This was my first foray into the subject of the neuroscientific underpinnings of language, and I found especially interesting the connection between movement of the mouth and the "scanning ahead" of the brain for upcoming muscular direction. This connection between the sounds desired and the physical movement of the mouth to produce this sound is likely why a lot of non-native speakers of a language have a hard time getting their accent to sound natural. Because pretty much every language has sounds (and close-together progressions of sounds) that are distinctive to it, it takes a lot of practice to get these muscular progressions of the mouth to follow how the speaker intends them to sound.
The quote from the second reading, "different languages talk about the world in different ways", highlights the importance of learning a language with a native speaker for me. The way people make sense of things happening to and around them, is tied into - or contrasts against - things from their own lives, their family's lives, their national and local identity, their ethnic background, and their interactions with outsiders of these groups. Thus it takes immersing oneself in the culture of the language being studied to understand and appreciate the way people use the words and phrases they choose to represent meaning.
Last week, we had our first group lesson in Bahasa Indonesia with Julie and Thalia. Julie, who was leading the lesson, started out by discussing our previous experiences with the language and our goals for the semester. Then, she hopped right in and began teaching us nouns related to objects in our immediate surroundings and prepositions related to the objects' locations. I enjoyed this approach to the lesson, as it led to us speaking in Indonesian almost exclusively throughout the lesson. I was surprised about how much of the pronunciation I was able to model accurately after Julie's examples, which is a testament to my auditory learning style and my long-term exposure to Bahasa Indonesia last summer.
As I am one of three students in the group, it is very useful to have two native Indonesian speakers participating, as it gives us an opportunity to hear Bahasa Indonesia in an informal, conversational setting. This will likely be the style of language with which I will be interacting the most during my future research in Java.
Comments
Fascinating post, Zach. A great deal of language tends to be physiological. Language so closely connected to the brain, cognition, and muscular control of various mechanisms in the mouth, throat, diaphragm, etc. The question of producing and discriminating different units of language becomes a matter of practice, and developing a level of familiarity with dissimilar ways of thinking, speaking, and hearing the world around around you.
Regarding the intertwined relationship between culture and language, one of the six universal aspects of human language identified by Chomsky is creativity. If a culture does not have a word for something that it deems important enough to communicate, it will coin a new term, borrow a word for the idea from a different language, or perhaps combine different morphological components of other words already in existence to formulate a new lexical item. As an ideological position, and this begins to echo Wittgenstein here (strongly recommended reading for philosophically inclined students), there is no experience or stimulus that cannot somehow defy description in words. The question of what kind of activities could then ever be beyond the descriptive potentiality of speech comprises the departure of linguistics into the realms of semantics, literature, and theology.
I'm curious to learn more about your studies of Bahasa Indonesia last summer. What drew you to the language and culture? Why Bahasa Indonesia as opposed to some other language? Will your future research endeavors feature as scaffolded, task-based activities and goals in your learning plan?