Theory: Music underlies language acquisition

Rice University ^ | SEPTEMBER 18, 2012 | B.J. ALMOND

[Erasmus]

Didn't you ever hear the album, Abner Schmenge and His Polka Champs Perform Dave Brubeck and Other Favorites ?

[Zionist Conspirator]

I wish I had been exposed to a second language when I was that age.

The secret to success in a second language is when one begins to think in that language rather than thinking in English then mentally translating it before speaking. Unfortunately, I've never gotten this far. There are some super-familiar Biblical phrases I understand without translating (Vaydabber HaShem 'el Mosheh le'mor: And HaShem spoke to Moses saying), but when it comes to the modern spoken language I have to spend thirty minutes figuring out how to translate the English into Hebrew and then speak it very carefully--and even then I usually make a mistake of some kind. And I've been studying Biblical Hebrew for 27 years!

Unfortunately there's very little commonality between learning a textual and a spoken language.

Maybe I should try learning Old English instead?

[Erasmus]

You haven’t lived until you have heard the “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction Polka”.

Robin Williams doing Lawrence Welk years ago. Imagine the North Dakota German accent, now:

Tankyou, tankyou, tankyou.

Daht wass a bitchin' boss song...let's hear it for de boyss in de bandt...effry vun uff dem is a bad mothher in hiss own riight.

Now let's hear it for de luffly Lennon Sisterss, as dey sing for you "I Cand Ged No Sadisfacshunn."

[Pharmboy]

Well, Olde English is close to German, which is the origin of Yiddish, but it will not help you with Ivrit, LOL.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Well, Olde English is close to German, which is the origin of Yiddish, but it will not help you with Ivrit, LOL.

I didn't mean learning Old English would help my Hebrew. I meant maybe I have no talent learning spoken languages and should confine myself to learning textual languages, of which Old English is an example.

Maybe learning to read Beowulf in Old English would be like learning to read the Hebrew Bible, and easier than learning to speak and aurally understand any spoken language.

[Pharmboy]

Yes...I did understand that...just my lame attempt at humor. I took German in high school, and in college English class we all had to read Chaucer out loud in the original Middle English. I did well at this because of my background in German.

[cornelis]

Schmenge Bros. double time!

[cornelis]

Perhaps you haven’t tried the musical route, ZC. You could learn the lyrics to songs in another language.

I also like to watch documentaries on YouTube—it doesn’t matter if I don’t understand them. I’m just a baby sopping it up. Think about it, it takes a baby some 20 years to finally speak as an adult—who knows, you also might have 20 years left! True, babies live in the language environment; our success depends on creating a language environment.

One of my favorite is the sound of Swedish—melodious warbling. Watch the “Wallander” series in a marathon and you’ll learn to warble in Swedish. That’s nothing to sneeze at, because once you can babble in Swedish, you can give the ancient Greek a proper cadence and intonation.

[dfwgator]

That’s what I am doing with Polish, I listen to almost exclusively Polish music today, I always liked how the language sounds when sung, kind of a mix between French and Russian. But I can pretty much recite songs from memory, phonetically sounding them out, and of course you do learn words that way as well.

[tsomer]

The classics, when we partake of them, will teach us much. And they do in fact help us to get going.

It took me a long time to figure that out. I finally broke down and read Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and thought "wow, this is amazing!"

Then a light went off in my head and I thought "yeah, it's a classic"

The thought occurred sometime back: it's narrative that underlies all art. This is the complete antithesis of the reductive tendencies of modernism; there is no such thing as pure art or pure music that can be distilled down to some abstract essence. In other words, song and verse is the root and wellspring of music. If a performer loses that narrative thread, the music goes flat. I've had enough of this arid crap.

I think this connection of music and language acquisition tends to buoy this understanding.

[palmer]

While music and language may be cognitively and neurally distinct in adults

Red herring. Basically everything overlaps neurally to some extent especially if it starts in the same audio pathway. Their claim that some low level processing is the same is practically a truism. But I doubt much of the congnitive processes are the same. For one thing their view of natural language is completely bottom up (like music). But it's demonstrably not, since garbled language can easily be understood by the context using top-down processing.

[ConservativeDude]

holy mackeral, I am reading Reflections right now! In fact, I just got out of a discussion group on it a half hour ago!!!

Truly a classic and like all classics perennially applicable...the way Burke and we understand the world is completely unlike obama. obama in fact is like a Revolutionary and he deserves the treatment that Burke gave to Price and the revolutionaries.

You know what else is funny? For the class, at the beginning, I told the students that Burke was too good but too rich to truly master in the short time we have with him. So I played them the first movement of Bach’s cantata BWV 140. I told them in that nine minutes of music they could “hear” everything that Burke was saying......

You are so right. Distilling music down to “pure music” is basically reducing flesh and blood men to mere Citizens, where it is them and the State. There is no such thing as pure citizenship (that would be simple slavery) any more than there is such a thing as “pure music”. Can you imagine Bach wanting to strip his complex compositions of everything in order to make it “pure”? Complete rubbish.

[Revolting cat!]

Interesting. Good to hear about some worthwhile research. I’m thinking it explains, at least in part, why I, a musically inclined cat, like some prose writers and dislike others for reasons not always of content but style. It must be the music of it. By the way, I like long flowing sentences, so-called run-on sentences, which I often write m’self.

[Revolting cat!]

I suspect that the researcher would be interested in hearing from you.

[cornelis]

If a performer loses that narrative thread, the music goes flat. I'm hoping you don't mean that the narrative is only carried through words.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Pharmboy. Better take a note of this, it sounds like a key discovery. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Raycpa]

And God sang, Let there be ....

It has a nice ring to it.

[lonevoice]

As seen in this, one of my favorite youtubes ever, of twin babies “talking” to each other. It's obvious they're mimicking tones, inflections, rhythms and phonemes in speech that they've heard. Their accompanying body movements are often matching the rhythms of the sounds they're making as well.

http://youtu.be/_JmA2ClUvUY

[aposiopetic]

Stravinsky always began his day by playing a Bach fugue at his keyboard

I didn't know that, but it makes sense.

[aposiopetic]

I told the students that Burke was too good but too rich to truly master in the short time we have with him. So I played them the first movement of Bach’s cantata BWV 140. I told them in that nine minutes of music they could “hear” everything that Burke was saying

Maybe even in three minutes and nineteen seconds.