How does a person that has never learned a language think? As in, literally, what does their inner voice sound like?

How does a person that has never learned a language think? As in, literally, what does their inner voice sound like?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0125:book=2
books.google.ca/books?id=tsO74eiExz8C&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=Psamtik language experiment&source=bl&ots=0ats7E7tLH&sig=w9PSddvVcJ88t4spyP6lvJZN7ng&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JJzEU5WdDoyQyASsioDoCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Psamtik language experiment&f=false
radiolab.org/story/91725-words/transcript/
podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab091010.mp3
youtube.com/watch?v=qmvlycFrZnk
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie's_Story
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

They probably think like animals do? like mostly impulses i guess

They'd invent their own terms/ symbols for them. It's human nature to do so.

They'd know them by association

Ask that one girl they found locked in her parent's basement or the wild child found in India years ago.

They don't have an internal monologue, it's quite difficult for them to master abstract concepts because of this.

This happens often among deaf people in poor countries that don't have the facilities to teach sign language.

Also, if you want to be angry for a while

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)

It has already been determined by experiment that they speak Phrygian.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
Why not just kill the babe instead of subjecting her to such torture

I know what you are talking about.

There's some assumption that Genie may have been born mentally retarded, and this is just how they decided to handle it, for some reason.
It may have been some kind of warped version of care, or perhaps they were ashamed.

And she's pretty too. A shame.

The team of psychologists working her case concluded that she was born normal.

The guy who did it claimed to his wife that she had been born autistic and this was the best way to handle it, and then ate a bullet when he realized that the police knew what had happened.

>Genie developed a tendency to masturbate in socially inappropriate contexts, which led doctors to seriously consider the possibility that Genie's father subjected her to sexual abuse or forced her brother to do so, although they never uncovered any definite evidence.

Jesus christ what a clusterfuck. Why do they need the consent of her mother to study her? Shouldn't her mother be charged for neglect for allowing her father to do that to her?

Jesus fucking christ.

There are many possible behavioral anomalies that may have led her father, since he appears to have been the one behind the confinement, to decide that she needed to be shut away which may not be particularly evident after so much psychological damage had occurred.
Unless I'm wrong, Genie's brother was allowed to grow up normally, so I doubt it was a case of arbitrary abuse.

Probably something caused by limited understanding of how to deal with a mentally handicapped daughter gone extremely wrong

>They don't have an internal monologue

So how do they do things like plan ahead? Can they even do that?

Unfortunately, all the feral children were solitary.

I wander what language they'd develop if there was a few of them. They surely would try communicate verbally. When you're alone it's a lot different.

He beat the shit out of his wife too. She was nearly deaf from repeated blows to the head.

How would you even test that?

I don't know, I ain't a psychologist, I'd ask me mum but she's probably sleeping.

Maybe he was just a dick

Muh dik

A person who never learns any language would be indistinguishable from an animal in terms of their behavior. They would be utterly incapable of comprehending, or conveying, anything abstract.

I always imagined they think in interpretive dance.

Ever got spooked or needed to react to something quickly? There you go, no words but your brain is still telling you to do shit.

I would think they would develop a language of their own out of necessity. Somewhat like how twins develop their own languages.

How else could they function on even a basic level? If they could not think about multiple objects as different things how could they ever deal with the world?

So what happens during quiet time?

I agree

Yes, they would by necessity have to associate things with something, I'd think.

Hey retard your thoughts arent in any language go ahead when you think what do you see or hear? Nothing.

What did he mean by this?

>Linguists later discerned that, in January 1971, Genie showed understanding of only her own name, the names of a few others, and about 15–20 words, and her active vocabulary at the time consisted of two phrases, "stop it" and "no more".
Holy fuck

I don't want to sound like a dipshit, but that really does sound a lot like an animal.

They tried, courts let her off, saying she wanted to but was beaten into submission. He did beat her into blindness so I guess there's some truth there.

Furious masturbating or sleep.

Feral Children you mean? They end up becoming sentient animals. It's oretty sad.

>Sexual abuse lead to this
Or maybe she was just unsocialized?

To be honest, she probably did have some manner of social handicap when she was younger , children can exhibit noticeable symptoms of autism from a very young age. Not that it means locking her away was a good idea.

>Phrygian
I dont, explain please

You know how animals speak to each other?

They don't actually "talk," of course, they don't have the capacity for language unless they're Koko the Gorilla. They communicate through body language and generally easy to interpret noises.

So just imagine how you'd talk to somebody who you had absolutely no idea what language they spoke or what culture they came from, and that'd be pretty much about it, I'd imagine.

A study was conducted where children were raised in solitude without being taught a language. It was discovered that people naturally speak Phrygian; you can look up the study it's pretty well known.

that's amazing, I didnt think that was possible

links?

>human nature
Never really had proper experiment done, or atleast I don't know of one. Normal humans are all using learned behavior taught to them by them imitating others.

>you can look up the study it's pretty well known
link?

Nice bait.

The experiment was conducted in Egypt; for obvious reasons it was not possible to do it in the United States. The actual study is available in Greek, but you can locate a translation pretty easily; here's a link to the original:

perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0125:book=2

This. We are so hardwired for language, we will create one if one isn't present. Language is compressive. Take for example the word "chair." It's a short, simple word, but try to describe chairness without the word chair and you would have to describe the shape, what it's made out of, when all you really need it to do is sit, so you point to the chair and say "sit," forming the word "sitter" and chairs have now been spontaneously definied.

>Authorities then moved her in the first of what would become a series of institutions for disabled adults, and the people running it cut her off from almost everyone she knew and subjected her to extreme physical and emotional abuse.[4][5][11] As a result, her physical and mental health severely deteriorated, and her newly acquired language and behavioral skills very rapidly regressed.[4][5]
WHAT THE FUCK? Bitch can't get a break.

I'm not sure if that's what you people mean by "internal monologue", but do you actually have a "voice" inside your head going through your reasoning step by step as you do it I have heard many people claim this, but it's not something I have experience by default. I'm pretty sure many people are like me and don't think in words.

Now I can *imagine* myself speaking which is helpful when e.g. preparing lectures (I work at a university), but that takes conscious effort of translating my thoughts into speech.

In general I end up having to write down things or speak them out loud to organise them and then review them. I can go quite far thinking without words but it's hard to review the validity of reasoning as I go without verbalising things.

But it seems to me the human mind is perfectly capable of reasoning completely abstractly through many steps and then just reporting the end result and translating that into words and specific concepts. I do it every day.

*Also this seems to be especially prominent in reasoning about more abstract things like mathematics.

I'll think about a problem and my brain will come back to me with a solution. Actually verbalising / writing down every step of the reasoning is extra work on top of that, but those steps must have happened in some manner for the solution to be found, there was just no reason to report them mid-way. For more complex problems I have to do it once every so many steps to review the reasoning and not get lost.

I'm pretty sure that at least in mathematics this is the case for most people.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
so he killed himself?

wow, that is scary, fuck greeks for hellenizing Phrygian

Actually, the people conducting and participating in the experiment were not Phrygian. That's a fascinating detail: it shows that even children of other races will default to Phrygian if they're not taught a different language. It's basically the default setting, accessible by all humans if necessary.

books.google.ca/books?id=tsO74eiExz8C&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=Psamtik language experiment&source=bl&ots=0ats7E7tLH&sig=w9PSddvVcJ88t4spyP6lvJZN7ng&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JJzEU5WdDoyQyASsioDoCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Psamtik language experiment&f=false

not quite

>so he killed himself?

Yeah. At least he was a small bit aware of just how fucked up he was, albeit the blame was not entirely his (himself coming from a severely screwed up background).

He would have died by now, anyway.

>A story by journalist Rory Carroll in The Guardian, published in July 2016, stated that Genie still lived in state care and that her brother died in 2011, and said that despite repeated efforts Susan Curtiss had been unable to renew contact with Genie.

So she's all alone now. I almost cried by the middle of her life story. She didn't deserve any of it.

That link doesn't work, sorry. Says I hit a page limit or some nonsense; do you have the plain text?

>tfw you're sharing a board with literal animals

>What is the bicameral mind?

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick in the 13th century had this question, so he took two children at birth and had them locked in a cell with as little outside contact as possible to see what language Adam and Eve spoke.

The results were much the same of the time he had a criminal locked in a barrel, left to expire so he could see the soul float out - inconclusive with dead subjects. He also really like Falcons and wrote a big ol' book on them.

>books.google.ca/books?id=tsO74eiExz8C&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=Psamtik language experiment&source=bl&ots=0ats7E7tLH&sig=w9PSddvVcJ88t4spyP6lvJZN7ng&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JJzEU5WdDoyQyASsioDoCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Psamtik language experiment&f=false

what's the page#

The historian Herodotus wrote that Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus I (Psamtik) sought to discover the origin of language by conducting an experiment with two children. Allegedly, he gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. The hypothesis was that the first word would be uttered in the root language of all people. When one of the children cried “bekos” (a sound quite similar to the bleating of sheep) with outstretched arms the shepherd concluded that the word was Phrygian because that was the sound of the Phrygian word for bread. Thus, they concluded that the Phrygians were an older people than the Egyptians.[26]

*Thinks*
>"Yes they are"
On another note I turned my eyes down and to the right when doing so, why is that?

If by study, you mean some Ptolemy decided to run an experiment on some child to see what happens.

>Thus, they concluded that the Phrygians were an older people than the Egyptians.

There's a certain beauty to the way these people approached that question.
He was curious, but he was also aware that it was completely meaningless. So he satiated his curiosity and ran with it, who cares if people speak Phyrgian or not when everyone teaches them their own language, anyway.

In pictures

Opposite for me, I can indeed think without words, but it is not my default state, I have to focus to actually think on images, or remember things like taste and smell. Words and sound are my default.

They don't have an inner voice. They process the world through a series of images, and generally communicate to one another through mime and mimicry.

There's a lot of deaf kids who were raised in areas of the developing world where there was no access to sign language, and those that learn sign language later in life, usually report something akin to that as a the result.

Interesting PRI audio article:
Transcript: radiolab.org/story/91725-words/transcript/

Audio:
podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab091010.mp3

Those poor kids.

Language is compressive


Explain grrman

>Genie's father had an extremely low tolerance for noise, to the point of refusing to have a working television or radio in the house.
>mfw reading about misphonia
>mfw certain sounds make me irrationally and abnormally furious
Fuck

You actually don't, unless you're also exposed to language, and introduced to the concept of naming objects. That seems to be a bit of a leap of logic the mind does not normally make on its own - though, obviously, there was at least one mind that made that leap on its own at some point.

Once introduced to the concept of language, even partially, a group will invent their own, but if they are severed from that concept, say by deafness or isolation, they generally do not come upon it themselves.

We're hard wired for communication, even rudimentary verbal expression, but language, as we define it, particularly with its ability to abstract and compartmentalize, seems to be a concept that needs to be acquired externally.

Even young children, who can speak, cannot understand the concept that should Sam move Sally's doll to from one box to another while she is gone, Sally will not search for the doll in the box where Sam put it. The same is true for adults learning language for the first time. So, not only is language not instinctual, it opens the a realm of empathetic basic logic, that seems to be lacking without sufficient use of the tool.

>I'm pretty sure many people are like me and don't think in words.

I do think in words, but I've come to think of it as 'narration'. I can get a lot done when I cease narration, but for anything with other humans except for fighting and fucking narration is very useful.

What is truly sad is when children are not taught maths well enough and early enough and they may never be 'fluent' in it.

Dreaming in maths is hardcore. Thinking in maths is exquisite. Just knowing maths stuff when you need it makes you look like a boss. I wish it was my first language.

>Throughout this time, Genie's father kept detailed notes chronicling his mistreatment of his family and his efforts to conceal it.
That's fucking horrifying and I want to read them.

Animals are not deprived from interacting with the natural world. I'd argue many animals are more intelligent than her, such as corvids and cetaceans.

I wouldn't define her as feral because she was isolated into a room. This is not the same as being brought up in the wild without human interaction. I'd argue she was semi-sensory deprived.

One needs environmental enrichment, variance in the world, and so forth in forth during critical periods for positive neuroplasticity. Thus, lumping all feral children as the same is fallacious, in my view.

>so forth in forth
so forth*

>variance in the world
variance of activities*

Germs aren't human.

Well, we have very few cases to draw data from.

There's plenty of cases of languageless humans - just not a lot of cases of feral children or super-isolated children.

In Genie's case, she really was brain damaged by the lack of stimulation, and most feral children suffer from medical maladies and malnutrition. However, children that are deaf and grow up in areas that lack signing are so common in the developing world that they put out headhunters to find them and drag them into special schools, often numbering in the hundreds. Such children (and sometimes adults) have no such mental issues, well, aside from those usually associated with being raised in extremely destitute circumstances.

But even non-brain damaged languageless adults have trouble adapting to linguistic concepts, as language really does seem to fundamentally change how you think, and if that foundation is already set under a self-taught methodology, it's hard to adapt to. They usually aren't as extreme, as in the case of Genie, where she has great difficulty conceptualizing,and some would argue she has little use of actual language, even as an adult. But, even mentally healthy adults who are introduced to language late in life have difficulty with abstract instructions such as "to the right of the blue door", or the Sam/Sally box-doll compartmentalization puzzle, similar to those of toddlers. The younger the individual is when they are exposed to language, and the more complex that language is, the less apt they are to continue to have such conceptual problems.

i know that people who speak in sign language actually think by imaginating hands do the signs in their head

If you heard the same song on loop every hour of every day for your whole life since birth would you actually hear it?

In addition, what would happen if that song was suddenly turned off?

Interpretive dance is just stylish movement. Its close to instinct, but not quite.

Going by the fact heart beats is essentially bass like, guess what faggot?
The answer is YES

Wait, you hear every single time your heart beats? You might want to get that checked out man, you're NOT supposed to hear your heartbeat at all times.

They do? That's actually kind of fascinating.

The one "problem" with deaf people is that it's not a binary thing. They get hearing aids and stuff because most of them are able to hear at least somewhat.
They are unable to hear things clearly enough to act on it and reproduce perfect speech, but don't live in a constant nothingness/silence. If you've ever heard any of them trying their best to say something, that is really them imitating what they can actually hear plus some basic corrections that could be sufficiently communicated to them.

Of course, some (a minority) are 100% deaf and the inner thoughts of these people would understandably look different. Like what user is suggesting with the imagining of the sign language visualisations.

Your heartbeat isn't static, it changes frequency and intensity based on various factors.

>bass

Was not mentioned

If you believe Herodotus then the answer would be phrygian.

Weren't there a bunch of deaf orphans in some shitty Central American city that banded together and developed their own sign language?

i thought in english before i could speak

She probably must have been handicapped to some degree; I don't know how factual the Kaspar Hauser story was but he was brought up under seemingly almost the same circumstances (but without the abuse) and became a pretty much normally functioning person afterwards

Well, you would die from the stress in a few weeks.

Masturbation feels good. If you don't know that it's generally taboo to do in public, there's no reason not to do it whenever you feel like it.

I'm pretty sure Helen Keller wrote that before she learned language, she was constantly reminded that she actually was real when she touched things around her.

Why would you suppose that language is a prerequisite for sapience?

>some Ptolemy decided to run an experiment
>Ptolemies doing anything in Egypt before the time of Herodotus.

youtube.com/watch?v=qmvlycFrZnk

Good film, somewhat relayed. Sorry for phoneposting.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie's_Story

My educated guess: they think in terms of images.

As far as I know, the CANNOT think. JP mentioned it in one of his talks.

That's why deaf people, who only learned sign langauge later in their life, were often considered retarded.