Effect Of Language On Memory
Victor Cabrera
California State University Fresno
Description
On the podcast Words that Change the World on Radiolab they talked about a twenty-seven year old man who was deaf, but was never taught sign language. Susan Schaller was a deaf interpreter and was placed in a reading skill class to help teach, which is where she met this man. She introduced herself to him by signing her name to him, but his response was exactly what she signed. With a bit of confusion she repeated herself, yet he continued to reply with the same signs she would use. She then realized he was mimicking her, which is when it occurred to her that the man did not have language.
The man was born deaf so he did not know there was sound and nobody ever bothered to teach him sign language. All he knew was lip movements and a few hand gestures, to him everyone else figured things out visually. Susan attempted to teach him sign language but her efforts failed. He was not able to associate the signs with their significance, such as book or with verbs like stand. Whenever she would attempt to teach him he would just mimic her. For weeks and weeks this would go on until she decided to just not talk to him and ignore him. She began to pretend to teach an invisible student, for …show more content…
The children with specific language impairment also showed greater number of errors in the answers about sentence content, which showed that their long-term retrieval was being affected. The fact that being able to recall specific vocabulary words was difficult for the language-impaired children shows the importance of language is on memory. With long-term being affected it also shows that language would play a pivotal role for
Victor Cabrera
California State University Fresno
Description
On the podcast Words that Change the World on Radiolab they talked about a twenty-seven year old man who was deaf, but was never taught sign language. Susan Schaller was a deaf interpreter and was placed in a reading skill class to help teach, which is where she met this man. She introduced herself to him by signing her name to him, but his response was exactly what she signed. With a bit of confusion she repeated herself, yet he continued to reply with the same signs she would use. She then realized he was mimicking her, which is when it occurred to her that the man did not have language.
The man was born deaf so he did not know there was sound and nobody ever bothered to teach him sign language. All he knew was lip movements and a few hand gestures, to him everyone else figured things out visually. Susan attempted to teach him sign language but her efforts failed. He was not able to associate the signs with their significance, such as book or with verbs like stand. Whenever she would attempt to teach him he would just mimic her. For weeks and weeks this would go on until she decided to just not talk to him and ignore him. She began to pretend to teach an invisible student, for …show more content…
The children with specific language impairment also showed greater number of errors in the answers about sentence content, which showed that their long-term retrieval was being affected. The fact that being able to recall specific vocabulary words was difficult for the language-impaired children shows the importance of language is on memory. With long-term being affected it also shows that language would play a pivotal role for