If you find any of that interesting, I recommend reading this short interview, How to Quiet Your Mind Chatter in Nautilus Magazine with Ethan Kross, an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan.

Two relevant quotes:

"What we’ve learned is that language provides us with a tool for coaching ourselves through our problems like we were talking to another person. It involves using your name and other non-first person pronouns, like “you” or “he” or “she.” That’s distanced self-talk."

"The message behind mindfulness is sometimes taken too far in the sense of 'you should always be in the moment.' The human mind didn’t evolve to always be in the moment, and we can derive enormous benefit from traveling in time, thinking about the past and future."

Check out the full interview here.

Weaving back in a short poem to start our post:

The Influence Unseen of the Words We Use to Be

Part I: The Acculturation of the Mind

There is a fertile topsoil we are born with in our brains, imprinted by the interplay of sights and sounds and movement of those who interact with us. This immersive communicative theater, felt first in the womb, roots itself within the immediacy of each moment, even while gesturing at distant realms yet unknown. Climbing towards this mystery with our tongues and thoughts and technology bends the world toward our needs, and allows us to project our inner selves into the past and future. We ride rivers and build highways across our brains. This is our cultural inheritance, our storied legacy of language and literacy.

Part II: The Shadowed Underbelly of Words

Yet this glorified development harbors dissonance as well, darker truths of the animal and spirit world we project beyond ourselves and thus, distort. As we entangle each other in our webs of words, we may mirror and magnify influences unseen, that inarticulate undertow of us vs. them. When we summon forth our disgust and anger at someone or something else and wrap them into words until our vision becomes blinded, we may become its prisoners, trapped in the enchantment of language itself. As Alicia lived in the interlocution of the pages, the chatter of our minds can lead us unto rifts within. Do animals go mad, other than when rabies infects their brains? Language, in this sense, is viral, amplifying our extremes while shrouding our ensnarement. We can paint a veneer of progress over the denatured scars we leave behind.

The Deceptive Power of Language

In our last post, we ended with the suggestion that our enhanced language and literacy abilities may also occlude our connections with our wiser selves or with our natural world. This deceptive power of language is a fear that Plato raised long ago. In The Republic, Plato argued that poetry is a mere imitation of nature, and thus, inferior. Yet in this shallow deception lay great power, for the poet, through the use of melody, rhythm, and other “ingenious devices,” could take advantage of the irrational “weakness of the human mind. . . having an effect upon us like magic.” He therefore recommended that poets be banned from his ideal republic.

Echoes of these fears can be heard in The Kekulé Problem by Cormac McCarthy, in which he notes that the “unconscious is a machine for operating an animal,” and in fact “that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesnt much like language and even that it doesnt trust it.”

In The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World, by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, which we explored earlier in Language—like reading—may not be innate, they similarly note that language has evolved, and continues to evolve, far more rapidly than our brain architecture and biology can, and thus that there is something about the viral, statistical nature of language itself that has been culturally shaped for learnability to fit the human brain and continue to be passed on across generations.

One of the arguments I’ve been making through this series is that language and literacy development enhances and extends our innate capacities. Yet as with any technology that brings greater power, linguistic or literary enhancements may also be abused or misused. Any study of human herd phenomenon and its correlation to the exposure to and use of dehumanizing or manipulative words, such as bullying, propaganda, or mass killings can demonstrate this. One of the fears that accompanies AI is this very misuse of the manipulative properties of language.

We’ve explored some dimensions of this previously when we explored the enchantment that the stories we tell can have over us, such that when accepted uncritically, they can lead us to acts that would be absolutely horrific to our more rational or empathetic selves if we had not erected blinders around our own mind’s eyes and heart’s understanding. Those blinders are most likely erected and reinforced by the linguistic environment we exist within and the words we unconsciously use.

Bringing Critical Consciousness to Language

And it is here that this tension between our unconscious and language may be unpacked a little further from McCarthy’s pithy description (“the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal”) – for it may be that the more consciousness and rationality we can bring to our use of language, the more we can work to reduce the influence of harmful assumptions or generalizations; conversely, the more we internalize or use language unconsciously and uncritically, the more we may subject ourselves and others to harm.

There are a couple of lines of evidence that may reinforce this idea that are worth pursuing:

1. By distancing ourselves from our own selves by using third-person language, we can better empower ourselves to tackle psychological or emotional obstacles. Source: Stepping Outside of Ourselves to Help Ourselves
2. Similarly, by learning to speak another language, we can improve our decision-making and better cope with strong emotions when we switch between languages. Source: ‘I couldn’t believe the data’: how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making

Beyond language, finding a way to maintain peaceful communion with our own unconscious may also be an important counterbalance. Meditation, hiking, running, music, and many other such disciplines are methods of allowing our inner chatter to simmer down to the point where we can gain momentary glimpses of what it means to stand outside of it.

Furthermore, there may be something we gain in terms of well-being, health, and learning simply from exposure to and immersion in natural environments and tree canopy, as we’ve explored in The Influence of Greenery on Learning. Our increasing detachment from and destruction of a world inhabited by a diversity of animal and plant life speaks to this non-linguistic need – while at the same time, we are struggling to find the collective language that we need to re-connect to and value our beautiful planet. If we can find a way to connect our language to the world we live in without blinding ourselves–or allowing ourselves to be blinded by those who would capitalize off of our ignorance–then there will be hope for the future of our species, and that of many other species.

Talking is just recording what you're thinking. It's not the thing itself. When I'm talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I'm about to say. But it's not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There's certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we're about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting.

–Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

OK, so let’s take some stock of where we’ve been thus far in our explorations of the development of language and literacy.

We’ve spent some time poking at the notion of whether learning to read is unnatural or not, and landed on the conviction that terming it unnatural–though useful as a rhetorical device–may be less precise than recognizing that learning to read and write is more formal, abstract, and distal from the immediate context of human interaction – and thus requires more effort, instruction, and practice to master.

We then turned to the development of language and discovered that even here–despite the ubiquity and swiftness with which native languages develop anew in every child across our species–language may not be as innate and inborn as it may appear.

Both language and literacy have bestowed humanity with sacred powers for the transmission and accumulation of cultural knowledge that seems to–as of yet–have no ceiling beyond that of our own destruction. Whether this is natural or innate or not may be beside the point. What does seem to be clear is that we have something inherited within us that is unfurled and reified by the networks that are riven across our brains through storytelling, interactive dialogue, and shared book reading that connects spoken to written language, and further strengthened with the hardwon fluency we manage to achieve on our own across modalities, texts, and languages.

The question of whether and why it can be so very difficult for some children to achieve that fluency with literacy–and, sometimes, to speak and understand language–is of great importance to educators and parents. What are the environments and interactions, strategies or programs that are most effective in helping children develop automaticity with language and literacy? And furthermore, what equips students to master the decontextualized language of academic disciplines in both spoken and written forms? This is essential for children to flourish and expand their intellect beyond that of the present moment and project themselves into our complex world and into our collective past to shape our collective future.

This leads us to our next frontier: the relations between language and literacy and cognition. Are words and thoughts synonymous? Does one come before the other? Do language and cognition light up the same parts of our brains?

We’ve done some exploration on this front before. In a previous post, aptly entitled Language and Cognition, we explored neuroscience that suggests that the areas of the brain that are used for language do not fully overlap or build on nonlinguistic cognitive abilities. I should note this–much as on the question of whether language is innate or not–is an area of some controversy and debate. Yet if we agree with the arguments made by The Language Game and Rethinking Innateness, this seems perhaps not so strange. If the evolutionary drive and primary purpose of language is social and communicative, and if language is not innate, then it makes sense that those areas of the brain that end up being co-opted by and specialized for language are not necessarily those that already existed for problem-solving and navigating the world.

The Kekulé Problem

While pondering this issue, I read Cormac McCarthy’s last novel, Stella Maris and it brought me back to arguments he had made back in 2017 in a fascinating article, The Kekulé Problem, written for Nautilus magazine. The character in Stella Maris, Alicia, whose savant-like intellect and imagination seems only capable of fully coping with her world through the frame of her own extinction, gives voice to McCarthy’s arguments from that article, and I think these claims are worth investigating as part of our inquiry into the relation between language and cognition.

Why did humans develop language, while animals have not? And how did it spread like a wildfire through our species, despite the great similarity between our brain architecture with those of our closest animal brethren?

The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they werent there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated.

--The Kekulé Problem

The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

--Alicia, in Stella Maris

This vivid image of the emergence of human language as a parasitic invasion may be startling, but it seems an apt description of what occurred. Something seemingly metaphysical–something from another plane of existence that had been heretofore unmanifest in the physical world–funneled into the crevices of our brains, took possession of our tongues, and pushed our larynxes down our throats–and continued to evolve through the fumbling but repetitive “games of charades” we engaged in with each other.

But what is language, even?

There are a number of examples of signaling in the animal world that might be taken for a proto-language. Chipmunks—among other species—have one alarm-call for aerial predators and another for those on the ground. Hawks as distinct from foxes or cats. Very useful. But what is missing here is the central idea of language—that one thing can be another thing. It is the idea that Helen Keller suddenly understood at the well. That the sign for water was not simply what you did to get a glass of water. It was the glass of water. It was in fact the water in the glass. This in the play The Miracle Worker. Not a dry eye in the house.

--The Kekulé Problem

The shared understanding that one thing can stand in for another. This revolution in spoken and signed languages mirrors the much later cultural revolution of written language, in which arbitrary symbols can be agreed upon by a community to represent the parts of a word. This is the sacred power of language and literacy with which humanity has been gifted. And yes, I use the word sacred intentionally, because there is some evidence that the ceremonies and rituals associated with mythical-religious development in early human societies emerged at around the same time as language emerged. Meaning that language has developed through a communal engagement in ritualistic interactions with objects and sounds that became imbued with a meaning other than what they were in the everyday world.

We’ll get into that part another time, as it’s worth geeking out on, but let’s stick with McCarthy some more for now. He made the important point that language imbued us with the ability to communicate that one thing can represent another, and that this symbolic capacity is foundational to human civilization and our subsequent achievements.

But he then explores something more unsettling, and which was perhaps suggested by that research we investigated earlier on the surprising distinctiveness between language and cognition in brain scans: our brains, as with those of other animals, have been operating biologically for a very long time with an unconscious alacrity that serves the purposes of survival and navigation of our world very well. And the unconscious does not seem to prefer to communicate its solutions to us in a verbal manner.

The unconscious is a biological system before it is anything else. To put it as pithily as possibly—and as accurately—the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal.

Problems in general are often well posed in terms of language and language remains a handy tool for explaining them. But the actual process of thinking—in any discipline—is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it. . . .

. . . But the fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesnt much like language and even that it doesnt trust it. And why is that? How about for the good and sufficient reason that it has been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years?

--The Kekulé Problem

This somewhat disturbing account of the unconscious is clarifying in that it sets cognition against and apart from language and for examining their distinctions. The unconscious is capable of great feats of problem-solving that extend far beyond that of mere survival. Advancements in math and science abound with tales of sudden solutions to complex, theoretical, and seemingly intractable problems arrived at seemingly out of nowhere. Hence, Kekulé. Some research suggests that learning can be further solidified after a period of sleep.

Yet McCarthy’s argument doesn’t seem to fully account for the forms of cognition that can be enhanced by language and literacy. When we read something we are deeply engaged with, we enter a state of flow, in which the language on the page seems to enter into our stream of unconscious being. When we write, we grapple with the things we have been sensing or feeling but haven’t yet been able to articulate. In wrestling to put our words to the page, we are forced to formulate a more precise understanding that we may not have had prior to the effort. Perhaps then to be further rendered asunder or refined by our unconscious.

The argument I have mounted in this series is that languages and literacies drive rivulets and then torrents of increasingly interconnected throughfares in our brains that become strengthened the more automatic–and thus, unconscious–those languages and literacies become. And the more automatic and unconscious they become, the more cognition we have to expend on more targeted and specialized efforts, which have the potential to take us to higher and higher planes of ability. Think of the musician who practices every day, whose fingers unconsciously and without effort flutter, hold, and pluck across the strings in pursuance of a dynamic ebb and flow of a melody or feeling while at the same time working within a complex and formal structure.

We are exposed to and practice language every day from the moment we are born, which is perhaps why it develops so swiftly. But when we practice a discourse that requires more exertion, that is more decontextualized from our everyday habituation, when we first learn to read, when we first read a challenging or specialized or historical text, when we sit alone to write, when we debate with curiosity, and not with anger, a colleague, when we put together a presentation for a critical audience, we must put in the work over time to become more fluent in that form of discourse so that we can jam out at a higher level of virtuosity and feeling.

And yet, as McCarthy suggests, there may be something that we have lost when language invades our brains.

All sorts of talents and skills must have been lost. Mostly communicative. But also things like navigation and probably even the richness of dreams. In the end this strange new code must have replaced at least part of the world with what can be said about it. Reality with opinion. Narrative with commentary.

–Alicia, in “Stella Maris”

When written language emerged, Plato similarly warned against what might be lost. When we gain greater powers of symbolic representation and abstraction, we also gain powers that can be used for the manipulation of others. Yet is this more, or less brutal, than the animal world in which power is exerted purely by physical prowess and force?

What are some implications?

So where does all this leave us? Methinks there could be some practical implications from this extended rumination, despite how heady all this may have been. And certainly, there will be more to come!

Here’s a few I can think of:

• We must use or practice, extensively and repeatedly, what we want to learn.
• Some things in our world, such as language, lend themselves to more constant use and practice by nature of our context and environment.
• We must practice with precision if we are to extend our abilities beyond that of everyday functioning and communication. Our context and environment does not necessarily lend itself to such practice unless we have guidance.
• The nature of language itself seems to bear dynamical properties that our brains and our culture have been unable to resist.
• Yet the nature of our unconscious seems to operate somewhere beyond the bounds of language, even as language may extend the bounds of our unconscious.
• The ability to understand that one thing can stand in for another lies at the core of the technology of language and literacy.
• The more abstract and distant from our immediate context and environment and use a skill or tool is, the more exposure and guided practice is needed to wield it with fluency.
• The more we are exposed to and use decontextualized language in our speech from our youngest ages through storytelling, read-alouds, and dialogic interaction, the more readily we can take on written language.
• The more exposure, instruction, and practice (with precision through explicit instruction in handwriting and spelling) we have with written language from our youngest ages, the more readily we can take on disciplinary and specialized discourse and literacy.
• The more language and literacy we gain with automaticity across multiple modalities and languages, the stronger the interconnections across our brains can become.
• The more automatic our language and literacy abilities become, the greater our cognition could be expanded.
• And yet, our enhanced language and literacy abilities could also occlude our connections with our wiser selves or with our natural world. Finding a way to maintain communion with our unconscious may be an important counterbalance.

What do you think?

Before we venture into the wilds of the possible relations between language and thought, I wanted to build on this idea of how our inner scaffolds are most fully realized through speaking, listening, reading, and writing by geeking out about the beauty and wonder of multilingualism.

There was a beautiful study I came across recently that provides a great way to visualize this.

The researchers used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine neural connectivity during English word processing in bilingual (Chinese-English and Spanish-English) and monolingual children.

The study groups included children (ages 5-10 years, Grades K-4) who were English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, or Spanish-English bilinguals, all receiving English-dominant education in the US (recruited from southeast Michigan, USA).

The researchers found that the greater proficiency a child (across all groups) had in both spoken and written language, the stronger the farthest connections across their brains were. In other words, spoken and written language exposure and use made longer distance connections across the brain, and then strengthened and reinforced those connections.

Children who were older and more proficient in spoken and written English showed more long-distance connections within the broader language network and across the two hemispheres, suggesting that advancements in language skills are supported by more integrated neural networks. In other words, the development of short-distance connections supports more basic language functions, while long-distance integrative connections mark more advanced or efficient language processing in older and more proficient children.

Furthermore, among bilinguals they found that the greater proficiency a child had in two languages, the greater the neural density those language networks were. In Spanish bilinguals, the network density was associated with Spanish vocabulary, whereas in Chinese bilinguals, the network density was associated with Chinese character reading. Both groups showed greater network density in English in relation to their heritage language skills (most likely due to greater time spent in instruction and use with that language).

These findings suggest that language development is supported by both short and long distance connectivity in a child’s brain. Moreover, long-distance connections are likely critical in integrating different and more complex aspects of language processes such as phonological and morpho-semantic analyses.

What a wonderful visualization of how our inner scaffolds – the nascent neural networks in our brains – are developed by language and literacy! The more we use language across oral (or signed) and written modalities, the more we refine those networks across our brains. And the more languages we speak (or sign) and write, the more we further strengthen those networks based on the unique features of those languages.

We see this with students who are in dual language programs for multiple years – they begin to outperform their monolingual peers. We see with students who are former English language learners (ELLs) who achieve English language proficiency – after achieving proficiency, they begin to outperform their monolingual peers.

So not only do we want to provide our children with daily textual feasts – but furthermore, with linguistic knowledge-building feasts.

The Acculturation of the Mind

There is a fertile topsoil we are born with in our brains, imprinted by the interplay of sights and sounds and movement of those who interact with us. This immersive communicative theater, felt first in the womb, roots itself within the immediacy of each moment, even while gesturing at distant realms yet unknown. Climbing towards this mystery with our tongues and thoughts and technology bends the world toward our needs, and allows us to project our inner selves into the past and future. We ride rivers and build highways across our brains. This is our cultural inheritance, our storied legacy of language and literacy.

To Review

In the last post, we explored whether language acquisition is truly innate. We reviewed two books that each suggest language may not be as biologically innate as typically assumed.

Why do we assume that language is hard-wired into our brains? Perhaps because we witness how swiftly children acquire languages used by others around them, as well as the simple fact that language is the human endowment that most distinguishes us from other animals.

And: how else would children learn something so incredibly complex as the grammar of a language without explicit instruction?

Some have posited that we have something uniquely fundamental (a “universal grammar”) genetically baked into our brains that predisposes us to learn language.

A recent literature review, for example, Prerequisites of language acquisition in the newborn brain00136-4), highlights that newborns already possess core auditory and speech processing abilities that enable rapid language acquisition starting from birth.

And yet, as Rethinking Innateness suggested based on computational modeling with neural networks, and which continues to be confirmed by more recent modeling (as in this study, When Children’s Production Deviates From Observed Input: Modeling the Variable Production of the English Past Tense), very simple repeated learning interactions can swiftly lead to complex linguistic abilities.

Furthermore, as the exponential rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated, there is something about the statistical nature of language itself that can lead to creative, interesting, and even sophisticated responses from glorified next-word prediction.

As The Language Game outlined in a chapter, the languages we use to communicate have evolved, and continue to evolve, far faster than our brains can, so while clearly there is something about our brain architecture that lends itself to language, we don’t necessarily have specific areas of our brain that form from language genes, or even areas of the brain that are at first specialized only for language.

What we do have are brains that can reliably and rapidly wire themselves for daily language use across our progeny. And, on the flip side, a well honed cultural technology (language) that has become well-adapted to the curvature of our brains and the demands of our societies, even as it iteratively and recursively creates new forms.

When does learning need to become explicit?

Thinking of language in this way – as an acculturated bootstrapping onto our animal brain architecture that chisels into increasingly specialized areas that become automated for language – offers us an intriguing parallel into how we also talk about acquiring the ability to read. The argument about why learning to read can be initially hard – and thus requires explicit teaching – has rested on the idea that reading is “biologically secondary” and “unnatural” as an arbitrary technology, and that it therefore requires bootstrapping onto pre-existing aural, visual, and motor networks that were not originally made for it.

Yet if language itself is not necessarily innate either, then that means both language and literacy are in some sense biologically secondary – even as they have become culturally necessary.

Clearly, written language is harder–and takes more time and guided practice–to acquire than the spoken or signed form of a language. But is that because written language is unnatural?

Or is it because written language is more formalized, abstract, and distal from the immediate context of human interaction? Is it because learning to read and write demands more from us than the simple and essential interactions that lead to our everyday use of oral language?

Think about other things that are easier or harder to learn. There is much in life we learn simply by observing and then trying. Some of these things are not necessarily natural. Is it natural to pick up a plastic sippy cup or an octopus toy? Or is it that these technologies have become designed by our culture over time to conform exactly to the developmental demands of a child?

Think of the Pythagorean Theorem. Did you rediscover this theorem by playing with objects? Why or why not? What is it about such a concept that makes it harder to learn, and how and why do we learn it at all?

Much of what we learn is through repeated exposure and interaction with other humans or objects. We learn such things implicitly. This is how we learn our first language(s). But when learning is more formalized, more abstract, and more removed from the immediate context of interaction with our physical world, it requires more explicit teaching and guidance. Learning to tie our shoes, for example, begins to edge into the realm of requiring more explicit teaching, because tying a knot that can be easily undone is a more abstract concept and more difficult to achieve, with finer motor skills, than tying a knot that is harder to undo. It requires far more effortful practice than learning to sip milk out of a sippy cup.

Learning to decode written language is far more initially abstract than learning to decode spoken or signed language, and it requires more effort – and greater precision – to attain – and thus, more explicit teaching. Yet creating a sharp dichotomy between oral (natural, hardwired, biologically primary, innate) and written language (unnatural, cultural, biologically secondary) may also lead us astray.

It may lead us astray because we may think that if language is innate it does not need to be taught, while if reading and writing are unnatural, then they don’t also depend upon social interaction and implicit learning.

To Be Clear

Before I go further, I want to be clear about something. I’m not arguing for a “whole language” view of learning to read (that oral language and written language are largely synonymous). Nor am I arguing against the need to explicitly teach decoding (because learning to read is natural). Instead, what I am trying to do is both complicate and make more precise some of the narratives we have about learning language and learning to read. My hope is that we can eventually land in a space of greater clarity. Stay with me.

Everyday Language and Decontextualized Language

Human language – whether manifested in spoken, signed, or written form – exists along a continuum of immediacy and abstraction.

Everyday language, the language we use to communicate our needs to other humans and navigate the physical world, is quite rapidly acquired. We can use context and nonverbal cues and gestures quite effectively to complement and accelerate our everyday use of language.

But there is another form of language – often called decontextualized language in early childhood research and academic language for older children – that takes far longer to learn and develop. Some initial forms of it are conveyed and developed through oral traditions of storytelling, enlivened with characters, events from another time, and settings in other places. This narrative type of language is more decontextualized because it takes the speaker and listener beyond that of the immediate context and moment. Such language is also developed with young children through conversational interactions and responsive turn-taking with adults. Back and forth conversations allow children to try out new terms and ideas, while prompting them to explore and articulate their own thoughts, experiences, and emotions.

Yet where most of this kind of decontextualized language can be found is in written language. Written language tends to be more dense, complex, and abstract. Why is that?

By nature of being written, it is more formal (spelling has ossified, while sounds continue to shift) and constrained, while affording cultural transmission that can travel greater distances in time and space (i.e. knowledge can be passed onto future generations). But it is more abstract because it is removed from immediate context and nonverbal cues, thus there is more that is left out and that relies on inference based on shared, implicit knowledge. This lends itself to denser use of words, ideas, and sentences to try to convey more information more efficiently and precisely.

This type of language can begin to be introduced early in a child’s development not only by the methods mentioned above (storytelling, interactive dialogue) but furthermore by reading books aloud to children and talking to them about it. The language used in children’s books that are intended to be read-aloud is surprisingly sophisticated. This is why the recommendation for parents to read books aloud to their children is so critical to development. It exposes children from the beginning to more decontextualized language, which seeds the soil for later riches. And by talking with children about the books before, during, and after they read, children further develop more complex language through turn-taking and interaction around the content of the stories.

Reading and talking to kids about what we read builds the foundation for later literacy development – and literacy development enhances language and cognitive development. Reading books aloud, of course, will not teach kids the alphabetic principle nor how to decode words. But it is a crucial and critical foundation because it connects oral and written language.

And to reconnect back to the importance of storytelling and dialogic interaction, it needs to be made clear that simply listening to stories through screens is not sufficient to develop the kind of decontextualized language that leads to literacy. Researcher Horowtiz-Kraus and her colleagues have conducted research on children’s brains and how they are affected by exposure to screens. “There is no replacement for joint storytelling in engaging neuronal circuits related to future reading,” she says.

A Scaffold in the Brain

Notice how we have moved past simple frames of innateness and naturalness? Instead, we are talking about language and literacy – whether manifested in spoken, signed, or written form – not as a dichotomy but rather on a continuum between immediacy and abstraction. While oral language development clearly precedes written language development in early childhood, written language also scaffolds, accelerates, and enhances oral language development, and vice versa.

In other words, there is something nascent in our brains only fully realized through interaction, dialogue, and reading and writing.

Researcher Nadine Gaab and her team have scanned the brains of 140 infants with a familial risk for dyslexia and followed them over time. What they have found is that “babies as young as 3 months old have an underlying infrastructure that helps predict success in reading years later. . . “

“there is a structural brain scaffold in infancy that serves as a foundation,” Gaab explains. “Language and reading may be a process that refines this pre-existing brain scaffold” [Bold added].

From Scaffolding to Screens: Understanding the Developing Brain for Reading

While there may be something innate in our brains that readies us to receive language and literacy, it is not fully realized until those repeated, rich interactions with caregivers, stories, and texts are experienced. These interactions build fluency in our use of language, chiseling our brains into interdependent, specialized units that are then further interconnected and refined through reading and writing.

What’s next?

Landing on this idea of an inner scaffold in our brains that is refined and specialized by language and literacy sets us up to further explore how language relates to cognition. Are words and thoughts synonymous? Does one come before the other? Does language and cognition light up the same parts of our brains?

Stay tuned as we continue to explore these heady ideas in the next post.

Language is a uniquely human phenomenon that develops in children with remarkable ease and fluency. Yet questions remain about how we acquire language. Is it innately wired in our brain, or do we learn all facets rapidly from birth?

Two books – Rethinking Innateness and The Language Game – provide us with some fascinating perspectives on language learning that bears implications for how we think about learning to read and write, and furthermore, for how we talk about the power and limitations of AI.

A Review of Where We’ve Been

In a previous series, we pursued an interesting debate about whether learning to read is more unnatural than learning oral or signed languages. We also investigated the notion, frequently stated by “science of reading” proponents, that “our brains were not born to read,” while our brains are “hard-wired” for language.

While I agree with researchers Gough, Hillinger, Liberman and others that written language is more complex and abstract than oral language and—hence—more difficult to acquire, I’m not convinced that calling it unnatural is most accurate. Instead, I suggest terming it effortful.

In one of the earlier papers we examined, Liberman argued that oral language is pre-cognitive, meaning that it requires no cognition to learn and thus is more natural to acquire. He used this claim to counter the Goodmans’ assertion that oral and written language were largely synonymous, and that kids therefore could learn to read merely through exposure to literacy, rather than explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle (“whole language”). While I most definitely don’t agree with the Goodmans, I paused on Liberman’s claim with some skepticism, as there are a subset of kids who also struggle to develop speech and language skills, just as there are a subset of kids who struggle to develop reading and writing skills.

Liberman also made another strong claim that I paused on: that the evolution of oral language is biological, while written language is cultural (which parallels arguments that language is "biologically primary" while reading and writing are "biologically secondary," which I have also questioned, given that making the distinction is harder than it seems when social and cultural advancements are deeply interwoven with human existence over generations of time). But I mostly accepted this premise, as it seems to be self-evident that language is baked into our brains. After all, babies begin to attune to languages spoken around them even while still in the womb.

Liberman does not stand on his own in these assertions, I should hasten to add. I just bring one of his papers up because we spent time with it here. Noam Chomsky, for example, has long argued for a universal grammar, which is taught in foundational courses on linguistics, and the related study of generative grammars is alive and well.

Why is this important? It’s important because whether we consider language “natural” or written language “unnatural” bears implications for how we decide to teach them (or not). If we think of language as completely innate, then perhaps we don’t think it requires much of any teaching that is explicit, systematic, or diagnostic. Or conversely, if we think of written language as wholly unnatural, we may not consider how to strategically design opportunities for implicit learning, volume, and exposure.

Yet I have just read two books, written in two different decades, that provide some really interesting critiques against the widely adopted supposition that language is innate.

Language Models

The first book, Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, by Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi and Kim Plunkett, was published in 1996, and approaches language from the lens of neuroscience, explaining connectionist models and their implications for neural development and learning. These models are not only part of the lineage of the current renaissance of Large Language Models, such as ChapGPT, but also part of a lineage of models that have informed our theoretical understanding of how children learn to read, and may continue to inform explorations of “statistical learning.”

I was led to this book from a recommendation by Marc Joanisse, a researcher at Western University, when he commented on my tweet (are we still calling them that?) about research on artificial neural networks that suggests they can accurately model language learning in human brains.

It was a great recommendation, and I found the book extremely relevant to ongoing conversations about AI and LLMs today, in addition to providing key insights from connectionist models into language and literacy development that challenge assumptions around innateness, such as:

• Simulations show that simple learning algorithms and architectures can enable rapid learning and sophisticated representations, such as those seen in younger infant competencies, without any innate knowledge.
• U-shaped learning and discontinuous change also occur in neural networks without innate knowledge, due to architecture, input, and time spent on learning. This parallels studies of the development of linguistic abilities in children, such as the learning of past-tense and pronouns.
• The way in which neural networks learn new things can be simple, yet the learning yields surprisingly complex results. This complexity emerges as the product of many simple interactions over time (this point, written in 1996, seems incredibly prescient to me as a reader in 2023 using Claude2 to distill and summarize my notes from each book for this post).
• Connectionist models show global effects can emerge from local interactions rather than centralized control. Connectionist models also show how structured behaviors can emerge in neural networks through exposure to and interactions with the environment, without explicit rules or representations programmed in (which makes me think of statistical learning).

Language Games

The second book, The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World, by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, was published last year in 2022, and focuses more on cultural evolution and social transmission of language, arguing that language is akin to a game of charades that is honed and passed on from generation to generation. I happened to check it out from the library and read it concurrently with Rethinking Innateness, and there was some great synergy between the two, especially around challenging the notion that language is innate. Some of the key points of the book:

• Language relies on and recruits existing cognitive mechanisms, becoming increasingly specialized through extensive practice and use.
• Language evolves culturally to fit the human brain, not the reverse.
• Language is shaped for learnability and for coordinating with other learners, not for abstract principles and rules. Children follow paths set by previous generations.
• This cultural transmission across generations shapes language to be more learnable through reuse of memorable chunks (“constructions”).
• Due to working memory limitations, more memorable chunks survive, causing a design without a designer. These chunks become increasingly standardized over time.
• Language input must be processed immediately before it is lost (what the authors call the “Now-or-Never” bottleneck).
• Chunking sounds into words and phrases buys more time to process meaning.
• Gaining fluency with increasingly larger and more complex constructions of language requires extensive practice.

Across Connectionism and Charades

Together, these books provide a picture of language as an emergent, complex cultural and statistical phenomena that has evolved from simple learning mechanisms across generations. Rather than an innate universal grammar baked into children’s brains, language itself has adapted and molded over time to become essential to our human inheritance, as with clothing, pottery, or fire. Language emerges through social human communication and interaction. It becomes increasingly complex, yet also streamlined and standardized, without any explicit rules governing it beyond the constraints of our brains, tongues, and cognition.

This isn’t to say there isn’t something unique about the human brain architecture in comparison to our closest animal brethren—there clearly is—but rather that language has adapted symbiotically to that architecture, like a parasite, rather than specific parts of our brain that are genetically pre-determined for language.

Like reading, using language drives increasing specialization of our brain—and this specialization, in turn, drives greater cognitive ability and communicative reach.

There’s a lot here to unpack and synthesize, but I wanted to begin bringing these together, because just as I feel myself pushing against the zeitgeist when I argue that calling learning to read “unnatural” isn’t quite right, so too are arguments that learning language is not “innate” swimming against the tide. These two counterclaims are interwoven, and I think worth further exploring.

Consider this post the first in an exploratory series. We’ll geek out on language development and its similarities and differences to literacy development, maybe dig into the relation of cognition and language and literacy a little, and riff on the implications for AI, ANNs, and LLMs.