Fascinating article in the Telegraph about the work at Elizabeth Spelke’s “baby brain” research lab at Harvard, where they study infant cognition and learning:

More fascinating still is that Spelke’s lab has revealed a deep-seated prejudice, present in infants, that trumps racial bias: language. Dr Katherine Kinzler, though based in Harvard, spends much time running parallel studies in France. ‘Five-month-old babies will look longer at somebody who spoke to them in their language. Older infants want to accept a toy from someone who has spoken their language,’ Dr Kinzler says.

‘They like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.’ Accents and vernacular, far more than race, seem to influence the people we like. ‘Children would rather be friends with someone who is from a different race and speaks with a native accent versus somebody who is their own race but speaks with a foreign accent.’

These findings make perfect sense according to two California-based pioneers of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. In the Stone Age, race was next to useless as an identifier, because most people would never have travelled far enough to see anyone of a different skin colour. Accent, vocabulary and dialect would have helped distinguish friendly tribes from foes. Tooby and Cosmides concluded that humans are born with a predisposition to divide the world along ethnic lines traced out by language and accent, more than racial lines.

Via Kottke.

Here’s a neat experiment that seems to show that “naming” does influence cognitive tasks and task performance.

…on the origins of language, called Babel’s Dawn.

This is fascinating: universal grammar vs. an entire culture based on mindfulness. “The Pirahã are a unique people living without time or numbers, without colours or a shared past.” In additon to adding to the debate on Chomsky, some linguists say that, because the Pirahã can’t concieve of numeration, it is proof of the Whorf hypothesis. Others disagree.

“A people without terms for numbers doesn’t develop the ability to determine exact numbers,” Dr Gordon said in Science magazine. “The question is, is there any case where not having words for something doesn’t allow you to think about it? I think this is a case for just that.” But Professor Everett did not leave it there. “You could say these features of the language, these absences, are all coincidences. I tried to find a common thread to explain why the Pirahã were the way they were.”

That factor, he found, was all around and yet its significance had never been noticed: the culture and unique way of life of the Pirahã. In a paper published last year, Professor Everett says this, not their language, prevents the Pirahã from counting.

Because of their culture’s ingrained emphasis on referring only to immediate, personal experiences, the tribesmen do not have words for any abstract concept, from colour to memory and even to numbers. There is no past tense, he says, because everything exists for them in the present. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, to all intents, to exist. “In many ways, the Pirahã are the ultimate empiricists,” Professor Everett says. “They demand evidence for everything.”

Life, for the Pirahã, is about seizing the moment and taking pleasure here and now. “I suddenly noticed how excited they were whenever planes crossed the sky then disappeared. They just love sitting around watching people coming around the bend in the jungle. Whenever I came into the village then left, they were amazed.”

The linguistic limitations of this “carpe diem” culture explain why the Pirahã have no desire to remember where they come from and why they tell no stories.

The question at play here is “what is the causal relationship between language and culture?” Which “causes” the other? Or, are they so intertwined that they develop together, with neither “causing” the other….?

Imagine: they tell no stories. What would life be like without stories? My guess is that the Pirahã are so totally immersed in the here and now that they truly feel the stunning fact of existing and being conscious of that existence. The Pirahã don’t tell stories because the here and now is so amazing that they don’t need them.

I was on a Skype chat with Ken Beare of esl.about.com this afternoon, and he led me to this must-read research document English Next 2006. Researched and written by David Graddol, and published by the British Council, this is a follow-up of sorts to the well-known Future of English 1997 which rocked my world when I first read it so long ago. I haven’t read the new report yet but I managed a quick skim and scan and it looks most intriguing. I love the teaser on the British Council site: “Read English Next and find out why global English may mean the end of English as a foreign language” (as you can imagine this is what I scanned for!).

Ken’s got a new podcast site up named English Feedand his company site is Dialogue Consulting. And I posted on his project Tutopia a couple of months ago. Ken’s a busy guy!