Is there a linguist in the house? How about a psychologist?

[rolanni]

Close readers of this journal will note that I have recently completed Nine Years Among the Indians being a first-person account of the abduction of a white child, one Herman Lehman, by Apache Indians. As I suspected, I gained very little insight into the process of moving (albeit being forced to move) from one set of cultural mores to one that was pretty much diametrically opposed from Herman's account. I suspect that he was among the Indians as he became among the white men when he was finally "reunited" with his "real family," a charming rogue who could spin a tale to his own benefit as easy as taking a breath.

But! One thing that Herman asserted has me wondering a bit about language (though perhaps I should be worrying about Herman). I know that children acquire languages very quickly, often making no difference between the words from Language A and those from Language B and being pretty free in the matter of creating creoles. Herman was eleven when he was abducted, and at that time was bi-lingual -- he spoke German and English. When he was returned to his mother, a great hulking savage of twenty summers, he spoke Apache, Comanche, and Spanish. He claimed to have no knowledge of English or of German and had to have those languages taught to him again by his sister.

I suppose I had expected that Herman would have perhaps had to have been "reminded" of his first two tongues, since he hadn't spoken them daily for nine years, but I'm having a hard time imagining that he would completely forget them. Maybe a younger child would have -- but by eleven you would think that the languages would have made grooves in his brain.

Does this happen? Do people simply forget their milk tongue if they don't speak it for a certain number of years? Or is this simply the "let's make it a better story" gene at work?

Comments

Forgetting milk tongue

[sb-moof.livejournal.com]

Here's a data point for you: I learned English and swiss-german as a child. When I was 16, I went to live with an aunt in Switzerland for a year. About 6 months into my stay, I wanted to give directions to an Australian couple that were visiting. I could understand everything they said perfectly, but I had the darndest time coming up with English words, the German/Swiss-German ones just kept popping into my head first. It was extremely disconcerting. When I got back home, it took about 3 weeks of total English immersion before I started "thinking" in English again.

English and German have a lot of common roots. Not so for the Native American languages Herman learned. I could see after 9 years of never hearing/speaking a language that you might have to relearn it to feel fluent. But I also think that you would still retain some basic comprehension. Like many skills, languages seem to fall into the "if you don't use it, you loose it" category.

[shana.livejournal.com]

My guess is that while he may not have had conscious knowledge of the languages, he relearned them a lot faster than he would have if he'd been starting from scratch.

[starushkaa.livejournal.com]

I think that "complete forgetting" is an exaggeration. At school and university I studied German (never could really learn it well enough to talk but could read books and newspapers)... It was (O, God!) 30 years ago, and since that time I never practiced it... But even now I remember bits of German!

[growlycub.livejournal.com]

I've lived in the U.S. now for almost 11 years and only get to speak German about twice a month on the phone with my parents. It's really depressing how often I stutter and cannot think of the appropriate German word and I'm a trained translator, too.

I'd question whether he really forgot all of it, but I can imagine losing large chunks of vocabulary, but as slrose said, he probably 'relearned' a lot faster than if he had never been exposed.

Another facet may have been that he (sub)consciously suppressed his other languages as a coping mechanism to deal with the situation he found himself in. Kind of a voluntary amnesia.

[miladyinsanity.livejournal.com]

I'm just thinking aloud here, but...

If Herman was kidnapped by Indians, then to fit in, wouldn't he also have suppressed his past to fit in better, kind of?

[katmoonshaker.livejournal.com]

Eh. It depends on who you talk to. ::grin:: In NeuroLinguistic Reprogramming, the theory is that neuron pathways can be written over. This is the theory behind affirmations (ex. saying to yourself "I am lovable and loving" 100 times a day to overwrite being abused as a child). Other psychologists/psychiatrists do not subscribe to this theory.

Because we still do not understand the brain completely (although we've come a long long way!), there is no way to know for sure. We DO know that children who are taught certain languages or sounds are capable of reproducing them later in life even if they do not learn the language completely while children who do not can not reproduce the sounds (such as certain 'tics' used in African languages).

Length of time speaking one language(s) that is completely different from a milk tounge(s) versus the length of time having spoken the milk tounge(s) would certainly be a factor in this. However, it would be easier for the child to relearn the language(s) than an adult wishing to learn the language(s) from scratch and they would be able to reproduce the sounds particular to the language(s) whereas an adult coming to that language without a similar capacity would not.

Does that make sense? I'm rather in a fibro fog today!

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

I asked essentially the same question of Dr. Jennie Dailey-O'Cain (http://www.ualberta.ca/~jenniedo/cv.html) of the University of Alberta's linguistic department, who specializes in second-language acquisition. Her answer was that her research on Germanic immigrants to Canada after World War II showed that they could speak German after more than sixty years, even though many of them had ceased speaking/hearing/reading it upon immigrating due to negative responses to Germany at the time. IIRC, she said that vocabulary was lost or more difficult to recall, but grammar was unaffected. Again IIRC, her research dealt primarily with people who were adult at the time of immigration, if young ones, but age 11 seems old enough for language to be cemented. If you need more detail than that I can put you in contact with her if you'd like.

So I think that his lack of knowledge of English or German was either 1) exaggerated, or 2) part of an elaborate con.

[(Anonymous)]

Even in cases of amnesia, the subject doesn't forget how to speak their native tongue. As an example of childhood vs. adult languages: I'm quite able in Spanish and have some facility with Japanese as my second languages, but I can still sing the French and Ukrainian nursery songs I learned in kindergarten nearly two decades ago. Going back to English after being immersed in another language it's hard to push it back to the front of my mind and I often grope after the correct word. Whatever his motivation was, he was faking. Especially if he could remember the events of his childhood he would be able to rember his native language.

~Lizah C Wiley~

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

I'm with the folks who are supposing that vocabulary and the more superficial aspects of grammar could have been lost or suppressed, while the deep structure of the original languages, and their phonemes, were retained.

(My elder son spent the first three and a half years of his life in Panama, and thus started out effectively bilingual, albeit on a three-year-old level. He lost all the Spanish after we moved back to the States, but when he came to take Spanish in high school, he found it very easy, and according to his teacher still had a Panamanian -- or at any rate, neither Castilian nor Mexican -- accent. He also found it easy to produce sounds present in Spanish but not in English, such as the trilled r and the bilabial fricative that is usually written either b or v but isn't actually either one._)

[herbmcsidhe.livejournal.com]

He may well have "remembered" parts of his original languages, but he was also likely punished by his captors if he spoke them; much as NA children were in the English language schools they were forced to attend at the turn of the 19th/20th century. Entire native languages were lost during that period.

You might also compare his story to that of Cynthia Parker, who was abducted at an earlier age and "rescued" as a young adult.

[baggette.livejournal.com]

When I was eight or nine, the nuns at my school noticed that I was having trouble remembering to speak English instead of French. If someone looked confused at me, I would stop and re-think what I said and translate it. My little dyslexic mind thought everyone in the world was bi-lingual French/English, I guess.
They recommended to my parents that my family should speak only English in the house. My parents, being obedient and consciencous Catholic parents, complied with that suggestion. (mind that they had been trying to prepare us for the bi-lingual world that they were ever intending to return to in Maine and New Hampshire) They never spoke French in the house or with us again.

Now, I can read in French and can follow the gist of a simple conversation; but I cannot speak or write in French at all.
The best intentions....

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Not a psychologist, but an intermittent student of same, so I'll throw out a few points for consideration.

1)He would have been dealing with a great deal of culture shock. Not just language, but everything would be unfamiliar to him, including behavior and thought patterns. He would have spent roughly half his life learning to translate body language, cultural expectations, and belief systems of people very different than what he was accustomed to as a child, and then would have encountered an entirely different set when he was returned due to his status as adult male.

2)Whether by Stockholm Syndrome or less traumatic means, he would have been separated from people he had possibly grown to love and returned to people who were, for all intents, strangers. Depending on why he was returned, he may have been resentful or angry enough to deliberately not-understand.

3)If someone thinks you're stupid, they tend to underestimate you. They speak more openly in front of you, and they don't expect full participation in activities you may not want to participate in. You're granted a great deal more latitude for many reasons.

4)One common coping mechanism is lying to yourself. If he had convinced himself that he wasn't rescued because nobody loved him enough, he may have lied to himself to convince himself that he didn't love them either, and become so zealous about his life with the Apaches that he buried his life as a child.

All of this doesn't take into account possibilities like a severe fever or head injury causing brain damage and memory loss.

[chazzbanner.livejournal.com]

I asked a friend who is a linguistics professor, and he said

"If HL was removed from the community of English speakers at the age of
eleven he could have still been prepubescent, in which case he might
have forgotten English."

So it's possible, and age of the change appears to be crucial.

children and languages

[dvdscar.livejournal.com]

I have a friend whose father was in the US Air Force. He was assigned to an airbase in Italy when she was a young child-- 3 or 4, maybe--and by the time they left about three years later she was effectively bi-lingual in English and Italian. They returned to Italy when she was 14 (I think that's what she said). She had not only forgotten every bit of Italian she had known, she wasn't able to relearn it very well at all. Or at least that's what she reported.

Yet Another Data Point

[jane-barfly.livejournal.com]

A friend moved with his parents to France from the United States when he was six. When he was seven or so, his parents left him with their dear friends and neighbors while they had to deal with eight weeks of business.

When they came back, he was entirely Francophone, and took three weeks of English immersion before he could speak English to them again.

They moved from France when he was twelve or so. He said that he lost almost all of French his vocabulary and grammar, and wasn't able to communicate well in French. Until he had a couple weeks of immersion in French in college...

He speaks English with a midwestern accent. He speaks French, apparently, with a Provencal accent, but it's not languedoc.

Languages

[(Anonymous)]

I was raised in an Scotish/Mexican Household. Father spoke with Scottish brogue/Mother born in Guadalaja Mexico. At 5 I would have been enrolled in remedial English classes if there had been any at that time.

At 32 I moved to Alaska and really didn't hear or speak Spanish for the 20 years I was there.

When I moved back to the lower 48 states, I have almost had to relearn my Spanish. It's beyond rusty. I stutter in conversations searching for correct words.

You can forget.

Hannah Mueller

[onyxhawke.livejournal.com]

Part would be immersion, part would depend on any punishment or even just strong disapproval he received when he use English. Depending on where he was developmentally (both physically and intellectually) he may well have either actually forgotten or simply very deeply suppressed the languages he spoke as a kid. Also, just the desire to fit in which is hugely strong in kids that age may have been enough to have him force the knowledge out of his mind.