With or Without Language

In the special edition, “Becoming Human”, from “Scientific American”, there is an essay about human language acquisition. The article mentions the delicate tools made by Neandertals and whether it was possible to pass on such skills without speaking language.

A Japanese research team made a stab to conduct an experiment, which they divided a group of undergraduates into two teams. They taught one team how to make a typical Neandertal stone tool by spoken language; whereas the other one received no such teaching expect silent examples.

I agree with the author’s point of view that we cannot presume our thinking or method of doing thing is the only way to do business in the world. The experiment conducted by those Japanese researchers must remember that their subjects are modern human beings and those undergraduates have already developed a solid cognitive ability. Besides, the team that received only silent instruction possesses verbal language skills as well. I personally think such an experiment lacks of credibility.

The question lies at the heart of the issue: How can we know whether cognition and perception of our world can be developed without certain forms of language, be it spoken or written? Modern human beings’ linguistic skills and language acquisition involve more than one aspect whether it is cognitive, linguistic, and psychological.

We can only have theories-such as Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar-that assume our brains are pre-wired with some linguistic ability before other stimuli come into the process of language acquisition. After all, it is daunting to measure one’s perception and cognition in the area of language learning without losing subjectivity.