Acquiring of Language and Dyslexia

In this text, I will discuss what kinds of evidence there are that humans have abilities that are specific to acquiring and using language, as distinct from an ability to communicate or use various kinds of vocal or other body gestures.

The human language is unique among all forms of animal language. It's unlikely that any other species, including our close genetic cousins the Neanderthals, ever had language. The reason that the human language is far more superior compared to animal language is that humans can communicate 'about'. What I'm trying to say is that we can talk 'about' something, for example, the weather. Different factors come to play when it comes to language development.

The ability to learn and use language is biologically hardwired in the human brain. The human mind/brain is composed of different modules evolved by natural selection. Language is a kind of knowledge. Language combines basic units into larger objects. You could also say that language is a combinational system, with several modules (components). Different factors decide how well we're able to acquire language, such as acquired deficit, critical age and impairment.

Acquired deficit is an injury on a specific part of the brain. Acquired dyslexia is a deficit that impacts the ability to read. More specifically brain damage on the left hemisphere. There are two kinds of acquired dyslexia that have been identified, these are deep dyslexia and surface dyslexia.

Deep dyslexia causes the person to have difficulty to read the word correctly. The response is related to the targeted word. They were able to get words associated with the word of choice. 'People that suffer from deep dyslexia also have particular difficulty reading function words such as prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliaries'. The problems that people with deep dyslexia have are similar to people with agrammatical aphasia. People with agrammatical aphasia and deep dyslexia provides evidence that content words and function words have their own place in the human brain.

People that suffer from surface dyslexia have difficulties with whole word recognition and spelling. They particularly have problems understanding irregular words like 'debt', but words like 'mint' comes fluently. That's because they can’t sense the pronunciation, as normal people can. They can't see the connection like others.

We can see that Broca`s and Wernick`s areas of the brain play a big deal in language acquisition. Damage on the Broca`s area affects function words. Damage on the Wernick`s area largely impacts grammar (word choice). These disorders prove that there are certain parts of the brain that language is processed in.

Critical age is another factor that comes to play when we are talking about language acquiring. The human mind is created so that it will understand language. But you can’t learn something without trying and failing. The most important factor in acquiring language is exposure. 'Children who do not receive linguistic input during their formative years do not achieve native-like grammatical competence'.

A good example of someone that didn't get the acquired exposure is a girl nicknamed Genie. Genie was taken from her father at the age of 12 (after critical age) by child service. Genie then started to try acquiring language at the age of 13. Genie was admitted to the hospital where they took several tests of her brain, to see if there were any problems with it. The tests that they did at the hospital showed that there was nothing wrong with her brain, but that her left hemisphere, which accounts for language had stopped working.

These results were there because her left hemisphere had never been used until the age of 13, after it lost its ability to learn language. In the critical period, the brain's job is to make sure that all brain cells are wired up correctly. It's not only a matter of making connections, but also cutting them. In the critical period, the brain must decide which connection to keep, and which to cut. This means that the brain uses a brutal rule. 'Use it or lose it'. Because Genie's parents hardly spoke to her, the part of the brain responsible for grammar wasn't stimulated as it was supposed to be, so it was crippled for life.

Generally speaking, language is revolved around utilizing sounds and non- linguistic properties to communicate. The human language allows the user to talk about things that are in the past and the future, we can talk about something that has happened and something that is going to happen. This separates us from non- human species. We can talk about something like 'John what are we having for dinner today?'. There have been studies where they have tried to learn non- human species language, but the results are not there. They aren't able to learn language as sophisticated as humans. There are clear signs that the human brain is far more complex to the animal brain, therefore animal can`t reach the linguistic properties that only humans can acquire.