Download Professor Colwyn Trevarthen - Musicality of language

Pre-Birth to Three: - Professor Colwyn Trevarthen: Musicality of language
One of the things that are important is that the rhythms and the expression, the melodic kind of
patterns, that seem to be the material of human thinking, and problem solving, and grammar of
language, all of this kind of dynamic patterning that makes things happen through time, and makes
them predictable to other people.
The kind of thing that is going on between a mother and a baby - as Daniel Stone pointed out - it’s
amodal, that is it’s between the modalities; it can be audible or visible, or you can feel it in body
movement, and the dynamics are common to everything that we do, and so any sense can pick it up.
We have an extraordinary film of a five month old baby who was born blind, and a Swedish baby,
and the mother is singing a baby song, and the baby is conducting the baby song beautifully with its
left hand, just like a professional conductor, and conducting the melody beautifully, going up for the
pitch and going down at the end of the phrase, just like a conductor. And when our professor of
music saw that, Professor Nigel Osborne, he said “Yes the baby is conducting like a professional
conductor, and with some anticipation”, so we checked it, and the baby is a third of a second ahead
of the mother, it is leading the mother through a familiar song, and with beautiful skill. So that
translation of the mother’s voice into the baby’s hand is intuitive, completely intuitive; nobody knew
the baby was doing his until we saw the film, and it was discovered in the film. But that is a film
which impresses people very much, they realise, of course we are actually moving inside ourselves
with other people all the time.
Now I think it’s a very sad thing that linguists who had been attracted to the structure of text –
written text – had strayed into a very complex field of the science of language, and come up with the
idea that language has grammatical rules which are logical or structural, and forgotten that the
origin of these rules is in the dynamic of human body movement.