The Source Book On Sikhism

Overview of Theoretical Positions on Language Development

Broadly speaking there are four theoretical positions on language development:

1. Behaviourist

2. Cultural Relativist - Determinist

3. Interactionist

4. Performationist - Predeterminist

Behaviourist

According to the behaviourist point of view, a child learns what he is taught. Language is acquired through selective reinforcement of natural babbling and shaping of vocal behaviour through operant conditioning. Some sounds die because they are not reinforced, thereby creating blind spots.

Cultural Relativist - Determinist

According to CRD point of view, language is acquired as a social necessity and its acquisition parallels the development of thinking and logic in children. Language is a conceptual system which produces a specific world view (reality) peculiar to that language. Language does not have to be taught but as a species-specific behaviour, it emerges in response to social needs.

Interactionists

Interactionists think that language is acquired because the child is pre-disposed to learn it through the on-going development of intellectual systems. Its acquisition is not dependent on training. Information received by others is adapted by built-in genetic language-learning mechanism and integrated into the cognition of the child.

Performationist - Predeterminist

According to Performationist - Predeterminist point of view the child scans linguistic environment and integrates formal universals (grammatical categories). It is done by associating sounds and meanings in a particular way.

Dr. Frank Smith tries to summarize the above mentioned points of view while discussing linguistic relativity hypotheses. He feels that the children do not live in the same world, but in individual worlds structured by their language habits. Since the language reflects cognitive structures it becomes a distillation of cultural experiences and the means by which this experience is transmitted from one generation to another.

A consequence of this cultural transmission through language is that the extent that children and adults differ in their language - they are likely to organize their experiences differently and perceive the world in different ways.

Aldous Huxley in his forward for Dr. Ghose's famous book, Mystics and Society (1968, p. 1), takes a different but very original point of view. He states:

“Every culture is rooted in a language. No speech, no culture without an instrument of symbolic expression and communication, we should be Yahoos, lacking the rudiments of civilization...The universe inhabited by acculturated human beings is largely home-made. It is a product of what Indian philosophy calls Nama-Rupa - name and form language is a device for denaturing Nature and so making it comprehensible for human mind. The enormous mystery of existence, the primordial datum of an unbroken psycho-physical continuity, is chopped up by the symbol - making mind into convenient fragments. The labels and their logical (or illogical) patterning are projected into the outside world, which is then seen as a storehouse of separate, clearly defined and nicely catalogued things. Our names have created forms ‘out there’, each of which is an embodied illustration of some culture-hallowed abstraction.”

In other words, language chops off the psycho-physical continuity of the child’s environment and conditions him to a culture and speaker of its language. Once conditioned he develops a cognitive style which generates in him a linear level of consciousness pertaining to his environment.

If that is so, children who do not learn Panjabi will not develop linear consciousness about Sikh culture. Their Nama-Rupa will be Canadian. Their "realities" will be different from the realities of their parents who speak Panjabi - a language shaped by Panjabi culture. These children will have Panjabi genes with Canadian “realities” - to live ambivalent lives in a materialistic, maya oriented, narcissistic world.