Ritwik Deshpande - Week #13 - How Memories Influence Our Language Perception
In our life, we experience many memories that shape the way we perceive language around us as we grow up. This can be seen through many examples in our life. Interestingly, a ubiquitous fact around the world is that a child’s first word is often “ma” or some form of “mom” as a term of endearment for their mother. Many speculate that the word “mom” has been established around the world in many different languages because of the fact that it is the first thing that most babies say. Evidently, the memories and experiences we have from a young age build up our sense of language.
In fact, the very way we learn languages from the start is through our memories. As most of you already know, at a young age, our minds are very perceptive about language and are able to pick them up very quickly. This is what gives people the notion of a “native speaker” of a language, which is really just having been exposed to the language as a young child and picking it up quickly. Interestingly, if you were to expose children to a language at a young age and allow them to form memories upon it, even if the children never had to use the language again, they would still develop a strong understanding of it.
This can also relate to the importance of reading books at a young age. When we’re exposed to new vocabulary and elements of language, we pick up on them and learn them ourselves. Although reading may have seemed like a nuisance to some of us, there were definitely reasons as to why we had to do it throughout our developmental years. By absorbing the vocabulary and other linguistic details of the literature we read, we probably became better speakers, listeners, and writers that probably affect the way we write in our APENG class!
Hi Ritwik! I once read that no piece of writing is original, and I feel like this pertains strongly to your blog. It has definitely been a problem that I have struggled with in my own writing, as there are always small bits and phrases that seem to flow mindlessly from my fingers, whether I am writing an in-class essay or experimenting with narrative writing. It is only later that I realize that the words had felt second-nature to me because I had absorbed them through the media that I consumed–whether it be through childhood books, news articles, or movies–just as you describe in your blog. There are so many words that I use in my writing whose actual denotations I do not actually know. I simply know the words’ connotations and usages in a sentence or situation.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, I find it very interesting how language is connected to memory. For example, in Everything I Never Told You, James was able to speak Chinese easily when exposed to the memory of a familiar food, despite having stopped speaking the language as a child. I’ve had similar experiences, even though I stopped exclusively speaking Bengali at a young age, something I now know thanks to your post is because I had already formed memories in the language. Conversely, though, in Beloved, Sethe is unable to recall the words of her mother’s native tongue that were spoken to her by Nan–even as she actively remembers the event–and I wonder if this is another way in which her memory is being suppressed, intentionally or not. Thanks for sharing!