaired.
The case is similar for hearing. Curiously, however, this may be a good thing, since the brain can only process per unit of time, 7 bits of information. Try to remember a 14 digit telephone number and you will see what I mean.
The transducers, limited as they are, all take in more information than our brains can process.
To keep from being over-laoded, the brain will structure the incoming stimuli into two fields: the figure and the ground.
The figure is the portion of the stimuli that is relevant to our immediate needs. It is strengthened and accentuated in our experience.
The ground is the remaining portion of the stimulus input. It is suppressed in our consciousness.
Hence, a much lesser stimulus array needs to be actually processed by the brain.
When the figure-ground process fails, the end result is a stimulus overload.
The child or adult's brain is bombarded with everything that has been transduced, much of which is irrelevant to our needs.
The end result is confusion, distractibility, emotional overly and poor understanding.
When all the processes are working, however, the stage is set to effectively join those human computers we call the brain.
This then, is the Language Bridge--from referent to concept to symbol to mixer to transducer on the expressive side; from transducer to perception to symbol to concept to referent on the receptive side. This forms the basis for the analysis of language processes or tasks. This is called TASK ANALYSIS.
CONTINUING ON
TO TASK ANALYSIS
RETURN TO
TOPIC 2
GETTING BACK
TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS
Puberty signals the end of another window of opportunity.
The Wild Child of Avyron was 12 years old when they tried to teach him language.
The Wild Child of Avyron was not able to learn language.
The "Wild Child" of Los Angeles was not able to learn language either.
Some pretty wild scholars received intensive early stimulation.
Are we stimulating our infants and toddlers enough?
Concepts are internal representations in the brain of outside referents in the world.
Two important parameters for Concepts are Retention and Retrieval.
When the process of retrieval for concepts fails receptively, we may find that familiar referents are now unrecognizable to us--AGNOSIA
When the process of retrieval for concepts fails expressively, we may find that we can(tm)t think of a thing to say--the, "My mind had gone blank," feeling.
Symbols are substitutes for concepts in the thought process.
Two important parameters for Symbols are Retention and Retrieval.
When the process of retrieval for symbols fails, we may find that words are now unrecognizable to us--APHASIA
When the process of symbol retrieval for language fails, we may find that rote phrases & songs from the right (non language) hemisphere take their place.
The Mixer provides a process involving the storage and retrieval of a myriad of learned motor patterns.
We have been learning and storing motor patterns in the Mixer since birth.
When the process of retrieval for motor patterns fails, we may find that we make the wrong movements--APRAXIA.
A Transducer is a mechanism that provides a process to changes energy patterns (signals) from one form to another.
Two parameters of the Transducer are Structure and Function.
When problems occur in the growth process of the face, the face parts may not fuse causing a structural deficit.
In the Expressive Transducer--The Lips, Hard Palate and Velum (Soft Palate) are structures necessary to create oral pressure for speech.
Consonants are essential to speech intelligibility and require oral pressure to be produced.
Cleft lip and cleft palate can cause additional problems of parental rejection which results in a deprivation of important referents for the child.
Parents need to know that the prognosis for a normal life for the Cleft Lip and/or Palate child is extremely good.
The major impediment to the Expressive Transducer's function is Paralysis
In cases of paralysis the function of the Expressive Transducer (speech) may be emulated by computers.
The Receptive Transducer for Aural Communication is the ear. It is the Perceptual processes, however, that enable us to hear.
The Receptive Transducers converts only a small portion of the stimulus, but it is more than the brain can process.
Figure-ground discrimination is one perceptual process.
The Language Bridge is a chain of processes which joins two human brains.
