NidaMAP — Modular Aggregation of Principles for Bible Translation

We are all born citizens of the world

RBRobert Bascom · Jul 3, 2019, 11:41 PM · Last modified: Sep 28, 2026, 11:38 AM
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  • Patricia Kuhl (et. al.) makes the point that infants and toddlers are able without problem to distinguish virtually all the possible sounds in all of the languages of the world (see her TED talk) from birth, but gradually prune away the recognition of those sounds not in the inventory of the language(s) they end up actually speaking. https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies?language=en
  • Oliver Sacks, in Musicophilia, shows how those people speaking tonal languages have perfect pitch to a statistically significant higher degree than those who speak non-tonal languages. This seems to be a similar phenomenon as in #1, but with pitch recognition instead of speech sounds in general.
  • Finally, Sacks shows in The Mind's Eye that all humans are born with roughly equal ability to recognize faces of all different sorts from birth, but gradually are only able to distinguish well between individuals with faces of the sort they have been exposed to. So for example, if someone is raised in a mono-cultural and mono-racial context, faces of community outsiders will all tend to look alike.
  • Taken together, the above are all a part of the brain's "use it or lose it," or maybe better "tune it or prune it" strategy of cerebral neuronal pruning and reinforced wiring. And they show how we are all born citizens of the world (Kuhl's terminology), but ultimately are functionally restricted (to a degree, anyway) to the cultural matrices within which we are socialized to interact.

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