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Biolinguistics and the Implication for Teaching

Language on Young Learners


Abbas Achmad Badib
IKIP Surabaya
Abstract: The majority of foreign language teachers tend to
believe that there is a significant different approach in terms of a
teaching strategy dealing with the first and second language
instructions. Can those different approaches be substantiated by
our sound justifications based on our proper understanding and
essential knowledge of language processes? Generally speaking,
our understanding of the nature of language acquisition in terms
of biolinguistics is only partial. Therefore, this paper attempts to
explore the biological aspects of the process of language
acquisition by a child and then compare it with the developments
of the birth of language. In other words this paper will examine
very briefly the micro and macro evolutions of language. Central
to this discussion are the neurological developments in the brain,
which are responsible for language planning and the speech
apparatus responsible for language productions. By examining
the two related activities, we can then study how language is
actually carried out by human beings, both first and second
language acquisitions. After developing a proper understanding
of the biological aspects of language, we can thus explore further
the best way of language processes. This may constitute a new
insight of language teaching because so far, relying on linguistic
theories alone, it is often difficult to obtain the most acceptable
information regarding the nature of first and second language
teaching.
Key words: biolinguistics, neurological developments, speech
apparatus, language evolution and language acquisition.
It was not until two and a half years ago that I began to seriously look
at the biological aspects of language which are generally known as
biolinguistics. What triggered my interest in that subject was because of a
consecutive publication by the National Geographic and the Time which
dated June 1995 and July 1995 respectively. Both magazines wrote, in their
covers, related and interesting topics: `Quiet Miracles of the Brain' and `In
Search of the Mind'. The two revealing articles which were accompanied by
coloured pictures of the angiogram, discussed almost the same problems: the
mysteries of the structure and the function of the brain and language
processes. Below are some examples of the findings (Picture 1 & 2).
Learning means forming new connections between neurons, a process most
intense in childhood ... In fact during these years a child's brain has many
more connections that do an adult's and uses twice as much energy.
Language is so complex that nouns are processed in one part of the brain
and verbs in another...................................... Both sides of a woman's brain
are used in processing language; a man 's mind is more compartmentalized.
These two articles were revealing indeed because in the past there were a lot of
linguistic concepts as the one quoted above- the younger one learns a foreign language
the more likely he will gain a better result- were simply taken for granted without
proper understanding of the brain mechanisms of the language acquisition. I began to
realize that how poor my understanding of the brain structure and language
productions. And also I never knew that there were different locations in the brain,
which are actively involved prior to the vocalizations where speech apparatus is acti-
vated. Another serious problem which needs to be addressed is the concept of
innateness-possessed from birth- of language with its language-acquisition device,
which is commonly known as LAD, a fundamental concept incorporated in Chomsky
'
s
work. As for this universal concept Chomsky says
Thus what was maintained, presumably, is that a child has an innate theory
of potential structural descriptions that is sufficiently rich and fully
developed so that he is able to determine, from a real situation in which the
signal occurs, which structural description may be appropriate to this signal,
and also he is able to do this is part in advance of any assumption as to
linguistic structure of this signal (Chomsky, 1972: 32).
And humans, species-specific property or character basically monopolizes LAD,
which must be put into operation. Humans differ from apes in that apes are unable to
speak as human does even if genetically we are related to apes (95%). According to
Darwin our direct ancestors are man apes. Thus biologically we are very close to apes.
Therefore it is important for us to know first why apes fail to speak like us and second
when actually humans began to acquire language. In other words whether it is possible
for us to guess the birth of language. This necessarily implies that there is a close
correlation between the evolution of the brain and speech apparatus which took place
between 400.000 and 300.000 years ago (Tatterstall, 1988: 540). With that information
it is expected that it will help us understand the nature of language production and
acquisition and consequently it may shed
a new light on teaching strategies with a special emphasis on a second language
learning.
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
As I have mentioned above, how much do we know, as teachers of language,
about the structure of the brain responsible for processing language? Is there any
difference between the first language and second language acquisition
biolinguistically? The majority of foreign language teachers tend to believe, while
others are non-committal, that there is a significant difference in terms of a teaching
strategy dealing with the first or second language instructions. Can those different
approaches be substantiated by our sound justifications based on our proper
understanding and essential knowledge of language processes? Generally speaking, our
under-standing- if we understand it at all-the nature of language acquisition in terms of
the biology of language, is only partial. Therefore, this paper at-tempts to explore the
biological aspects of language developments including neurological developments
which may be able to throw light on the process of language acquisition by a child and
then compare it with the developments of the birth of language. In other words this
paper will examine very briefly the micro and macroevolutions of language. Central to
this discussion are the neurological developments in the brain and the speech apparatus,
which are responsible for language planning and implementations. By examining the
two related and coordinated activities then we can study how language is actually
acquired by human beings whether it is the first or second language. After developing a
proper understanding of the biological aspects of language we can thus explore further
the best way of dealing with language teaching. This may constitute a new insight for
the language teacher because so far relying on linguistic theories alone it is often
difficult to obtain the most acceptable information, if not conflicting, regarding the
nature of first and second language teaching.
The brain of a normal human adult which ranges between 1000 and 2000 grams
with the average around 1330 gram makes up about 2 percent of the body weight and
consumes as much as 20 per cent of metabolic energy at any given moment. It may
contain as many as 10.000 million neurons which grow at a very rapid rate of two and a
half million per minute at the early stage of pregnancy. Based on this it is important to
inform the expecting women that nutritious food is a necessity in order to stimulate the
normal growth of neurons.
It is generally understood that brains of females are lighter and those of males
only because of the differences in body size Jones at all, 1992: 115). It is important to
note, however, that the ratio between the brain of the newborn males and females is
380: 384.2 (Young, 1974: 222). Thus the brain of females at birth is heavier compared
to male counterpart. Despite of the fact the brain of an adult male is heavier than that of
the female counterpart, the latter can handle the language better (Aitchin, 1996: 218-
219). She says that one half of the human race, the female half, may be `better
'
at
language than males. Women perform better than men on a wide range of verbal skills
do; though men outperform at spatial tasks. She further states that this difference is
apparently due to hormonal differences, which affect the embryo, though the details are
disputed. One long-standing view is that men
'
s brains are `lateralized', with abilities
more firmly located in one hemisphere than the other, though recent studies have not
all sup-ported the lateralization claim. A controversial evolutionary interpretation is
that early human-gatherers may have taken on different roles. For example men were
responsible for hunting large game, which may have required long-distance travel and
an ability to find their way about while women gathered food near the home, looked
after children, and talked to them and to each other. These circumstances might have
dictated the gradual needs of sign and verbal communications, which functioned as the
embryonic stage of language development. That type of communication would be
better termed as an iconic communication rather than a conventional communication as
the one we use nowadays. Besides the early language developments can provide a
clearer concept of semiotics and pragmatics.
With regard to the size of the brain of male and female as mentioned by Aitchin
above it is important to note that the size of the brain does not guarantee the degree of
intelligence. The argument is that a bigger brain could be worse because it impedes
rapid communication between neurons within the brain (Swerdlow, 1995). For two
centuries, popular and scientific opinion assumed that intelligence is determined by the
brain size. As a result, studies of the brain have focussed on this measure, at the expense
of others. This study has been misused in the study of racial, sexual and individual
differences. There is still no proof that bigger brain means smarter (Jones et al, 1992:
115). This scientific, expensive and difficult experiment has been wasted because of the
false assumption. But this type of experiment does not deter neuroscientists who want to
unravel the mystery and challenging object. This is evidenced by the result of imaging
pictures re-ported by Gorman ( Picture 3). The picture clearly shows that both sides
of a woman's brain are used in processing language while a man's mind is more
compartmentalized. The report mentions that men are good at spatial orientation,
architects, and problem solving while females are good at communication, verbal and
nonverbal and reading comprehension. Readings of MRI scans suggest one reason:
women seem to have a stronger connection between the two halves (hemispheres) of
the brains. This finding is not always true, though, because the converse of the finding
can also be found. Another important finding of the imaging is that it turns out that
language activities are produced in various locations in the brain (Picture 4).
BRAIN MATURATION, THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH APPARATUS AND
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
There are lots of components of human anatomy and physiology which are
involved in producing speech, but two fundamental systems must be present: (1) a
brain and associated nervous system sufficiently sophisticated enough to capture,
integrate, and direct the transmission of information, and (2) peripheral anatomical
system, what we generally call them speech apparatus or vocal tract, which is capable
of producing rapid, articulated sounds (Tatterstall, 1988: 539). The largest of thc brain,
which is divided into two hemispheres hosting frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal
lobes, contains an outer layer of gray matter called cerebral cortex and underlying
white matter that relays information to the cortex. The cortex, of which its folds
increase its surface and the number of neurons-make them possible to perform complex
calculations, handles most sophisticated functions of the brain, from processing visual
images to thinking and planning. There are two main areas in the brain which play
central roles in language acquisition, language reception hosted in the Wernicke's area
and language expression and speech hosted in the Broca's area. Temporal lobe
'
s task is,
among other things, to process sounds, control aspects of learning, memory, language
and emotions. Hippocampus helps establish long-term memory in the regions of the
cerebral cortex.
The nervous system is one of the recognizable features of a human embryo. Its
earliest form, the neural tube, closes at about three weeks. By seven weeks the brain
and spinal cord have emerged and by twelve the brain is the size of a large pea. At birth
it is about a quarter of its adult size. Only a few parts of the brain-the deep spinal cord
and the brainstem connections ( motor nerves, tactile sensory nerves, the optic nerve
and the optic nerve- the vital nerves which are vital and essential for life to start)-are
mature at birth. Innate behavior, such as thumb sucking, crying, are
probably controlled by the sub-cortical systems. The sub-cortical auditory pathways
mature in the few months, along with the inputs to the visual, and social smiling and
laughing in response to social interaction begin to develop during this period. From
Picture 2 we notice that each nerve system works interdependently with each other
particularly those nerve systems which begin to function immediately after birth but
they mature at different rates. Generally these nerve systems develop rapidly at this
stage and highly sensitive and elastic due to the growth energy which at sometime later
it can inhibit the growth. The result is the growth slowly declines (Jones et all , 1992:
131). Visual abilities are the first to reach adult levels. The beginning of babbling
probably depends on the maturation of the cortical auditory path-ways, but maintains
its somewhat random character because the still-immature state of the motor and
auditory systems. The maturation of pyramidal (cortical) motors systems and of the
inputs to the tactile cortex correspond with the appearance of simple word mimicry and
skilled locomotion behaviours, such as walking.
The ability to create meaningful sentences and the acquisition of syntax do not
begin until auditory cortical connections are well on the way to adult levels and do not
reach a mature form until cortical associations are approaching mature levels in mid-
childhood. The late maturation of the corpus callosum (the large bundle of nerve
fibbers linking the two cerebral hemispheres) parallels the progressive specialization of
the left hemisphere for language. Before the age of 5 years, damage to the left
hemispheres can be partially compensated by the right hemisphere.
On the physical level we notice that the lips, tongue and the palate of the
newborn infants are sufficiently mature to allow for sucking, swallowing, and simple
phonation, but many structural and functional changes must take place before words
and phrases can be uttered. Compared to adults and older children, infants have a
relatively small mouth cavity and a large, relatively immobile tongue. These lips are
shorter, smaller, and less mobile. The soft palate and the epiglottis are very close,
similar to the position of an adult chimpanzee
'
s soft palate and epiglottis. The speech
apparatus of the chimpanzee is similar to that of the speech apparatus of Homo erectus/
Javanicus Erectus who lived approximately between 1.800.000-600.000 years ago. This
position of vocal tract prevents a child or a chimpanzee or Homo Erectus from
producing normal vowels or consonants as produced by children or adults. As a baby
gets older and older the epiglottis will lower down and this change will allow the
mouth chamber gets bigger. In other words the maturity of the speech apparatus or
vocal tracts or organs of
speech stimulate the developments of language. This process is a kind of the evolution
of vocal tracts of modern human in a micro scale compared to the evolution of Homo
Erectus to Homo Sapien which took place million of years. Technically speaking there
is no real vocal tracts because as I have indicated above that the tongue has a primary
task, that is for licking or swallowing, teeth for biting, lips for sucking, the vocal cords
for protecting lungs from the intrusion of foreign objects entering into our body and so
on. Thus the primary roles of the vocal tracts are for the survival of human beings.
What we have observed is that the delay of the maturity of the vocal tracts is in
fact quite strategic in the sense that it provides the opportunity to the maturity of nerve
systems, which will be activated immediately after birth. The interplay between the
nerve system and environments will cause the changes or growth of the nerve system
until fully function such as the acquisition of language.
The speech mechanisms developing in the brain which are located in different
areas are called innate but the functioning of the nerve systems will be determined by
the inputs going through the brain. Therefore the process of language acquisition is
closely associated with the brain maturation and the developments of vocal tracts.
Viewed in this way the language acquisition and language development are the result
of the integral developments and the product of the observable, speech apparatus and
the unobservable, neurological components which are sometimes regarded as mys-
terious. The language acquisition develops from pre-speech to speech involving
changes in the anatomy and control of vocal motor apparatus. Most importantly, during
these critical periods infants are extremely sensitive to the linguistic environments.
This is because the 10.000 million neurons in the brain of a child are very sensitive to
incoming stimulus and these neurons will form dendrites as the result of, among other
things, the sounds received from the environments including language. The formation
of neurons and the connections between axon terminal and the synapses are very
sensitive at the early stages and can be easily determined and influenced by various
factors, such as proper exercises, experience including learning language (languages).
Thus the total inputs of the daily communication is processed by all nerve systems
.which eventually phonological patterning, phonetic implementation, semantic
development, syntactic formation and all kinds of linguistic components. The
formation of the concepts of meaning is thus developed by means of the integral
developments of the senses of smell, taste, sight, hearing and touch. All of these nerve
systems are acti-
vated simultaneously when communications take place verbally and non-verbally. Each
nerve system develops and matures individually depending on the nature of the nerve
system, For example the auditory nerve has developed at birth but it develops very
slowly because the maturity of this nerve system depends on the interplay between this
nerve system, the stimulus and the maturity of the speech organs. This is what I call it
the microevolution of the nerve systems and the speech apparatus. This probably what
determines the intelligence of a child: to develop optimally all the nerve systems and
the associated dendrites available to him. Remember that our brain contains as much as
1 billion neurons. Otherwise the neurons will be left unoccupied, underdeveloped and
redundant (See Picture 1).
The stimulus received by the individual nerve system helps form new dendrites
quite easily. The more stimulus a nerve system receives the more dendrites will grow.
This necessarily means that the more concepts will be established in the brain of a
child. The nerve system will always process any kind of stimulus coming into the brain
of a child regardless of the first or second language because the nerve system is still
responsive to any stimulus at the very early stage. Biolinguistically, the nerve system
will treat the stimulus, the first or second language, in the same manner. What it means
is that learning language at the early age is crucial to acquiring language natively
because beyond the critical period, for example, after the age of 5 is far less effective.
A large body of research shows that in addition to the sensitivity to sounds, including
prosody, infants can distinguish many phonetic contrasts of speech at very young age
(Krasnegor et all, 1991: 351). Therefore we can conclude that learning language
(including foreign language) at the early age is preferred to a later stage.
CONCLUSION
This paper provides a further support and clarifies our understanding,
biolinguistically, that learning language is best done at the early years be-cause learning
means forming new connections between neurons, a most intense in childhood.
Neurons, which are activated during the critical periods, will form and establish
permanent impression/experience by way of developing the language functioning as
means of communication. Beyond the sensitive periods learning language will be far
less effective. What needs to be explained is that how our brain recalls the stored
information which is located in the hippocampus within the temporal lobe related to the
first and the second language: how the nerve system organizes them.
Picture i

Picture 2
Picture 3

Picture 4
REFERENCES
Aitchison, J. 1996. The Seeds of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. 1972. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachussets: The
M. I.T. Press.
Jones, S. et all. 1992. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Cambridge:
University Press.
Krasnegor, N. et all. 1991. Biological and Behavioral Determinants of Language
Develop- Met. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lecours, A. R. et all. 1983. Aphasiology. London: Bailiere Tmdal. Lieberman, P.
1972. The Speech of Primates. The Hague: Mouton. National Geographic. Vol.
187, No. 6, June 1995.
Oatley, K. 1972. Brain Mechanisms and Mind. London:Thames and Hudson.
Tatterstall, 1. et all. 1988. The Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory.New
York: Gar-Land Publishing.
Time. July 31, 1995.

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