Preprogramming of Language
Your language ability is stored in your DNA, and here is how.
We are continuously learning from the environment, but our body gives us a fundamental limit on it, so is language learning. A way to pass language ability is a good idea.
The chosen way for human is DNA. So our question is, what kinds of language abilities will be preserved and how to preserve them in the DNA? We need to first understand what makes up a language.
There are three major parts of language: grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary.
Since the demand for language is always changing, it would be better to have the language ability for all possible languages. But how do we define the scope of language ability?
Language is a representation of our mind, and we have the same brain. Languages we use must have foundations in our brain, so patterns in the languages we use should be limited to our cognitive abilities. Thus, we only need those patterns related to languages.
Depending on the language that are being used, the corresponding patterns can be activated for language processing.
Grammar, as a set of rules, can be passed in the form of patterns. We are storing the full set of patterns, take word order as an example. While the word order of Subject-Verb-Object is common, other word orders like SOV are also available. However, it is uncertain that which word order will be useful in the future. Grammatical rules are therefore stored in the form of tree, the required word orders can be generalized by some fundamental patterns and activate the specific one when required. For example, it is common for languages to have a word order of subject-verb-object, but it is not the only word order we can have. When candidates in a research were required to describe the content in a picture by sign language, which does not regulate word order, all of them are presenting the content in the word order of subject-object-verb, not matter which language the candidate speak, showing that we already have the ability to handle different word orders.
The case for pronunciation is rather similar to grammar. Our cognitive ability gives us a set of possible pronunciations, which can be greatly represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet. Languages also do not use the full set, but only a finite amount of elements from it. Therefore, we may activate specific elements in the full set according to the language that we are going to use.
The last part, vocabulary, is more difficult to preserve. One solution is to preprogram it as mental images, so that we can recognize them when we see the actual words, just like what our instinct tells us about dangers.
In the above ways, the language ability can be stored in our DNA. But why do we limit ourselves to only a few languages?
The answer is energy consumption. Each language pattern use up part of our cognitive resources, so a more diverse language ability also means a higher energy consumption, which is not good for survival. As a result, we are preserving only the language ability that we find useful, and disable others that are not in use. Our solution to this problem is the windows of language learning.
When we were born, we were constantly exposing to an environment full of languages, which we were going to learn. We were trying to recognize the language patterns that we would use and activate them, until we passed the stage of language learning. Afterwards we are just maintaining our language ability to save energy. However, the suggestion of second window for language learning states that we also have the ability to learn foreign languages later on.
In conclusion, we are preserving language ability in our DNA, which will then be activated by demand for the purpose of energy efficiency.
