What I get from it, is it is the study of signs with implicit and explicit meanings. It is a theoretical way to analyze the world around us that distinguishes between:
"- semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for;
- syntactics (or syntax): the formal or structural relations between signs;
- pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters (Chandler 1)."
Semiotics is what distinguishes our different views because of what we have been shown, what we have absorbed our entire lives. This is why in the process of encoding and decoding sometimes the message the addresser is trying to get across may never get decoded at all by the addressee, he may not have been taught or shown anything in that subject to understand.
This reminded me of something Cara had been talking about earlier in the year, as well as something else I had heard of quite a few years ago, Feral Children. The two that are most known are the wild child, who was raised by dogs until he was the age of 12. Found at a very young age after his parents had left him in the woods to die. Or, a young girl named Genie. Her parents had tied her to a chair up in their attic until she was 13 years old. She had no communication, education, stimulation, or even light. When she was found, not only could she only whimper since having no prior communication with anyone- but she could also not stand erect because she was tied to a potty-chair her whole life (except for the nights when she was remembered. She would then get strapped into an over sized crib that had a metal sheet as an overhead cover) and never learnt to stand. Apparently, her father was psychotic. He hated children and had killed two children previous to Genie. One died of pneumonia when he left it in a garage, a second choked on his own mucus. There was a third child that was saved by the grandmother, and he is still alive today and helped in aiding the mother to feed Genie. Neither of them spoke to her because they feared the father, and had been victimized themselves. "The discovery of Genie aroused intense curiosity among psychologist, linguists, neurologists, and others who study brain developement. They were eager to know what Genie’s mental level was at the time she was found and whether she would be capable of developing her faculties (Pines 2). She had been rehabilitated and over went through special training to try and teach her to communicate. What they had found out in their research was that there is a critical time in a childs development where if the 'language acquisition' is not stimulated it may become impaired later on if it emerges at all (Pines 2).
Susan Curtiss, a psychologist, worked with genie in trying to help he develop speech. Curtiss also was working to develop a hypothesis about language and the relationship between the left and right sides of the brain.
"When Genie arrived in Children’s Hospital in November 1970, she was a pitiful, malformed, incontinent, un-socialized, and severely malnourished creature. Although she was beginning to show signs of pubescence, she weighed only 59 pounds. She could not straighten her arms or legs. She did not know how to chew. She salivated a great deal and spent much of her time spitting" (Curtiss 1). She walked with a jerky motion with her hands curled up like a rabbit, and within seven moths she had learned how to speak roughly one hundred words and was able to conjoin two of them together ("big teeth", or "Little Marble"), and she was also potty trained.
However, she had a lot of saliva and would drool everywhere and all over her clothes. She also masturbated obsessively.
According to Eric Lenneberg, language can only be learned during the critical period between two years of age and puberty. This theory was created in 1967, and was proven wrong in 1971 when genie was found, and started her special training. "the brain of a child before the age of two is not sufficiently mature for the acquisition of language, while after puberty, when the brain’s organization is complete, it has lost its flexibility and can no longer acquire a first language" ( Lenneberg 1). This is not one hundred percent accurate as Genie showed by learning few words, but the basic idea is correct. She still can not communicate as effectively as most 3 year olds, which has also been shown when her progress came to a halt a few years later. This can also be described as the third principle of perception from Lipton's notes "We are not born perceiving. We learn to perceive and not to percive"
"Among human beings, four-week-old babies can recognize the difference between some 40 consonants that are used in human languages, as shown by how their sucking and heartbeats change when different consonant sounds are presented by audiotape. That ability seems to be innate, since babies respond to many more consonants that are used in their parents’ language—English, for example, has only 24 consonant sounds, yet babies of English-speaking parents react to the consonants present in Japanese. Babies lose that ability as they grow up. By the age of six, when children enter school, their ability to hear the difference between sounds to which they have not been exposed in their own language is severely reduced. Feature detectors responsible for recognizing about a dozen consonant sounds have so far been inferred to exist in the human brain. They need to be triggered by the environment, however: if not, they appear to atrophy." (Pine 1)
Although Genie had ended up learning different words, she didn't understand verbs or grammar, nor did she know how to ask a question. Noam Chomsky theorized that grammatical principles are what distinguishes the language of human beings to that of an animal.
The following is the transcript for the television program Secret of the Wild Child hosted by the NOVA station;
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2112gchild.html
A song that was written about Genie by an Indie band named Killjoy Confetti. If you go to this link you can both view the song lyrics, and clink another link to hear the song... ( I wouldn't suggest it though. ha ha)
http://www.feralchildren.com/en/listbooks.php?bk=arcade
And finally, this is a video clip from the documentary made about Feral Children named Mockingbird Don't Sing
"model of oral communication is (for its time) innovatingly labelled as a 'speech circuit' and includes directional arrows indicating the involvement of both participants (thus at least implying 'feedback'), it too was nevertheless a linear transmission model (albeit a 'two-track' one). It was based on the notion that comprehension on the part of the listener is a kind of mirror of the speaker's initial process of expressing a thought (Saussure 1983, 11-13; Saussure 1974, 11-13; Harris 1987, 22-25, 204-218). In this model there is only the briefest of allusions to the speaker's use of 'the code provided by the language', together with the implicit assumption that a fixed code is shared (Saussure 1983, 14; Saussure 1974, 14; " (Chandler 1)
1. Daniel Chandler, Semiotics For Beginners, Encoding/Decoding, February 19th, 2001.
2. Myra Pines, Tripod, The Civilizing of Genie, October 8th, 2002
<http://kccesl.tripod.com/genie.html> Other names used with this link; Susan Curtiss, and Eric Lenneberg
3. Andrew Ward, The Regents of the University of California, Genie, A modern day wild child, 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment