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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Re: Pre-adolescent children typically possess better linguistic learning abilities than adults, making it easier for them to learn a new language. But this ability normally disappears around adolescence and why this should happen remains unclear. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Kita suggests that this could have had an evolutionary advantage, helping to reinforce linguistic bonds by making it more difficult for those who grew up outside of a social group to learn its language.</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS'"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">hb: This quote from the article below is an extremely interesting suggestion about the origin of language. It hints that language may have developed as an individual display mechanism, a way of showing off your powers to impress other males or to seduce females. It also suggests that language evolved with a dual purpose--not just to show off the power of your brain, but to show off the power and identity of your group. It was a group display device as well as an individual bit of flash.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">And it was a group bonding mechanism. Then there's its function in communicating and all that that entails, culture-building, sharing tips and secrets, gossiping and keeping others in line, coming up with complex plans, coordinating strategies, negotiating alliances and trades, frantically gabbling to others about your latest techno-dreams, putting down folks you want to rise above, praising those whose favor you thirst for, and in the process of your snobberies and imitations of those above you creating the basic units of large-scale social structures. </SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt">Talk about multi-tasking. Language may have evolved with five or six simultaneous functions, five or six different ways of being useful, five or six different ways of transforming upright apes into human beings. Howard</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman">Retrieved September 17, 2004, from the World Wide Web <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99996411 Childhood learning may determine linguistic rules 19:00 16 September 04 NewScientist.com news service The way children learn may determine the building blocks of language, suggests a study of deaf Nicaraguan children. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Ann Senghas of New York's Columbia University, US, and colleagues studied three generations of deaf schoolchildren from <B>the Nicaraguan capital, Managua.</B> <B>The first deaf schools were established in 1977</B>, giving many deaf children their first a chance to interact with one another.<B> Pupils from these schools gradually developed their own form of hand-based communication, known today as Nicaraguan Sign Language.</B> <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><B>Senghas and colleagues showed deaf pupils a video of a cartoon cat tumbling down a hill and asked them to describe the event using sign language. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>They found that older students used hand signals resembling the gestures employed by hearing people, mimicking the entire event physically. But younger pupils - who had interacted with other deaf children from an early age - used a more complex series of signs. They split the scene into component parts and arranged these sequentially to convey the incident.</B> The constructions resemble the way words and sentences are built in verbal languages, using segments structured in a linear fashion. This indicates that way the younger children learnt the sign language helped reshape it according to these linguistic rules. Learning bias <B><SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>"Our findings indicate that children have a learning mechanism with a bias towards linear and hierarchical organisation of information,"</B> says Sotaro Kita at the University of Bristol, UK, and one of the team. "It may tell us why languages all have this linear, hierarchical organisation of information." <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><B>Languages the world over exhibit similar structural features, perhaps indicating that humans have a biological predisposition to communicate in this way.</B> The new study suggests that the way children learn a language may play a critical role in constructing these linguistic rules. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>The new study may also provide unique insight into the way language evolved, says Karen Emmorey, an independent linguistics expert from the Salk Institute in California, US. "It tells us about the way language emerges," she told New Scientist. "The exciting thing is that there's just no way to get at this data for spoken languages as you can't go back in time." <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Pre-adolescent children typically possess better <B>linguistic learning abilities </B>than adults, making it easier for them to learn a new language. But this ability normally <B>disappears around adolescence and why this should happen remains unclear.</B> <B><SPAN style="BACKGROUND: yellow; mso-highlight: yellow"><SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Kita suggests that this could have had an evolutionary advantage, helping to reinforce linguistic bonds by making it more difficult for those who grew up outside of a social group to learn its language.</SPAN></B> <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Journal reference: Science (vol 305, p 1779) <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Will Knight <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Return to news story © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd. <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN></FONT></FONT></P></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from <BR>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>