Language and Friendship

[lillibet]

As most of you know, I record textbooks for Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. This week I was assigned to a textbook I've read parts of in earlier sessions that deals with language deficits and impairments. I was reading the chapter about school-age children and was impressed with how it outlined the specific and complex language tasks that are

Comments

[thatwesguy]

Feel free to talk with me about it!

So, I think that the great tragedy in life is that we are all fundamentally alone. Someone told me that recently. ;-)

Language is the primary way we get around the issue. Those of us who can, that is.

[muffyjo]

I cannot recall whether it was a Ted Talk or an article on NPR or a book I read that talked about the theory about how we (homo sapiens) were able to evolve and survive versus our near-cousins (who were homo somethingelse) which involved the development of the ability to speak. It's far down in the memory cells that half-heimer's has eaten but if I recall, it went something like this: Behaviorally, we (as a species) tend to be much like the gorillas and other monkey clans who maintain small tribes which often communicate with social behaviors of touching. And the spending of time touching becomes part of the bonding exercises that keep the pack together. At some point the pack becomes too large to touch with significant time. This keeps the packs to a certain maximum size. This is where language comes into play. We can talk and communicate further than we touch. By communicating like this, we can reach out to others and our packs can become larger. We create "societies" where we share time and energy in larger tribes.

[plumtreeblossom]

This is something that Jay and I have had conversations about. He is able to have and maintain friendships with people who have severe language/comprehension impairments, while I generally am not. We can't pinpoint the mechanisms that allow one person to "get through" and communicate with a language impaired person, while others fail to do so.

[lillibet]

Yep, word retrieval problems apparently occur frequently in people with expressive language deficits. The funny thing is that the person I know who has the most problem with this is severely dyslexic, but I had never connected the two traits before.

[starphire]

Hmm. That's an interesting idea. I had early proficiency with language, but still had difficulty establishing close peer relationships. The challenge for me seems to be maintaining focus on what another person is saying. My brain is so actively conjuring up new thoughts on so many other topics. It's getting harder to do this without complications, though.

There was an interesting interview on NPR last week with a woman who's written a book about a problem she'd been having with memory. Apparently it's becoming a more common complaint, particularly among baby boomers in our increasingly busy multitasked world. The loss of even a little focused attention on what others are saying means bits of information go straight out the window and there is absolutely no recall of it later on. That triggers fears of early onset alzheimer's. But it's something else: it seems the part of the brain which filters out irrelevant information gets confused or something and starts throwing out information indiscriminately.

[muffyjo]

Ooh, this is very interesting to me as I find that stress leads me to the same issue of losing the ability to focus well and therefore losing both recall and context. Any chance you remember which NPR show it was? Or the time of day? I'd be interested in listening to that one.

[starphire]

I thought I remembered Terry Gross, so I'd say Fresh Air. Must have been late December or early January, but I can't find anything on the NPR website that sounds right. I am trying their search service, maybe something will come up.
Sorry, I only heard about 10 minutes of the interview while I was in the car.

[starphire]

Hi, sorry this took so long.
It seems I may have the occasional memory problem myself...ahem!

The show was Here and Now, it was not an NPR production but it was on a public radio station. Anyway, here is a link to the show:

http://www.here-now.org/shows/2007/12/20071231_2.asp

[greenlily]

Feel free to chat with me about it. I was reading at an adult level, and reading more than I talked to people, for most of my critical language acquisition period. It's left me with what I usually think of as language problems (particularly conversational language).

[lillibet]

That's very interesting. I--and most of my close friends--have similar histories. Have you ever read the notes on geek-speech that were written by a linguist whose sister is a con-goer? (I'd supply a link, but my google-fu is failing me.) One of the things she noticed is that because geeks tend to have a much larger read-vocabulary than spoken-vocabulary, it is not at all uncommon to hear people correct each other's pronunciation without offense being taken (e.g. "It's indeFATigable." "Really?" "Yup." "Oh. So, as I was saying..."). When a volunteer starts at RFB&D there's a list of commonly mispronounced words that they encourage you to look up for yourself (the shocker for me was DESultory, although I was also appalled that the OED's preferred pronunciation is arCHEtypal and that Merriam-Webster accepts nucular for "nuclear").

Anyway, I tend to think of early-reading as being part of my high language proficiency and am curious as to what problems you think it has caused you.