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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 106 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 May 05 Wednesday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) My daughter, less than three weeks old, is my youngest English student, and already she is beginning to learn the nuances of communication, if not of speech. Initially, her reaction to necessity - to hunger, or to self-inflicted diaper discomfort - was an automatic full-throttle roar, from eggshell silence to armageddon in one single gear shift. But now she seems to have acquired the concept of economy of effort, alerting her parents with intermittent fretting cries, and only taking the thermonuclear banshee route if the response is slow. (Judging by how soon we move into the "too slow" zone, patience is unlikely to be one of her earlier acquistions.) My own working theory, then, is that communication begins with the discovery (probably accidental) that half a lungful of effort can often short-circuit the hard labor of staging a one-baby riot. And, in making this claim, I am throwing in my lot with the behaviorists. A full-pitched screaming fit is obviously not pleasurable, the proof of this being that the baby (let's imagine that her name is Cornucopia) never screams except in the face of necessity (hunger, a defiled diaper, over-heating or swallowed gases still demanding extra burping.) Since screaming is volitional, and since it is avoided except when necessary, it may reasonably be presumed that screaming until you go red in the face is unpleasurable. A tentative fretting cry, rewarded by a prompt response (the reward being the relief of the necessity) minimizes Cornucopia's effort, encouraging her to try the same path-of-least-effort route the next time. To my mind, this is as simple, and as obvious, as the conditioning of a laboratory rat. The hungry rat, roaming its cage at random, accidentally pulls the required lever, and is rewarded by a food pellet. Pretty soon, the rat has been conditioned to pull the lever every time it gets hungry. (In theory. In practice, when I studied psyche at university - many years ago, and it was one of the papers I flunked - the rat gave up and lay down in a corner to sulk. We students protested to the supervisor that the rat was not hungry, only to be assured that the rat was most certainly very hungry, and had been reduced to a state of defeated frustration on account of the fact that the five of us would-be experimenters had five different ideas about precisely how to go about training it.) In defiance of Chomsky, then, I assert that the first step in communication is behavioristic (rather than genetically pre-programmed), and involves the accidental acquisition of the art of economy of effort, the practice of this art being reinforced repeatedly by prompt parental response. Yesterday, the first hot and humid day in Cornucopia's young life, she fretted a little and was rewarded with a diaper change. Then she fretted a little more and was rewarded with her mother's milk. Then with a supplemental bottle of baby formula. Pretty easy, this baby stuff, huh? Then she fretted some more, and was rewarded with another diaper change, in the course of which an untimely (but undoubtedly involuntary) initiative on her part meant that her babywear needed to be changed, as did the towel on which she was lying. Then she fretted some more. Then screamed. Dry? Yes. Needs to be burped? Already done. Just needs to be held? Apparently not. Will singing help? Well, not much. She can's possibly be hungry, can she? Well, apparently yes. (Eager sucking on a proffered finger is, apparently, symptomatic of a desire to feed.) Her needs having been divined, Cornucopia guzzled another sixty milliliterss of baby formula, with proper rests from time to time to allow her to catch her breath. Then there was an emphatic SPLURK! and about a third of the ingested milk came spilling out of her mouth and went sprawling over her face and her babywear, so we needed a new set of babywear. Then, being dry and burbed and held and sang to, she nevertheless insisted on SCREAMING, and there is nothing so calculated to make your blood pressure rise as a baby's full-throttle scream. It was my mother-in-law who figured out that Cornucopia was probably just too hot, and after ten milliliters of warm water ("Maybe her throat is dry") and a minimizing of her bedding, she consented to go to sleep. And I also went to sleep, collapsed in a boneless heap of exhaustion under the huddled bedding of my futon, my head shrouded by the simulated night of a spare T-shirt, and I slept for all of about twenty minutes until I was trampled underfoot by an adult human, who very shortly came trampling back the same way, this time almost falling over after the footing provided by my thigh proved to be inadequate. I surfaced. "Yes?" "Sorry," said my wife, in confusion. "I thought you were in the other room." As you can probably gather from the foregoing, while the theory of babies is pretty simple (wet stuff goes in one end and is removed from the other) the practice can be a little more demanding. At less than three weeks of age, the child, as mentioned above, has discovered (in practice, and perhaps conceptually, as well) the art of economy of effort. Cornucopia also makes occasional quasi-vowel sounds, these being now-and-again blurting cooing sounds which I can't fit into any system of sound patterns. She's getting a lot of Japanese-language inputs from her mother, these occasionally being Japanese mixed with English, for example "Kick kinshi!" (= "Kick forbidden") (It's very difficult to put a new diaper on a baby who is determined to use this as an opportunity to train for the Kicker of the Year competition.) Cornucopia gets English-language inputs from me (it having been decided that my role, linguistically, is to avoid Japanese altogether, at least when talking with my daughter), the idea being that this baby will grow up to be bilingual. More on the bilingual baby in due course. Update 2004 May 07 Friday: Joshua writes that "most Western baby books take it as a given that infants should not be given water until 4 months of age. I was surprised to learn Japanese consider otherwise!" In response I have to say that I don't know what standard Japanese practice is, but my wife did attend antenatal classes before giving birth, and, either there or somewhere else, acquired the notion that it's okay to give a baby ten milliliters of water after a bath, and my mother-in-law thought it was a good idea to give a little water when the baby seemed to be have gotten too hot. Whether this is good practice or not I have no idea. The child's consumption of water is certainly not exceeding ten milliliters of water a day, and that's a small fraction of her fluid intake, the rest of which is milk. |
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