3 ms·

Hmmm, I'm not sure I like the experimental design. This reminds me of the economics "experiments" which claim that money is universal because prisoners spontan

Hmmm, I'm not sure I like the experimental design. This reminds me of the economics "experiments" which claim that money is universal because prisoners spontaneously use cigarettes at currency. However, the prisoners already have a motion of money from their time outside of prison, so are well conditioned to reimplement a money system in their new environment. Likewise, the kids in this study already have language (and even a shared language, German) from their daily lives. One of the fascinating parts of the NSL story is that many of the participants did /not/ have a language beforehand. There's even a radiolab interview with an NSL speaker who didn't have language for 27 years: 'He said he can't think the way he used to think. When I pushed him to ask about what it was like to be languageless, the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was exactly that. "I don't know. I don't remember."' https://radiolab.org/episodes/91730-new-words-new-world https://radiolab.org/episodes/91730-new-words-new-world

prismatix 4y ago
Okay, that's really fascinating that the older NSL speakers don't have Theory of Mind (something typically seen emerging around 5 years old) but the younger ones do.
simulo 4y ago
There is a longer section on the (dis-)connection between thinking and language in the second chapter of Oliver Sacks’ “Seeing Voices” (1989) including accounts by Deaf people, psychological research and philosophical ideas.
retrac 4y ago
I've seen the term "cognitive artifact" or "cognitive tool" used before, in the sense of a technique or trick that, once known, transforms a person's abilities and even ability to think. It tends to permeate everything. Arithmetic is an example. Looking at the terrain and being able to abstract that to a map, whether mental or in the dirt/on paper, is another example. "Categorization" is probably one - putting things into abstract classes and sticking a label on them. Artifact is an interesting choice of word for it; human-made and passed like a material object. Yet children tend to learn them so young, we can't imagine how we thought before we knew them. Written language, I think, is clearly in this category. Humans have had the physiology necessary for reading/writing for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. And yet we did not write. In recent history, individuals from non-literate societies simply exposed, without intimate detail, to the idea of writing, have gone and invented their own writing system shortly after. (The Cherokee alphabet is probably such a development.) What if spoken and sign language are like that? In discussions of the origins of human language, it is often framed as if an individual acquired a genetic mutation that allowed modern language usage and so they started speaking. But what if humans had the physiology necessary for a long time, but only made limited vocalizations, until someone or some group made the necessary mental leap, and so developed the process of abstraction and seemingly-infinite recursion that language allows? What if they successfully communicated it to others, and every human alive now is, in effect, culturally and mentally descended from them and their insight, unable to escape it even if we wanted to?

prismatix 4y ago

Okay, that's really fascinating that the older NSL speakers don't have Theory of Mind (something typically seen emerging around 5 years old) but the younger ones do.

simulo 4y ago

There is a longer section on the (dis-)connection between thinking and language in the second chapter of Oliver Sacks’ “Seeing Voices” (1989) including accounts by Deaf people, psychological research and philosophical ideas.

retrac 4y ago

I've seen the term "cognitive artifact" or "cognitive tool" used before, in the sense of a technique or trick that, once known, transforms a person's abilities and even ability to think. It tends to permeate everything. Arithmetic is an example. Looking at the terrain and being able to abstract that to a map, whether mental or in the dirt/on paper, is another example. "Categorization" is probably one - putting things into abstract classes and sticking a label on them. Artifact is an interesting choice of word for it; human-made and passed like a material object. Yet children tend to learn them so young, we can't imagine how we thought before we knew them. Written language, I think, is clearly in this category. Humans have had the physiology necessary for reading/writing for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. And yet we did not write. In recent history, individuals from non-literate societies simply exposed, without intimate detail, to the idea of writing, have gone and invented their own writing system shortly after. (The Cherokee alphabet is probably such a development.) What if spoken and sign language are like that? In discussions of the origins of human language, it is often framed as if an individual acquired a genetic mutation that allowed modern language usage and so they started speaking. But what if humans had the physiology necessary for a long time, but only made limited vocalizations, until someone or some group made the necessary mental leap, and so developed the process of abstraction and seemingly-infinite recursion that language allows? What if they successfully communicated it to others, and every human alive now is, in effect, culturally and mentally descended from them and their insight, unable to escape it even if we wanted to?