Why Kids May Be the Key to Communicating With Alien Life

by Kate Morgan                  July 12, 2018                   (slate.com)

• When we make first contact with extraterrestrials, how will be learn their language to be able to communicate? Do we gather the most prestigious, well-educated linguists in the world to suss out the alien language over a number of years? Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, advocates bringing in human toddlers.

• In reality, we probably won’t have any idea what extraterrestrial beings look or sound like when we first hear from them, says Wells-Jensen. If the language medium in a first contact scenario turned out to be something we can’t reproduce, Wells-Jensen acknowledges, it would present a fairly serious problem. What if their language were chemical or magnetic fluctuations? What if it were too high- or low-pitched for us to hear? There are a lot of what ifs, she says.

• At four months old, toddlers start learning language fast and furious. They’re capable of hearing and reproducing every individual sound – called a “phoneme” – used in all 6,500 or so languages on Earth. This is when we are at the peak of “neuroplasticity” when the brain’s primary focus is on figuring out how to give and receive information. Kids will naturally pick up communication patterns that even expert adults might miss. We lose this ability in adolescence.

• Toddlers are also a lot more flexible in terms of what sounds they’ll classify as language. That flexibility could really come in handy when we encounter sounds that may not exist on Earth, according to University of Texas professor Catharine Echols. Echols research shows that 13-month-olds are more willing to associate nonlinguistic sounds such as a beep, signal, or tone, whereas older children increasingly favor speech. “By 20 months, children won’t accept a whistle or a harmonica sound,” Echols said. “They’ll only accept words.”

• “Doing something this hard and this important is going to require our best, most gracious selves, so we better start getting ready,” Wells-Jensen says. “It’s dangerous and beautiful and impossible, and (ET contact) could happen at any moment.”

How do you teach a language nobody speaks or has ever heard? That’s the first question Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor at Bowling Green State University, had to answer while designing the curriculum for her course in xenolinguistics—the study of alien languages.

“The problem of not having an existing alien language isn’t really a problem,” Wells-Jensen said. “If we ever get one, it would be nice if some people had thought about it ahead of time. You’ve got to get ready. We could make first contact tomorrow. We don’t know.”

If we did make first contact tomorrow, Wells-Jensen says, humanity’s first instinct would probably be to find the most prestigious, well-educated linguists around and “get them to our secret base,” à la Dr. Louise Banks, Amy Adams’ character in the 2016 movie Arrival. In the film, when 12 UFOs appear at locations around the globe, Banks gets tapped by the U.S. Army to go to the spacecraft hovering in Montana to decipher the utterly foreign language of the aliens in it and find out what they want. It’s Hollywood, of course, so it only takes a montage or two before she’s fluent.

If the real world actually got alien visitors, we’d probably start attempts to communicate similar to the ways they do in the movie—using pictures, and lots of pointing and gesturing, to establish a basic vocabulary of simple words and descriptors. But, unlike the depictions in Arrival, our best hope for learning to communicate quickly and effectively might rest not with the studied linguists of the world. Instead, we may want to bet on our planet’s best learners: toddlers.

But first, back to the adult experts. How do you teach something truly alien? It’s impossible, says Wells-Jensen, but we can start with the basics.

To study the hypothetical, Wells-Jensen’s university class in xenolinguistics discusses the relationship between language and thought and the types of message construction common in Earth languages. They also look at what Earth languages don’t do, but also what we could probably handle. Humans exhibit an extraordinary ability to communicate, and when it comes to communicating with aliens, Wells-Jensen says, there’s plenty of potential—so long as their style is at least a little bit “people-ish.”

For example, many of our communication methods are dictated by our bodies and by the way we manipulate the physical world around us. If the aliens had something resembling hands—and, preferably, a face that could direct attention toward an object—we might stand a chance at understanding one another.

“We could learn a humanlike language, and we could learn a furry bunny-shaped language, but we probably couldn’t learn the language of hyperintelligent sugar blobs,” Wells-Jensen said.

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