Our blog partners Geoscience I was amazed this week with a fascinating topic: language is an instinct in addition to a cultural process You need contact with other people.
They explain that our genes are considered to have programmed us to be able to learn a language, which is a mental constuction that each language then fills with its vocabulary and grammar rules.
If we reflect on it, it would seem obvious that learning such a complex form of communication must have a biological basis common to all humans already programmed in our nature. All human peoples communicate verbally and everything points to our cousins, the Neanderthals, also had to do so, given the complexity of their culture even if their sound apparatus was something different from ours.
The need to express oneself in a language, with its grammatical rules, is something innate, but that nevertheless requires contact with other human beings to develop. And it is in early childhood when these processes are fully assimilated and as the years go by our brains, less plastic, do so with much greater difficulty, to the point that children raised without human contact never manage to perfectly handle a language.
All this makes us give much more importance to talk to the children, even with babies, since they are born, and to appreciate and encourage their efforts to communicate with us. Let's talk with children, very slowly, looking at them, and that will feed their intellectual capacity better than anything else.
He language is an instinct that we must feed with words. He is instinctive but needs our help and contact to be internalized and used with skill.
