[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you are here. On today's show, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins is joining us in studio for a live performance of music from his new album Blues Blood, we'll learn about how the increase in chocolate prices is changing what Halloween candy looks like this year, and we'll offer a corrective to racist comments about Puerto Rico with some actual history and facts about the island.

That's the plan. Let's get this started with linguist Julie Sedivy.

[music]

Alison Stewart: In a new book, linguist Julie Sedivy writes about our relationship with language through the span of a life. In the framing of a memoir, she describes the processes of language learning, loss of language, and all the ambiguity and mistakes in between, something I have a particular interest in as someone recovering from a brain injury. The book is titled Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love. Julie Sedivy, welcome to All Of It. Hi, Julie, are you there?

Julie Sedivy: Good to be here. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Awesome. Great.

Julie Sedivy: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Good to hear from you. Listeners, tell us about your own experiences with language. Did you grow up surrounded by many language or only one? Have you experienced the possibility of language or been confronted with its limitations? Our phone number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or call in or text us with questions for Julie Sedivy about how we learn and lose language or other answers you might have about questions you have about how language works. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

You grew up surrounded by languages. Your parents moved around a lot. What languages were you exposed to as a kid?

Julie Sedivy: My first language was Czech, which is where I lived until the age of two. Then, my parents started traveling through Europe. We lived in Austria, so I learned some German. We lived in Italy, I picked up some Italian, and then landed in Montreal, which is a bilingual city, and I learned French before I finally, finally learned English in kindergarten.

Alison Stewart: How did you think about your relationships between them even at an early age?

Julie Sedivy: When you're a kid, you just take it for granted. It didn't strike me as unusual, but I do remember having some very conscious memories of being in that stage of language learning where you're still trying to just break into the flow of speech. You don't really recognize words very well yet or not very many. You're constantly misunderstanding. You're trying to map what people are saying onto the things in the world. If you grow up in a monolingual environment, those memories are so far back that you probably don't have any memories of them, but for me, it was a recurring condition.

I do have many memories of being in those very early stages of learning language.

Alison Stewart: You describe this encounter of a "Uniform, tidy version of English". I think you were in kindergarten, first grade, or something like that,-

Julie Sedivy: Yes.

Alison Stewart: - and you write similarly about taking Spanish classes and how different that experience was from the immersive way you learned Italian or German. From your personal experience and your professional research, how should we be teaching language better in schools?

Julie Sedivy: Well, for one thing, we should start as early as possible. Now, schools are faced with a challenge in that you just don't have as many hours in the day as, ideally, if you're learning through immersion, you need to be exposed to lots and lots and lots of language. We try to shoehorn language teaching in schools into a very small number of hours. I think it's really helpful if the school instruction is supplemented by exposure through media, exposure especially through personal contact, where there's an opportunity to engage with speakers of that language as much as possible.

We do know that language learning is easier or at least stickier if you pick it up earlier in life than later in life. That would be, I think, the first place to start, is not relegated to middle school, but really start as early as possible. Then, the other part is to encourage people to hold on to their heritage languages if they come from elsewhere or have a family history of speaking another language, to really not try to sweep that aside.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, do you have your own experiences with language? Did you grow up surrounded by many language or only one? Have you experienced the possibilities of language or been confronted with its limitations? Our number is 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC, or you can call in or text us with questions for Julie Sedevi about how we learn and lose language and other answers about questions about how language works. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

My guest is Julie Sedevi. Her new book is called Linguaphile: A Life of Language and Love. Early in the book, you draw a comparison between language and music. What is meaningful to you about this comparison?

Julie Sedivy: Yes, actually, researchers are finding that there are a lot of parallels between language and music. Both of them, if spoken, if languages spoken involve a structured series of sounds that unfolds in linear time, they both structure chunks. Just as we might be able to identify phrases in language, it turns out people are pretty good at identifying phrases in music as well. There seems to be some recruitment of similar brain areas.

Where they're different, of course, is that language has meaning. It points to things in the world. It relates our thoughts and emotions, whereas music does that by mood indirectly, but you can't point to a note or a phrase and say, this means something very specific. That's an element of music that's strikingly different from language.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Let's talk to Sue from North Arlington. Hi, Sue. Thanks so much for calling All Of It.

Sue: Thank you. Basically, I'm 68 years old, of Polish and Slavic descent, and grandma, babcia, lived with us when we were kids. My parents, not knowing any better, told my grandmother, "Don't speak Polish to the kids because their English is going to be screwed up." Sadly, I never really learned Polish. Only a few words, a lot of curse words, crude sayings, things like that. Sadly, when we would talk to my grandmother, who would speak to us in broken English, we would talk broken English back to her.

I would definitely say to parents, expose your children to as many languages as you possibly can. Don't lose that.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling, Sue.

Julie Sedivy: Yes, Sue, that is such a common story. I hear that again and again and again, and it really is unfortunate that there is a generation or two of people who were told exactly this. We now know that maintaining the heritage language will not interfere with learning English and that the two can be held together. In fact, if anything, English just can't help but dominating the other language if you're living in a country where that's the main language.

The problem that you describe in communicating with your grandparents is so heartbreaking and so frequent. I think if people realized how that introduces an unnecessary generation gap in the lives of many families. I think there is now, I think, much more recognition of the benefits of maintaining that heritage language. I just want to say one thing, though, that you learned curse words and little else. I had exactly the opposite experience.

My parents did speak to me in Czech, but they never, ever cursed. Because I learned Czech essentially only from my parents, I never learned to curse properly in Czech. That's a skill I don't have.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] This is a text, "I'm Brazilian and tried speaking Portuguese with my daughter until three, but slowly stopped when busy daily life, preschool got in the way. Husband is American. She also had Spanish in kindergarten and then Mandarin at school. Is there any hope that she still remembers any Portuguese deep down at some point?"

Julie Sedivy: Oh, that's such a great question. The answer is yes. It will become less accessible if she doesn't use it, but there's really intriguing research that suggests that languages that you're exposed to very early in life, even if you go through a period where you seem to have lost it, there still seem to be some remnants there. This shows up especially when people are trying to relearn their language. They might be people who were speaking a language in childhood and then stopped, and then they go take a university course and they find that the language comes back to them faster than people who hadn't been exposed to it.

There is something that's laid down. It becomes harder to access with disuse, but there is probably quite a benefit to that early exposure.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jason calling in from Harlem. Hi, Jason. Thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Jason: Hi. I'm a big fan. I am a college professor, and in my freshman composition classes, a teacher article, Is your language making you broke and fat? How language can shape thinking and behavior and how it can't. It's such a great article in terms of understanding how languages are structured and pushing back against these silly ideas about the ways that language mythically or mystically shapes our thinking and Chinese people just can't understand the future, or Greek people just can't understand saving.

You cite a study about playing the prisoner's dilemma, and I had my students play the prisoner's dilemma, but once they figured out it was snitching, they only played cooperatively.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Do you want to share what the prisoner's dilemma is?

Julie Sedivy: The prisoner's dilemma is basically a way of creating a psychological scenario where-- there's various variations on this. The idea is that if both partners cooperate together, they both benefit, but if one partner pulls out and acts in their self interest, then the other partner loses big time. This can play itself out in a scenario where you're pretending that you're being charged with a crime and your accomplice may or may not confess, or it can be a variation in a business setting where you decide to act in cooperation or competition with your rivals.

The finding of that study that Jason is alluding to is that there was a Dutch study that looked at whether people played more cooperatively if they spoke in Dutch versus English, and found that in English they played more competitively and in Dutch they played more cooperatively, but only if they had lived in an English-speaking culture. That speaks to Jason's point that the language doesn't stamp you with a set of patterns for thinking, but that you can come to have all kinds of associations with the language that reflect the culture that you experienced in that language.

In a sense, then English becomes a cue that, "Oh, now I'm in this frame of mind of English-speaking culture, that I'm going to step into and absorb some of those social norms." I think that's such an interesting aspect about language, is that they're imbued with our lived memories that have taken place in that language. That gives rise, I think, to the feeling that many multilingual people have that they're not quite the same person in each language.

Alison Stewart: I was so interested in your comparing language between humans and birds. We always hear about primates, but personally, you think that bird songs and human language have a lot in common. Could you explain?

Julie Sedivy: Yes. Again, this relates to the earlier point about the parallels with music. Birdsong maybe is a lot like music. It's the structured sound that's very complicated, but it doesn't, as far as we know, have meaning. When birds sing, we don't think that it refers to anything, that there is anything like words, but there is structure to it. It certainly serves a social purpose for birds, much like music might serve a social purpose. It's also passed down from generations. It's not something that a bird is born being able to do.

If they're not exposed to the birdsong of their species, they won't learn it. If they're exposed to it past a certain critical age, they will learn it only imperfectly, in much the same way that a person who begins to learn a new language in adulthood probably won't speak it perfectly. There are these fascinating parallels that I think to me make me feel very close to birds. I already love birds, but that's the extra bit of connection between us humans and birds.

Alison Stewart: My guest is linguist Julie Sedivy. Her new book is called Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love. If you'd like to get in on this conversation, you can tell us, did you grow up surrounded by many languages or only one? Have you experienced the possibility of language or been confronted with its loss? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more with Julie and take your calls after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is linguist Julie Sedivy. Her new book is called Linguaphile: A Life of Language and Love. You write about vocalizations in the book, Julie, um, uh, er, but you say that they're not empty. What do these words do?

Julie Sedivy: What they do is they give some insight to the hearer about what's going on in the speaker's mind. One of the really fascinating things about speech is that we don't pre-compile a full sentence and then just press the play button. We start to speak before we've mapped out the rest of the sentence, so we work it out on the fly. We're speaking and planning at the same time, and sometimes you're speaking and you get to the point where you should be saying the next word, but you haven't yet fished it out of your memory, or you're still planning a complicated phrase.

Filler words like um or uh are a signal that you're still in that planning stage. What's really interesting is that that can actually help the listener understand because by virtue of the fact that it's appearing before some more complicated material, because that takes more time to plan, it also cues the hearer that, oh, something challenging or complicated is coming up, and we think that maybe the hearer's attention is just perked up a little bit. It turns out that if you take all of those filler words out of speech, people's comprehension of speech is not as good as if you left some of them in.

Alison Stewart: You describe common language mistakes like someone saying sam hamwich instead of ham sandwich.

Julie Sedivy: Yes. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: What does that reveal about how we think about language?

Julie Sedivy: Exactly this phenomenon that we're speaking and planning at the same time. You might have actually pulled out the concept of ham, and you know that there's a word for it, but you haven't yet sort of fleshed it out in all of its sounds. You might have some of the sounds of the next word sitting around in your mind before you get to it, so you might have a sandwich in your mind and you're still in the process of saying ham, but because the words from sandwich are active and the sounds from ham are not yet fully fleshed out, you grab the wrong one.

Sort of like they're on a conveyor belt coming in and you're just mixing up the sounds a little bit. That really speaks to the process of just putting sentences together on the fly and that there are these multiple stages in planning. You have the stage of you come up with the idea, you frame it generally in terms of the structure of the sentence, and then you have to pull out the individual concept words, and then you have to put them in clothes, so to speak, which is their full sounds. Lots of things can happen at any of these stages that throw a wrinkle into the system.

Alison Stewart: Let's take some more calls. Meg has pulled over. Hey, Meg. She's calling from Brooklyn. Nice to talk to you.

Meg: Hi, nice to talk to you too. I was just calling because my dad, during the late stage-- well, towards the end of his life, he had dementia, and so I helped take care of him. Because he lost his language skills, he would talk in these very abstract ways. For example, we were driving down the highway, and he pointed up at the sky and he's like, "Angry, angry." I was like, "Yes, there's a storm rolling in," right, because you could see the storm coming in.

Or, they were building, this is in Indianapolis, and they were building a new skyscraper. He pointed at the building, he's like, "Shiny." He's like, "Big, shiny." I'm like, "Yes, yes, they're building a new building." Then, he wanted to go out because they built a new airport, and he wanted to go out to see the airport. I took him out there, but it wasn't open yet. I ended up getting turned around on these back roads, but my dad traveled a lot for work, and I was completely lost, and he got me back into the city.

It was just strange how he lost his ability to form sentences, but was still able to communicate and still had that muscle memory of how to get around. I don't know. It's just interesting.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Do you want to respond?

Julie Sedivy: Yes. I think that's such a touching story. To me, Alison, I've heard your story of how you lost language, and that's my worst fear. It has been alleviated somewhat, in part by people like you whose recovery is really very admirable, but also by stories like the one we just heard, where even when language starts to fade, that drive for human connection persists and finds a way. In this case, the caller's dad was just wanting so much to share what was in his mind, what caught his attention, the shininess of the buildings, and using whatever he had at his disposal.

That, to me, really speaks to the hunger for human connection that can transcend even the withering of language. I think that's really super powerful.

Alison Stewart: It reminded me of something that my speech therapist said to me that said that your brain is like a series of file cabinets and they've all been thrown over, they've just fallen on the floor, and all of the files are everywhere, and now you have to figure out what to put back in what file and if there's a deficit in that file. That's my job, is to put everything back in the files now.

[laughter]

Julie Sedivy: Yes. Yes. And to use whatever workarounds you can, and clearly, your drive for connection with your listeners is what propels you and what smooths over any of the little gaps and wrinkles that might arise.

Alison Stewart: Also, there's something that's weird with my brain where I have language centers on both sides, which is very strange.

Julie Sedivy: Yes, I've heard that. Yes, I'm not surprised to hear that.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Dan. Hi, Dan. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Dan: Hi. I lived in nine countries and learned nine languages, but I find that if you don't speak in a language, it gets very hard to pick it up again after a long time. On the other hand, I would say as a neurobiologist, I consider language like a motoric skill, and when you make a mistake, the frustration that you have, let's say, trying to play tennis and you're having trouble, you get clumsy the same way with a language when you can't find the right sequence of words or the right--

Because languages are used artistically, not just informatively, you inhibit yourself, and that inhibition usually is probably what makes you look worse at the language than you really are.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much. Let's talk to Marta from East Brunswick. Hi, Marta. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Marta: Hi. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, I can hear you great.

Marta: Great. I was calling because I just love the study of languages. That's what I studied in college, and I'm an interpreter now. I was born in Argentina but came to the US when I was a year old, so I learned languages simultaneously. I find what's really interesting is something that your linguist just said about how people are different in different languages. When I feel emotional, something hurts, I'm sick, I'm upset, I become a Spanish Alison Stewartnd I only think in Spanish, I speak in Spanish, but just my normal life is mostly English, but the emotions, that childhood things, I think of them in Spanish and I verbalize in Spanish.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's so interesting.

Julie Sedivy: Yes, I think that's a very common response. I've been told actually by people that when they witness me speaking to one of my relatives and check on the phone, they say, "Your gestures change, your voice changes, you just inhabit a different persona." It's, I think, to me, one of the delightfully fun things about knowing multiple languages.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Edmund. Edmund, thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Edmund: Hi. Thank you. I was born and raised in Quebec. We were an English family, but in Quebec, we made a choice to be bilingual, so I went to French school from the get go. During elementary school, middle school, people thought for sure that I was native French speaking. Now, the reason why I'm bringing this all up is because I did notice though gaps in my learning. When I went to English, I found it much more difficult to read as fast as everyone. I think part of it was because the re versus the er.

If you're not able to trust yourself, you slow down a lot. That's one. Then two, the grammar in English I completely lost, or not so much lost, but missed. I just felt like the comment was around the value of being a little bit proactive in what you're getting and not getting in whatever choices you've made in terms of exposure to language, because I felt those gaps for a while.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for your comment. We're running out of time. I think I'm going to get to this question. We think of childhood as a period of progress in language and then adulthood a period of possible language lost, but you really challenge this idea in the book. How could we view each one differently?

Julie Sedivy: Yes, so I think we really should question whether all changes that are related to age are in fact loss. One of the examples that I give in the book is this problem that many of us over a certain age have where we're prone to missing words, we're just fishing around for the word and it just seems so elusive. That certainly increases with age. It's very, very normal, and it's not a sign of dementia by itself. One of the reasons that this happens is that actually, we have continued to accumulate a whole bunch of words.

We have typically a lot more words in our vocabulary than someone who's 20. It's like going into a crowded, messy room and trying to retrieve that one object you're looking for. We think of it as loss and decline, but in this case, it may actually be a function of abundance. I think similarly, we can look at the various stages of loss through aging as, in some cases, there is a real decline, but one of the things that I've become focused on as I get older is that that often shifts our attention to an aspect of life or an aspect of interacting with each other that maybe we haven't paid attention to before.

When you have certain limits, you have to explore other means. I love that caller with the father with dementia because he was pulling out these very emotional words to get to the essence of what he was trying to communicate, and maybe his attention was shifted more to the emotional texture of the world around him because his capacity to express other aspects of the world maybe was not fully there anymore. I think I would invite people to think of loss more as change over the course of a lifetime, and each phase of life has its own way of living.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love. It's by my guest Julie Sedevi. Julie, thank you so much for taking our calls and having this conversation with us.

Julie Sedivy: It was such a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me, Alison.