The Language Connection to Art and Music
Most cultures introduce infants to informal language development by singing songs and lullabies to babies, later teaching them to move their bodies to the music, which adds another dimension to language development by connecting it with the brain-body circuitry. Music, typically correlated to right-hemispheric function, has historically been one of the most effective means of learning the sounds and tonal nature of any language, particularly when merged with speech (generally considered a property of the left hemisphere).
It is hardly surprising that the 26 letters of the English alphabet are frequently taught through the “Alphabet Song,” to merge the orthographic representations of the English language with the sounds. When the 26 letters of our alphabet are sung to the familiar tune, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the well practiced song is connected to the English alphabet. The slower-processing right hemisphere assists the faster-processing left hemisphere in memorizing the order of letters, while also practicing their sounds.
The same process allows stutterers to sing a song without a single stammer when circuits operating inside the auditory cortex provide a (phonological) feedback loop, reducing motor delays in the prefrontal motor cortex. While these individuals are incapable of reading the lyrics off of a piece of paper without stuttering, they can sing.
When the phonemes (the sounds of spoken the language) are linked in the auditory cortex of the brain to the written symbols (the graphemes), the “brain basics” for written language learning are ready for activation.
Pictorial representations and symbols have been part of the human experience for far longer than the printed word. Parents should encourage their children to draw at home. Learning to visually reproduce objects and concepts in the mind is also an integral part of reading comprehension. To understand the printed word, readers must rely heavily on the “picture-making” mechanisms in the visual cortex of the brain.
Children first see and touch objects around them. A precise name for those objects is learned next. The same neural pathways that responded to seeing the “real thing” are activated to mentally recreate that same object in the visual and association cortices. Later, these brain circuits will also learn to respond to a series of symbols representing a word. Repeatedly making these associations renders the image and the word indissociable from one another (see “From Objects to Words”). The word cannot be heard, seen, or said without the picture immediately coming to mind.
Visual imagery is fundamentally a nonverbal dimension of reading and is often a determining factor in reading comprehension, which, ultimately, is the purpose of reading. Mental pictures of characters, actions, and events must be maintained in working memory. If the pictures are “lost,” so is the story. The association cortices of the brain make up 37 percent of the cerebral cortex, and they work vigorously to help “make sense” of visual and verbal information. A child learns to create mental pictures for what they hear or read in a story. The “context processor” in the brain constructs an online, coherent interpretation of what is being heard. Words are used to think, not just to read.
Art, dance, and music give rise to understanding the significance of patterns, relationships, connections, and symbolic representations. These are all useful tools for understanding the patterned nature of language. The physical evidence left behind by nearly every early human society indicated that art, symbols, and music were vital elements to the human experience. Perhaps that is why the arts are fittingly referred to as the “humanities.”
Brain-Building: Word by Word
The English language is composed of nearly 600,000 words, constituting the largest number of words in one language. This descriptive database partially explains why English has become the lingua franca of business, international politics, and the internet. Our everyday speech consists of 5,000 to 17,000 words, on average. In our daily communication, 400 to 600 high-frequency words are typically used, out of the 86,741 most widely used English words.
The faster a child’s vocabulary grows, the greater is their ability to understand the ideas of others, as well as their ability to express their own ideas with precision. The words we learn are the words we subsequently use to think. Educational organizations host annual seminars on “closing the achievement gap.” However, the achievement gap is primarily a knowledge gap, due in part to a vocabulary gap. Essentially, vocabulary is a proxy for knowledge.
The most common method of teaching vocabulary has been to break a word into its composite syllables, and pronouncing each of them in the order of their left-to-right appearance. However, the brain can process syllables more efficiently in their reverse order (another “trick” of the brain). Here is one example of that strategy:
Dactyloscopy is the practice of using fingerprints for personal identification. We instruct students to read the phonetic “dak-tu-los’ku-pē,” pronouncing each syllable in sequence. However, if students pronounce each phonetic part in the reverse order instead, learners will be far more successful in pronouncing any new polysyllabic word, often on their very first attempt (see “Learning to Pronounce a New Word”).
