By another happy coincidence the result of a study of teenagers IQ was published just as I finished reading the David Bellos book about translation – Is That A Fish In Your Ear?
The admittedly small study by scientists at UCL overturns received wisdom by showing that IQ is not fixed by the time you get to adolescence; a number of the children studied showed a very distinct improvement.
Even the researchers wondered if some sort of measurement error might be to blame – until they noticed a correlation with scans which showed changes in the areas of the brain associated with speech & hand movements.
No suggestion – yet – of causal correlation.
Having given short shrift to the idea that it is grammar that makes language, Bellos asks What is it that unambiguously identifies some set of sounds made by humans as a language?
Bellos points to the strange connections between mouth & hand. ”There is no language in the world that is ever spoken aloud without accompanying hand movements … the greater the effort of concentration on live speech, the more the speaker needs to move their hands … try watching conference interpreters behind their glass screens.”
Speaking is not the same thing as reading aloud from a written text.
Television newscasters keep their hands on or under the desk or just shuffle papers – because they are only pretending to talk to you – in fact reading a teleprompt. A lecturer who moves his hands is almost certainly adlibbing, one who keeps his hands to his sides or grips the desk is reading a script.
Conversely, delicate finger-work of a non-linguistic kind almost always prompts movement of the lips. Watch someone threading a needle – hardly anyone can do it without pursing or twisting their mouths. [Does the same thing apply to someone who is struggling to see the eye of the needle & the end of the thread?]
Bellos goes on to point to the other important activity which links hand to mouth: eating.
Speaking & eating use almost all the same muscles.
Facility with language is an important component of IQ in its cognitive sense. The close relationship with eating raises intriguing questions about the relationship of diet to IQ, as much in the textures of food (involving different kinds of exercise for those muscles) as in its biochemical composition, & in the manner of its eating (hand, knife & fork, chopsticks).
For infants & young children, whose muscular control is not fully developed, eating & speaking at the same time can be quite dangerous. A child who is nervous about eating solid foods may be slow to develop. A relaxed & happy child eating with the family may learn from more than just the social & linguistic interaction.
But what, specifically, might happen to teenagers to enable them to make up lost ground?
