Oxford University Press's Blog, page 856

Remembering Daniel Stern

By Colwyn Trevarthen

Daniel N. Stern, a New Yorker, died in November 2012 after a long illness. A distinguished child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a world-famous developmental psychologist, he transformed ideas of human nature in infancy and he made important contributions to his last days. He gave us a theory of how we create and share imaginative stories by rhythmic movements, which he called ‘forms of vitality,’ a domain that draws satisfaction and regulation from all sensory modalities in a consciousness of movement, and which, “distinct from the domains of emotion, sensation, or cognition,” gives life to all our ventures.

Daniel Stern

As a child Dan was, by his own account, observant of people. When he was seven years old, he saw that non-verbal expressions of a baby that were clear to him could be invisible to a talkative parent. He conceived the idea of two languages, one of which, awareness of embodied movement, may become dismissed with age. After studies at Harvard of the 1950s, he graduated from Einstein Medical College with MD in 1960. He turned to psychiatry, and then psychoanalytic training at Columbia University, hoping to gain knowledge of how the mind works. Dissatisfied with the theory of instinctive drives and their complexes, which he could not relate to everyday experience or clinical work, he was drawn to research in child psychology, then a very active field. Inspired by the discoveries of ethologists who demonstrated how signals among animals guided their social lives, he tried a different approach. He became part of a group at Columbia who adapted micro-analysis of natural communication by gesture and expression when words are inadequate or misleading, and this led to curiosity about how infants share ideas without language.

Dan wrote seven books, each a step in a journey of discovery of the human ‘self in relations’. In 1977 The First Relationship: Infant and Mother summarized work at Columbia on the fine timing of expressive movements by which a mother and baby share a game. His first scientific paper, ‘A micro-analysis of mother-infant interaction: Behaviors regulating social contact between a mother and her three-and-a-half-month-old twins’ in the Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry, appeared in 1971. It was followed by others on how gaze, facial expressions, and vocalizations controlled the ‘stimulus world’ of playful interaction between an entertaining baby and a loving mother. As Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre and Chief of the Laboratory of Developmental Processes, Stern did not see the infant as a mindless organism dependent on maternal care for bodily pleasure or comfort, and needing to learn a separation between a Self and any Object. From an approach assuming personal powers for the baby grew a new conception of the mother’s role and her experience of being with her baby, which in time became a model for a different way of conceiving psychotherapy for adult patients.

In his famous 1985 book The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Development Psychology, translated into many languages, Stern presented the infant as a human being from the start, especially gifted for attracting communication from a mother. He portrayed the emergence of awareness of self and other as a layered model like a building, in which initial talents remain a foundation for later advances. Dan’s book excited critical responses from followers of the modern authorities on the infant mind, Freud and Piaget, but the new vision was welcomed and strongly supported by psychologists who had been collecting evidence for 20 years about young infants’ clever powers of communication, and instincts for cultural learning. In his book Dan introduced new terms: ‘affect appraisals’, ‘core relatedness’, ‘intermodal fluency’, ‘intersubjective relatedness’, ‘relational affects’, ‘selective attunement’, and so on, to capture what was expressed in the infant-mother relationship from the start. Stern’s new terms became the language of a different developmental science for the baby in their interpersonal world.

In 1990 Stern, retaining the post of Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre, New York Hospital, had moved to the University of Geneva as Professor of Psychology and gained a new group of collaborators who shared a particular interest in the mother’s contribution. Her experience of pregnancy, birth, and new motherhood became a topic for in-depth research, and three books: a fanciful Diary of a Baby (1990) expressing a richer view of growing self-awareness; The Motherhood Constellation: A Unified View of Parent-infant Psychotherapy (1995); and in collaboration with his wife Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, a developmental pediatrician and child psychiatrist, and with a professional journalist Alison Freeland, The Birth of a Mother: How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever (1998). This last is a guide for expectant and new mothers to give support for their extraordinary experience. Dan also joined work on the relationships of the infant to with mother and father together, and with other persons. The sociability of the young human person assumed a much wider purpose, to become a conscious actor in a collaborative community.

In 2000 Dan presented a new paperbook edition of The Interpersonal World of the Infant. He made no changes to the 15-year-old text, instead adding a 26 page Introduction, which is an important addition to his writings. He reviews advances to his thinking, and gives thoughtful response to criticisms received, mainly by psychotherapists defending the classical psychoanalytic model of neuroses and therapy for patients who are able to speak, denying relevance of the research on infancy. He says:

“One consequence of the book’s application of a narrative perspective to the non-verbal has been the discovery of a language useful to many psychotherapies that rely on the non verbal. I am thinking particularly of dance, music, body, and movement therapies, as well as existential psychotherapies. This observation came as a pleasant surprise to me since I did not originally have such therapists in mind; my thinking has been enriched by coming to know them better” (p. xv)

In the last decade of Dan’s life he felt committed to a dynamic and generative view of the conscious self-as-agent with an experience of time in movement, in the ‘present moment’ of vivid awareness, and in ‘narratives’ of personal ambitions and affective engagements. New terms in the theory include ‘dynamic emotional states’, ‘forms of feeling’, ‘forms of vitality’, ‘present moments of meeting’, ‘proto-narrative envelopes’. Two books present these ideas. The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004) opens the way to a more sensitive and collaborative way of exploring a patient’s distress and its manifestation in all expressive actions, and in responses to an open reception by a person trained to sense the feelings behind their dynamics. The Boston Change Process Study Group, adopting Stern’s layered model of developmental change in relationships, promoted of this in practice and produced Change in Psychotherapy: A Unifying Paradigm (2010). The same year brought Dan’s final masterpiece, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development, published by Oxford University Press. Here we have an eloquent presentation of a theory of all human creativity, which depends on the creativity and sympathy for the poetic motives of body and mind which seek to discover two worlds, the physical aesthetic one of objects with beautiful properties that may be profitably used, or horrors that must be avoided, and the animated human one that senses one’s hopes and fears for relationships and may offer sympathetic moral companionship and collaboration.

This is a psychology to build not only practices to strengthen care for those in distress, but also encouragement for education of the young, and the development of laws and social industries and institutions of government that will benefit more people and reduce injustices. Dan Stern’s thoughts are with us, and will last.

Colwyn Trevarthen is Professor Emeritus of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a close colleague of Daniel Stern for over forty years. He is co-editor of Communicative Musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship published by Oxford University Press.

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How to stop looking for a French Michelangelo

By Phillip John Usher

British comedian Eddie Izzard — known for his Francophilia and for performing standup in French and in France — once made a quip during a show in New York that at first seemed rather Franco-sceptic: why, he asked, do we talk about the “Renaissance” using a word of French origin when France itself had no such moment of Re-birth? He called out to the audience, asking if anyone knew the equivalent Italian term. Someone called back “Rinascimento” and it was proclaimed on stage in lower Manhattan that, henceforth, the Italian term should be used in general parlance. If we put to one side the fact that France obviously did have a Renaissance (whatever we mean by that) and the various academic debates about periodization or about whether the term, invented in the nineteenth century, might be anachronistic or ideologically overburdened, we might acknowledge that the British comedian had a point. Or at least that his comment is symptomatic of what we mean when we say “Renaissance.” Say the word to someone and, if that person doesn’t think of Shakespeare or the Showtime’s Tudors, he or she will probably call to mind a certain painting by Da Vinci, a sculpture by Raphael, or a recent trip to the Uffizi Gallery. Ask that person to name a French artist from the same period and there will likely — and not surprisingly — be silence.

France’s first art historians (the likes of André Félibien and Alexandre Lenoir) seemingly operated from, while denying, a similar intuition — and consequently, in a nationalistic vein, they sought to fabricate the myth of a “French Michelangelo” in the person of Jean Cousin the Elder, whose only known painting, Eva Prima Pandora, is at the Louvre, at the heart of an exhibition organized by Dominique Cordellier and Cécile Scailliérez. Outside of such exhibitions, I would be willing to bet money that it is not one of the most looked at works in the collection. It is, for sure, a beautiful painting. In a somber grotto, which opens out in the background onto ancient ruins, a cityscape, and a garden, a woman reclines amidst luxuriant foliage on a fine piece of fabric that also wraps around and between her legs. A snake is wrapped around her arm and she holds in her right hand an apple-tree branch — she is thus Eve. But there are also two vases — she is also Pandora. The painting is both Christian and Pagan; it is at once mournful and wary (see the skull on which she leans, see the antique ruins in the background) and yet full of hope (the vases are upright and Pandora, as art historians have shown, is not a wholly negative figure). The painting is, moreover, reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (again, the Uffizi!), except that there is no rose, no dog, and no cassoni, all attributes evoking marriage. Moreover, and as Henri Zerner has shown, the painting can be likened to the decorations and celebrations of King Henri II’s royal entry in 1549, in which Paris itself (referred to as “Lutetia”) also became a “new Pandora.” But while Cousin’s painting is both beautiful and worthy of our attention, it has not been enough to make Jean Cousin the Elder the “French Michelangelo.”

Michelangelo’s David

The thing is, and as I am certainly not the first to write, the vast majority of French Renaissance art has little to do with paintings and standalone masterpieces. A much better place to seek out French art of this period is, well, everywhere else: sculptures, architectural façades, pottery, fireplaces, boiseries, saltcellars, copperplate engravings included in books, etc. And one particularly rich way into this complex situation is via the essential relationship between the various sister arts and literature. Take, for example, the stunning set of forty-four stained-glass windows in The Gallery of Psyche now housed at the Château de Chantilly, a thirty-minute trip from the center of Paris. Scene by scene, the images tell the story of Psyche’s love for Cupid: how Venus was jealous, how Cupid told Psyche not to look at him when they made love, how Psyche’s sisters convinced her to look, how hot oil from the lamp Psyche used to gaze at her lover fell on Cupid, of the travails that followed, and of the happy marriage at the end. But the images are not just illustrations of that story as told by Apuleius in the second century. The series of images, created at the demand of Anne de Montmorency in the 1540s, are windows that open onto a complex network of translators, artists, editors, writers, and poets. A quick summary would note that an anonymous maître verrier working in France created stained-glass windows based (largely, though not exclusively) on cartoons by a Flemish painter Michel Coxie, themselves mainly adaptations of engravings realized by the Master of the Die; but the finished verrières also included poems by three French poets, Claude Chappuys, Antoine Héroët, and Mellin de Saint-Gelais; and all this amidst the first editions in Latin and vernacular languages of Apuleius’s original text. There is not one author or artist, but many. And there is not just one medium or semiotic system, but several. Images evoke words that draw on images and other words. For so much of French art, we must situate ourselves in front of works of art realized in various media while, at the same time, opening one or several books.

It is not difficult to marvel at Michelangelo’s David – nor Cousin’s Eva Prima Pandora, for that matter. And there is no reason to stop doing so. But if we are to change what the word “Renaissance” evokes for most of us, namely the Rinascimento and the (rightly admired) masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, and especially if the word’s French etymology (from renaître – to be reborn) is to one day seem less jarring vis-à-vis the seeming lack of a French Michelangelo, we could do worse than turn to the extensive dialogue between art and literature in Renaissance France. The Gallery of Psyche — and yes, which indeed had an Italian predecessor at Rome’s Villa Farnesina — is just one point of departure. In fact, if the term Rinascimento brought to mind the amazing loggia of Cupid and Psyche at the Farnesina or Nicolò dell’Abate’s Aeneid gabinetto as frequently as it evoked Michelangelo’s David or the Mona Lisa, things might be quite different. The real distinction to be made is thus perhaps less between a French Renaissance and an Italian Rinascimento than between the search for standalone masterpieces and the realization that so many works of art produced in the early modern period grow from, react to, or even inspire works of literature. If we remember that, then France and Italy stop seeming quite so different and the search for a French Michelangelo all of a sudden seems even more pointless than before. At the same time, new works of art and new ways of reading and viewing all of a sudden come into focus.

Phillip John Usher was born in England. He studied French literature at Royal Holloway College, University of London, before pursuing graduate work in Romance Languages at Harvard University. He is currently Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he is also Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Epic Arts in Renaissance France.

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Image credit: Michelangelo’s David. By David Gaya (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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Front page news: the Oxford Etymologist harrows an international brothel

By Anatoly Liberman

Why brothel? We will begin with the customer. Broþel surfaced in Middle English and meant “a worthless person; prostitute.” The letters -el are a dead or, to use a technical term, unproductive suffix, but even in the days of its efflorescence it was rarely used to form so-called nomina agentis (agent nouns), the way -er is today added to read and work and yields reader and worker. The OED, in the entry devoted to the suffix, does mention agent nouns with -el ~-le, but the examples are very few. They are beadle (from French, from Germanic; literally, one who “bids”: the initial sense was “crier”), the obsolete words losel “profligate,” from lose, with its variant lorel, and brethel “worthless fellow,” the almost obvious predecessor of brothel. The consonant r in lorel, most probably, came from lorn, the base of the past participle of lose (remember the tearful Mrs. Gummidge, “a lone lorn creetur,” first a whimpering, then a brave, self-sacrificing widow in David Copperfield?). Those curious for more details may look up German verloren “lost” and the history of the English adjective forlorn.

The verb breoþan (þ = th) “to degenerate,” from which brethel and presumably brothel were formed and of which no traces are left in Standard Modern English, existed, and so did brieþel “worthless.” The adjective bore an uncanny resemblance to brittle, related to Old Engl. breotan “to break,” another extinct word, and its eastern and Kentish synonym brotel. To be sure, brothel “a depraved, dissipated person” could be formed from the root we find in the participle broþen “depraved,” but why should a doublet of breþel have sprung up in or before the fifteenth century and ousted the older, apparently, well-established form? There are also problems with meaning. My guess is that “profligate,” though the earliest attested sense of broþel may not have been the first one in everyday use. Not improbably, the story began with “whorehouse.”  Such names of immoral people as scoundrel and wastrel, despite the difference in their suffixes (-rel versus -el), were close enough to drag brothel into their net. Anyway, brothel “profligate,” to judge by the extant texts, was short-lived. Such a word certainly occurred more often in conversation than in books, and we have no way of reconstructing its former frequency.

Quite naturally, all those who have tried to discover the origin of brothel have asked the question about the relations between brothel and French bordel. In Modern French, bordel is a borrowing of Italian bordello, but the word existed in Old French. Its root (bord-) is a Germanic word, akin in sound and meaning to English board. From an etymological point of view, bordel designated a small board house, a hovel (-el is a diminutive suffix) and only later acquired the meaning that has stayed without change to this day. Dictionaries assert that brothel and bordel crossed each other’s paths by chance and are not related. But perhaps confusion, not coincidence, played the decisive role here.

In my opinion, the events developed so. A bordel, that is, a hut, a ramshackle building, a temporary and unsafe house, was a structure habitually used for sheltering prostitutes. We don’t know why Romance speakers borrowed a Germanic word for designating such a cabin. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a movement in the study of etymology called “Words and Things” (German “Wörter und Sachen”). Researchers would devote long articles and even books to exactly such matters. Regrettably, nowadays this aspect of history is neglected, and dictionaries discuss words without paying sufficient attention to things. That is why I have no answer to the question posed above. Presumably, the old inhabitants of France and Italy looked on something in the Germanic board house as “special.”

A fully respectable board house

Words for sex and prostitution move easily from language to language. Consider the peregrinations of bordel all over the Romance-speaking world (the noun became “international,” though surely the introduction of the “thing” did not need help from the neighbors), the etymology of ribald (from French, where it is from Germanic: the root (h)rib- meant “copulate”), and the unhealthy popularity of our F-word in the remotest countries of the planet. The OED provides evidence that bordel made its way into Middle English, and in light of this circumstance I would risk defending and developing an etymology offered in The Century Dictionary but disregarded by all later authorities. Unlike breþel, broþel from breoþan — I suspect — never existed. Much more likely, when bordel surfaced in Middle English, it was associated with broþen (the participle). The variation ro ~ or and the like (that is, r preceding a vowel versus r following it: metathesis) is common; thus, the German for board is Brett. Given this scenario, brothel will emerge as a trivial folk etymological alternation of a foreign word. Probably no one noticed that bordel reminded one of board. People needed a vivid picture of a house of sin, not an exercise in historical linguistics.

Two factors would have contributed to the association. First, a visitor or an inhabitant of a whorehouse was indeed a “lost” human being, a “losel.” The participle broþen suggested the connection and provided the necessary link. Second, the proximity of broth should not be disregarded. In fifteenth-century slang, for example, a brothel was, among others, called stew and kitchen. Customers were, figuratively speaking, “cooked” in the embraces of prostitutes. (If someone wants to know the origin of broth, “no problem,” as “servers” say in the restaurants of my area: the root is brew, so that broth is something brewed.)

Brothel ended up as a synonym for stew, with a suffix designating the “thing”: here a “kitchen” where the dish was prepared. Losel, wastrel, and scoundrel may have led to an occasional re-evaluation of the sense; hence “profligate,” rather than “bordello.” I would like to repeat my suggestion that, although “profligate” was the earliest recorded sense of brothel, it need not have been the original one. As for a customer of a brothel becoming an article produced in that kitchen, I can mention Old Engl. myltestre “prostitute.” It is said to be an adaptation of Latin meretrix (the same meaning). If this etymology is true, the unusually strong alteration of the Latin word was due to an association with meltan “burn up, consume by fire.” The Old English word for “brothel” was myltenhus (hus “house”).

Brothel has a voiceless sound after o. This may cause surprise, but, if we mentally transpose the letters and read -le for -el, we will discover hassle (as opposed to puzzle), baffle (as opposed to shovel), and the like, all of which have voiceless consonants (fricatives) between the vowel and l. However, the group thl not separated by a syllable boundary, as in athletic or sixthly, occurs only here. All things considered, this is the smallest problem in the history of brothel (the word or the thing). So why bother?

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

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Image credits: (1) House and Ruin On the machair at Smeircleit. Photo by Dave Fergusson, 23 May 2007. Geograph project collection. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) “Too many cooks spoil the broth” / F. Opper. Puck, 1884. Public domain via Library of Congress.

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A voyage in letters [infographic]

The 17th century saw great, heroic voyages of discovery — voyages into the unknown, voyages potentially into the abyss. The 18th century saw a slow transformation in travel — if for no other reason than the incremental improvement and progress in the methods of travel. The world was gradually encompassed into the realm of the known, or at least of the knowable. No longer were vast spaces of the earth truly terra incognita. They might as yet be unexplored, harbouring surprises of their own, but these places and their peoples became part of current time and space, of everyday existence and experience. Take a journey across this early modern world and explore tens of thousands of letters from this period with Electronic Enlightenment!

Download a jpg or pdf of the infographic.

Electronic Enlightenment (EE) is an unparalleled, evolving resource that brings the past to life, allowing you to explore both the relationships and the movement of ideas in the early modern period through its web of correspondence. This vast online searchable collection of inter-connected letters and documents range from the 17th to the mid-19th centuries, giving you unprecedented access to some of the world’s great historical “conversations”.

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2013: A Year in International Law

Compiled by Katherine Marshall

We asked a number of experts to share their most important international law moment or development with us.

“2013 was an important year for international law. In a number of ways it highlighted the impact that international law can have on debates, trials, and decisions which would have once been considered purely national. The British Parliament’s vote against participation in military operations in Syria is a good example of this, as is the first ever conviction of a former head of state, Charles Taylor, by an international(ized) court. On a less positive note, 2013 also showed international law’s inability to make a difference in situations of humanitarian need in the absence of political will. Syria is an example here as well, with hundreds of thousands of civilians suffering violence, displacement, and hunger as a result of Assad’s brutal crackdown on the opposition. It was also a year marked by widespread disappointment at the acquittal of a number of high-profile defendants at the Yugoslav tribunal, and by the continuing failure to reach a breakthrough in protection the world’s environment. ”


— Merel Alstein, Commissioning Editor for international law titles at Oxford University Press

“The tentative deal over the nuclear ambitions of Iran that was struck in Geneva between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China and Germany) was the most significant international event of 2013. The importance of this deal is twofold. First, Iran has been playing a dangerous game, being in continual non-compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency over much of this period, over which time it is understood to have become quite close to developing nuclear weapons. If it came much closer, it is likely a military strike against it would have occurred. Second, and linked to the first point, much of the Middle East, with the Syrian conflict, remains on a knife-edge. The Iranian connection in this area is very prominent, with both Iran and a number of other proxies being very active in the conflict. This tentative deal helps lower some of the tension in the area, and starts to remove what could easily have been a pretext to allow a war which is currently only in one country, become regional.”


— Alexander Gillespie, author of International Environmental Law, Policy, and Ethics

“Despite denials, evidence indicates that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in its civil war in August. A retaliatory strike by the United States and allies seemed inevitable. However, the UK Parliament voted against the use of force, depriving the United States of a key ally. Finally a deal was brokered whereby Syria will surrender all of its chemical weapons by 2014. This is a much better outcome than if the United States had conducted an illegal strike on Syria, which would have achieved nothing but futile death and destruction, and another tear at the fabric of international law.”


— Sarah Joseph, co-author of The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Cases, Materials, and Commentary, Third Edition

“It would be tempting to highlight the ESIL-IGILT conference ‘The Approaches of Liberal and Illiberal Governments to International Law: A Conference Marking 25 Years from the Collapse of Communist Regimes in Central and Eastern Europe’ (Tartu, 12-13 June 2014) as one providing a potential forum for significant and needed developments with regard to the working of international law in Eurasia. The topic is timely, its interest both practical and theoretical, but its result still open. Already in 2013, an important body of literature and documents consolidated addressing the systemic deficiencies and paths for reform proposals of the investor-State dispute settlement regime. It might be that we are finally heading to developments towards the best of both worlds, inclusion of individuals in the system together with respect for public choices and policies.”


— Mónica Garcia-Salmones, author of The Project of Positivism in International Law

“Syria remains a reality check for an emerging R2P (Responsibility to Protect) norm, particularly as R2P is currently based upon achieving agreement in the Security Council. Resolution 2118 of September 2013 represented a success for arms control in that it has led to a process of chemical weapons disarmament by the Syrian regime, but it did not fulfil the United Nations’ R2P the civilian population of Syria. The proposed limited military intervention of August 2013, if it had gone ahead, would have served punitive as well have preventive ends, but it would not have stopped the appalling loss of life (of over 100,000) mainly through conventional means of warfare. Only massive military intervention might stop this at least temporarily but such is beyond the United Nations and states post-Iraq. Nevertheless, when it is unable to agree on action the Security Council has a duty to continually work towards a diplomatic solution using its undoubted collective leverage. It has abysmally failed to do this in Syria but the Geneva conference scheduled for January 2014 gives the P5 another chance. The perseverance shown in achieving agreement over Iran’s nuclear programme in November 2013 is evidence that P5 consensus on what appears to be intractable problems is possible. It also holds out the prospect of finally building a post-Cold War international legal order based on diplomacy and agreement as the norm rather than on coercion and expeditionary interventions.”


— Nigel White, author of Democracy goes to War: British Military Deployments under International Law

“On 17 April 2013, the US Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum affirming a lower court’s dismissal of the case and restricting the scope of application of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) to exclude consideration of alleged human rights abuses occurring outside the United States. The ATS, which dates back to 1789, grants jurisdiction to federal courts to hear tort claims by aliens alleging violations of the ‘laws of nations’. Over the past two decades, there has been protracted litigation under the ATS regarding the implication of corporations in human rights abuses abroad. Indeed, the plaintiffs in Kiobel, Nigerian nationals residing in the United States, filed suit under the ATS against foreign corporations alleging that the latter aided and abetted the Nigerian Government in committing violations of the ‘law of nations’ in Nigeria. The Court held that the presumption against extraterritoriality applies to claims under the ATS, since there is nothing in the Statute to rebut that presumption. Chief Justice Roberts who delivered the opinion of the Court, noted that even where the claims ‘touch and concern the territory of the United States, they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.’ Kiobel seems to slam the door shut regarding human rights complaints brought against foreign corporations under the ATS. Yet, proponents of corporate accountability may perhaps find solace in the Concurring Opinion of Justice Kennedy who spoke of the possibility of other cases that ‘may arise with allegations of serious violations of international law principles protecting persons’ which may not be covered ‘by the reasoning and holding of today’s case.’”


— Markos Karavias, author of Corporate Obligations under International Law

“The Council of Europe has organised a public consultation on the longer term future of the system of the European Convention on Human Rights. Since the first steps were taken in 1950 for the collective enforcement of certain human rights, much has changed in Europe. The European Union has become an public authority to reckon with, which will accede to the Convention. Through internet communicating and sharing information across borders has become an everyday experience. Through the consultation the Council of Europe internationalizes democracy through the internet. Now we must point out, before 27 January 2014, the future role to be played by the European Court of Human Rights to further develop democracy and especially accountability on the European level.”


— Geranne Lautenbach, author of The Concept of the Rule of Law and the European Court of Human Rights

“2013 has been the year for challenging the traditional rules governing the law on the use of force. Challenges have come from several quarters. We have seen the intense debate — in the Security Council, in the UK Parliament, in the US Congress, on the blogs — regarding the legality of military action in Syria in response to chemical attacks on civilians. Controversy has also surrounded the use of drones to conduct targeted killing, particularly by the United States in Pakistan and Yemen. Concepts such as the ‘unable or unwilling test’, ‘elongated imminence’, and ‘consent to the use of force’ have been scrutinized by the UN Special Rapporteurs on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights and Extrajudicial Executions in their 2013 reports to the General Assembly. The debates will last long into the New Year, but will only lead to results if States are committed to greater transparency and accountability.”


— Philippa Webb, author of International Judicial Integration and Fragmentation

“While, in absolute terms, there have been more important developments in general public international law (think of, eg, the unanimous adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2118 on the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons and the disillusioning results of the Warsaw Climate Change Conference), I would like to highlight a less-noticed development in the field of international economic law. 2013 was the first year during which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) applied in practice its new institutional view on capital flows adopted in December 2012. In advising its member states, the IMF now explicitly recognizes the potentially destabilizing effects that excessive capital inflows and uncontrolled capital outflows may have depending on the precise economic circumstances and the state of development of a given member state’s financial system and institutional framework. The IMF, which over many years had been a fierce and inflexible proponent of a complete liberalization of global capital flows, has thus learnt an important lesson from the global financial crisis.”


— Claus Zimmermann, author of A Contemporary Concept of Monetary Sovereignty

“For the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (which will disappear from the year round-ups in international law in the near future), 2013 will enter the annals as a tumultuous one. The February acquittal on appeal of Momčilo Perišić, the former Chief of General Staff of the Yugoslav Army who had been convicted at trial for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and war crimes, has been on everyone’s mind. Along with the soon-to-follow acquittals of Stanišić and Simatović, both high-ranking officials in Serbia’s State Security Service, Perišić aroused fierce debates both within and outside the court. The legal controversy (and the accompanying political controversy) concerned the application by the Perišić Appeals Chamber of the requirement that general, or neutral, assistance should be specifically directed to the commission of crimes to warrant a conviction, as a decisive element of actus reus of aiding and abetting. However, the Special Court for Sierra Leone’s Taylor appeal judgment (September 2013) in strong terms rejected that requirement as having no basis in customary law. It remains to be seen which of the approaches will prevail in the future jurisprudence on aiding and abetting liability. But the current rift between the two courts is remarkable and puts their legacies apart on this issue.”


— Sergey Vasilev, co-editor of International Criminal Procedure: Principles and Rules

What do you think people will still be talking about in 10 or 20 years’ time? Continue the conversation with us on Twitter at @OUPIntLaw.

Katherine Marshall is a marketing Executive for Law titles at Oxford University Press.

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.

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                Related StoriesVolume, variety, and online scholarly publishingBetween ‘warfare’ and ‘lawfare’Growing up in a recession 

Growing up in a recession

By Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo

Economic crises have a traumatic effect on peoples’ psychology and attitudes, as superbly illustrated by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, both written in the middle of the Great Depression. The experience of the dramatic years during the Great Depression had a large impact on people and, ultimately, helped forge the social beliefs and attitudes that sustained a political system for many years. The Great Depression gave the state a new role in stabilizing the economy, created a new political alliance that dominated the US for several decades, and prompted the Keynesian revolution and the birth of macroeconomics. The most recent crisis has also left deep scars, which will affect the economy for many years to come.

What are the psychological and political effects of an economic crisis? Recent research can give an answer to this question. We studied the impact of severe recessions on individual’s broad beliefs and attitudes.

We looked at answers to the General Social Survey, a nationally representative sample that gathers information from about 1,500 American every other year and has been conducted since 1972, to analyze how economic shocks have affected the attitudes of different generations in the US. The basic idea was to match macroeconomic shocks during early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey.

There is an important challenge in analyzing the effects of shocks on individuals’ beliefs. Individuals go through many experiences over their life cycle and it is important to control for all these additional factors. In particular, other non-economic factors, including wars and the culture revolutions, can affect various generations in different ways. For instance, Strauss and Howe (1991) argue that a cycle of various generations explains major events in US history. According to these authors, US history is explained by the succession of four types of generations: idealistic, reactive, civic and adaptive. The succession of these four types is independent of economic events.  So, for instance, the generations growing up during the Great Depression could have been affected also by the experience of World War II.

In order to disentangle the effects of economic distress from other nationwide events, we used the fact that there is considerable heterogeneity in the economic growth across the nine US regions. For example, in any year, New England may be in a severe recession while the rest of the country experiences positive growth. It turns out that a severe regional recession strikingly alters the attitudes and beliefs of individuals growing up there. Recessions do alter perceptions, especially of people between the ages of 18 and 25. Recession-influenced respondents expressed a stronger preference for government redistribution and tended to believe that success in life was more a matter of luck than hard work; as a result they are also more likely to vote for a democratic president.

Four points are worth noting:

First, the effects of a severe recession experienced are large when the individual is between the ages of 18 and 25 – the so-called formative age – during which social psychologists think most of social beliefs are formed; the effects are not so strong when the recession is experienced later in life.
Second, these effects are permanent because attitudes of recession-stricken individuals remain significantly altered many years after the severe recession ends.
Third, we control for individuals’ endowments such as income, level of education, and ownership of a house that could also have an impact on beliefs. We thus measure the direct effect of a recession on beliefs; this effect could be even bigger if we added also the indirect effect through the personal endowments, which are also affected by a recession.
Fourth, our estimation represents a lower bound of the effect of a recession on beliefs because our identification strategy relies only on regional shocks implicitly ignoring the effects of nationwide recessions.

That same pattern is found in an analysis of the World Value Survey, which includes data from 37 countries. When we work with this larger sample of countries, we also found that coming of age in a lousy economic environment breeds the belief that success in life depends more on luck than effort, which in turn leads to more support for social welfare policies. In addition, we found a positive association between experiencing a macroeconomic disaster and both left-wing ideology and affiliation with a left-wing political party.

Why do beliefs on the importance of luck, the role of the state, and redistribution matter for the economy? Today’s experiences and beliefs shape tomorrow’s political climate, and, ultimately, determine policies. Thomas Piketty (1995) has shown that people who believe that luck plays a big role are more comfortable with higher taxes. Similarly, Alberto and Angeletos (2005) and Benabou and Tirole (2006) show that the interaction between a belief in fairness or “in a just world” respectively are able to generate an “American” equilibrium with laissez-faire policies and just-world beliefs and a “European” equilibrium with social welfare and a more pessimistic view about how just the world is.

So, is it possible that the experience of the current severe recession is forming a generation that will want more state intervention, believe more in redistribution, and accept higher taxes? Large political realignments in the US have often coincided with traumatic economic events. Hopefully, this reserch sheds some light on how economic conditions could affect beliefs and attitudes.

Paola Giuliano is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Global Economics and Management Group at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Antonio Spilimbergo is an advisor at International Monetary Fund. They are the authors of the paper ‘Growing up in a recession’, published in the Review of Economic Studies.

The Review of Economic Studies aims to encourage research in theoretical and applied economics, especially by young economists. It is widely recognised as one of the core top-five economics journal, with a reputation for publishing path-breaking papers, and is essential reading for economists.

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My dearest Xandra…

Hugh Trevor-Roper was born 100 years ago today on 15 January 1914. The following is a letter from Hugh Trevor-Roper to Xandra Howard-Johnston, extracted from One Hundred Letters From Hugh Trevor-Roper, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman.

To Xandra Howard-Johnston, 8 August 1953

8 August 1953 Christ Church, Oxford

My dearest Xandra

You think I am ironical when I am serious and serious when I am ironical—or at least you pretend to do so; is it just calculated feminine perversity, or is my language really so ‘ambiguous’? Of course I was perfectly serious when I said James should read natural history books and become observant. You say that those are two things that I have not done. But (if you are right in saying so) may I not even so suggest that a boy avoid the omissions that I perhaps regret having made in my early studies? In fact I don’t think you are right. When I was a small boy I was an enthusiastic naturalist: I read numbers of books on natural history (some of which I will now give to James if you think he will like them); knew all the wild flowers that grew in Northumberland, all the kinds of crustaceans, molluscs, sea-mice, marine-spiders, etc., that crept and clung upon its coast; collected butterflies and moths (I even once caught a White Admiral after days of stalking in Gatwick wood, Surrey); kept hedgehogs, tadpoles, caterpillars and mice; and (unlike Billa) can tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat! If you were ever to come on a country walk with me, I believe I could add considerably to your knowledge of the details of animal and vegetable life! Of course I have forgotten a good deal—especially about birds at which I was never so good, as they are less easy for a short-sighted boy to see; and then I think I interested myself in such things the more because I was a solitary child (neither my brother nor my sister had, or has, the slightest interest in nature; and I was very ungregarious!), and took less interest in them later when I found other subjects to concern myself with; but even so I think it is a good thing for a boy to study, and I was not being ironical at all!

Now you ask what I think of your letters: are they ungrammatical, illexpressed, naïve, platitudinous? I am, you say, ‘a famous writer’, and you expect a judgment. Dearest Xandra, I hate , I really, genuinely hate, being treated as ‘a famous writer’, and I can assure you that there is no more certain way of driving me back into an opaque, impenetrable reserve than by treating me as such.  It maddens me when people introduce me in such terms: I’m afraid I always retreat into a sulky silence and create a very bad impression if they do! I feel it is false in itself, a misuse of language, and also it makes people treat one in a different way, a kind of inhuman, deferential way; and whereas I know you will say I don’t respond much at any time, nevertheless I do think that I can respond just a little in society if treated as human, not as a kind of exhibit or slot-machine! That is one reason why I like undergraduates, at least some of them. It is not for the reason that you supposed, but because they haven’t yet acquired that deferential attitude which people so soon acquire when they think in terms of public dignity. Of course there are other reasons too—they are energetic, willing to rough it and do chores, and interested in experiences: they like seeing and learning and discovering new things and don’t look on everything with that blasé affectation of boredom which older people so often do. All this makes them good travelling companions; I think you are a good travelling companion too; because you are still capable of being delighted and surprised and instructed by new worlds; but you must have noticed how most people, once grown up, lose that freshness of approach, and when they travel are more apt to complain at the interruption of customary routine than to be exhilarated by experiencing something new.

Now, your letters: need I really say it? I love receiving them; they make it perfectly possible for me to live alone here, in this sullen climate, surrounded by deserted rooms and halls, and quadrangles full of apparently inhuman tourists, taking my identical cold meals in solitude and silence while the echoes of their brazen, inappropriate, transatlantic misobservations drift in through my open window. I have tried to work here alone in August before; and always before I have had to give up through utter dispiritedness; but this time I feel I can go happily on and only wish it could go on longer; and this difference is entirely due to the sustaining hope and confidence that next day, at breakfast, I shall find a flat blue envelope with a Melrose postmark and a spidery inscription! I can assure you that my sensitive skin has not yet shivered at an infelicitous adjective, that I never notice your punctuation (which is surely a sign that it is correct), and that I would rather have a mixed metaphor (as in your last letter) than no metaphor at all! If there are any platitudes, I will shudder and tell you; but so far—in some 769 pages—there have been none! So please don’t write to me as if submitting exercises to a critical pedagogue; write as you do, and as fully, and as often, and I am delighted!

And now comes the question what I shall say to Dawyck. I keep putting off my reply to him, because it is so difficult; and perhaps in the end I shall not reply, it being too difficult. How can I explain the position? The fact is that I feel a kind of complex where Dawyck is concerned. He has been a very good friend to me for a long time, and I owe him a great deal and have a genuine respect and deep personal affection for him, and yet I now feel that perhaps we have been on false terms, and that I, insensitively, have been unaware of it. You know, he is very uncommunicative (in some ways less communicative than I am), and when he writes letters they are so brief and bald that they suggest a positive physical difficulty in writing, as if he were writing with treacle or tar instead of ink. Nevertheless he always behaves with such kindness that one tends to deduce his sentiments from that, and in fact, deducing from his behaviour, I have allowed myself to suppose that he both understood me & liked my company more than I now feel that he does. I now feel that he has in his mind a picture of me which, in some respects, I believe to be wrong (for although I am always chary of supposing that I am right about myself, I do feel that there are some points on which one can be a judge), and, further, that he finds me a more difficult companion than he had allowed me to suppose; and therefore I feel that I have exploited his kindness too much in the past; and when he writes suggesting that I write fully and openly to him, I feel that whereas I could have done so before, when I believed there was a greater basis of understanding between us, it is much more difficult now, across the great cloud of incomprehension which seems to me suddenly to have revealed itself between our minds. This is the basis of my difficulty. One can unbare one’s soul (though at the best of times it is a painful enough operation) to someone with whom one feels complete sympathy of understanding; but without that sympathy it is, I think, impossible. Please don’t tell this to Dawyck—that would only add a social misunderstanding to a private difficulty; but if he complains that I have not answered, I hope you will see my difficulty and contrive that he does not blame me for my omission!

Dearest Xandra, these are some of the difficulties that inhibit my expression; and when I try not to thrust before you such a dreary tangle of insoluble emotional and intellectual problems, but to extract with such precision as I can the essential, practical conclusions, then you find these conclusions clear perhaps, but cold. No doubt you are right; but I think that I am also right in supposing that clarity—at least if it is about a complicated and tangled matter—must be rather cold and surgical. However, if you don’t mind the tangle, I can assure you of the warmth. I do indeed love you deeply, more deeply (I am sure) than anyone before, and I now feel that I should be unhappy without you and without your letters in a sense in which I have not been unhappy before. I have often enough wanted to express this, but always I have been inhibited by the great practical difficulties of doing anything about it—so many grim, invincible, irremovable figures project their prohibitive shadows relentlessly across what might otherwise be a simple relationship giving happiness to both of us; or else (I must admit) you have pressed me for short, simple answers and then, perversely, feeling that complex situations don’t provide such simple answers, I have dodged the pressure and slid maliciously away; but at least I have tried to show by other means than words how much your love means to me. I couldn’t have enjoyed our holiday more, and I am ashamed to think that perhaps I have not properly thanked you for it, and for coming with me to visit my friends, and sharing also with me the discomforts which I sometimes so arbitrarily imposed. May I do so now, and ask to be forgiven for my reticence hitherto?

I am beginning to be ashamed of this letter, it is so confused and complicated and egotistical. I will end it. I’m afraid also it is the last I will write for a few days, so for that reason too I wish it were better; but as it will catch the late post tonight, Saturday, I don’t suppose you will get it before Monday afternoon, and since you go to Wales on Tuesday, I daren’t write a letter that may miss you. But I will write again on 13th, to reach you in Wales on 14th; and I shall hope that you will be able, even in these intervening days, to find some opportunity to send me some note, however brief, to tell me that you have had a good journey and are well and sometimes thinking of me, as I shall be of you.

All my love

Hugh

The above is taken from One Hundred Letters From Hugh Trevor-Roper, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman. Richard Davenport-Hines is a historian, literary biographer, and former Research Fellow of the London School of Economics. He has edited two previous collections of Hugh Trevor-Roper‘s writings, Letters from Oxford (2006) and Wartime Journals (2011).  Adam Sisman is a freelance writer, specializing in biography. His first book was a life of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s rival, the historian A.J.P. Taylor (1994), and he has more recently written the authorized biography of Trevor-Roper himself (2010).

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                Related StoriesWhat is important about shininess in design?Why we should dive deep into studying music historyThe EU and ‘anti anti-fascism’ 

The real unsolved problems of mathematics

By Jason Rosenhouse

With the arrival of the new year, you can be certain that the annual extravaganza known as the Joint Mathematics Meetings cannot be far behind. This year’s conference is taking place in Baltimore, Maryland. It is perhaps more accurate to say that it is a conference of conferences, since much of the business to be transacted will take place in smaller sessions devoted to this or that branch of mathematics. In these sessions, researchers at the cutting edge of the discipline will discuss the most recent developments on the biggest open problems in the business. It will all be terribly clever and largely impenetrable. You can be certain, however, that the real open questions of mathematics will barely be addressed.

It is hardly a secret that large conferences like this are as much about socialization as they are about research. This presents some problems, since the Joint Meetings can be a minefield of social awkwardness and ambiguous etiquette.

For example, imagine that you are walking across the lobby and you notice someone you know slightly coming the other way. Should you stop and chat? Or is a nod of acknowledgement sufficient? If you do stop, what sort of greeting is appropriate? A handshake? A hug? And how do you exit the conversation once the idle chit chat runs out? Sometimes you stop and chat, and then someone friendlier with the other person arrives to interrupt. One minute you’re making small talk about your recent job histories, and the next you’re just standing there watching your conversation partner make dinner plans with someone who just appeared. Now what do you do? Usually your only course is to mutter something about being late for a talk and then slink off with whatever dignity you can muster.

The exhibition center presents its own problems. How long can you stand in one place perusing a book before it becomes rude? Quite a while, apparently, if we are to judge from some of the stingier characters we inevitably meet. If the book is that interesting just buy it and be done with it. Come to think of it, when you are standing there looking through books, what is the maximum allowable angle to which you can separate the covers? Cracking the spine is definitely frowned upon. How many Hershey’s miniatures can you reasonably pilfer from the MAA booth? Which book should you buy to burn up your AMS points? Let me suggest that the answer to that one depends on which book will look best on your shelf, since you know full-well you are never going to read it.

Actually presenting a talk brings with it some challenges of its own. Perhaps you are giving a contributed talk, and you get the first slot after lunch. So it’s just you, the person speaking after you, and whoever drew the short straw for moderation duty. Do you acknowledge the lack of an audience? Or do you go through the motions like you’re keynoting? After giving your talk, is it acceptable simply to leave? Or are you ethically obligated to stay for the talk right after yours? What do you do if you notice an error in someone else’s talk? Should you expose it to the world during the question period, or just discuss it privately with the speaker afterward?

Perhaps we need a special session to discuss these questions. That, at least would be a session where everyone could understand what was being said. On the other hand, given the occasionally strained relationship between mathematicians and social graces, perhaps I should not be so cavalier about that.

Jason Rosenhouse is Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University. He is the author of Taking Sudoku Seriously: The Math Behind the World’s Most Popular Pencil Puzzle with Laura Taalman; The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math’s Most Contentious Brain Teaser; and Among The Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Lines. Read Jason Rosenhouse’s previous blog articles.

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What is important about shininess in design?

By Tom Fisher and Nicolas P. Maffei

What attracts us to objects? Why does ‘bling’ catch our eye, albeit superficially? Why do we value the glow of patina? While all of our senses aid our first contact with material and form, arguably, it is the visual qualities of an object’s surface that first draws us in. It is only later, perhaps, that the other senses – touch, smell, taste, hearing – become engaged. Different lighting conditions and object biographies create varying surface effects from soft matte to shiny gloss – each suggesting its own strongly engaging set of meanings.

Gold Souq, Dubai

Shininess in art and design history carries a range of, often paradoxical, cultural and historical meanings. We were attracted to the notion that stable meaning could be found in such a slippery phenomenon, one dependent on perceptual instability and, arguably, lacking essence; a phenomenon that is as unstable and fleeting as our own perceptual experience.

In our research, we found that , depending on its context, shininess could suggest a multitude of historically specific meanings: the presence of ancestral spirits (pre-modern), the spirit of modernity (twentieth century), as well as connotations of invasive Western progress (Japan in the 1930s). Shininess could suggest inner health through the glow of radiant hair and skin. It could equally attract and repel: consider the alluring shine of gold and the disgusting shine of slime. A shiny, mass-produced product could seem cheap and throwaway, whereas gleaming gold jewellery could indicate wealth and permanence. Superficial shininess seemed strongly linked to postmodern theory, which identified surface experiences and effects with a new era of late-capitalism. We soon realized that shine is often not inherent in an object but is sometimes derived from labour. So, shined boots, polished silver, etc. fell into a class of worked goods that might connote work or suggest leisured social status.

Shininess is a useful category of study for design history, where many objects are composed of shiny stuff everything from gleaming stainless steel to bright plastic. But we are keen to extend our investigation beyond these familiar materials. We are also interested in challenging the expectations that shiny materials might push the boundaries of design history, for example the seemingly magical shimmer of daguerreotype glass. The motion on the Moscow Metro and the display of health through shiny hair are manifestations of shininess that imply bodies, but in each case the shininess has a different relationship in their subjectivity. Passengers on the Metro inhabit a shiny Soviet sublime in a different sense to an individual playing out the constant battle between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ shine in hair. This subjective element – another instance of the instability of the phenomenon – is mirrored by the effect of broader cultural and social phenomena on the meaning of shininess. A range of themes central to mid twentieth century modernity, including progressiveness, novelty, and technological innovation were materialized in the shininess of both stainless steel and plastics. But just as the authenticity of the shine of stainless steel could be irrelevant in a field of consumption characterized by impermanent glitz, the promise of an a-septic, colourful, glossy world provided by modern plastics was, by the 1970s, ringing hollow in the face of environmental concern.

Partizanskaya station, Moscow Metro

For us it was these instabilities that became the lens through which to understand our subject. It influences how we acknowledged not just the subjectivity of individual perception, but the ever-shifting light and the constant physical change of materials and surfaces in the context of prevailing ideas filtered through the gloss of myriad surfaces.

Tom Fisher is Professor of Art and Design in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. After study in art and design and some years running a small craft business, he took his PhD at the University of York in Sociology, concentrating on the role of artificial materials in consumption experiences. Dr Nicolas P. Maffei is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design, Norwich University of the Arts, UK. His research has focused on modernism in American design. He has published academic articles in Design Issues (MIT Press), Journal of Design History (Oxford University Press), and Design and Culture (Bloomsbury Academic).

Journal of Design History is a leading journal in its field. It plays an active role in the development of design history (including the history of the crafts and applied arts), as well as contributing to the broader field of studies of visual and material culture. The journal includes a regular book reviews section and lists books received, and from time to time publishes special issues. The most recent special issue is on Shininess.

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Image credits: Gold Souq, Dubai by Ian and Wendy Sewell, Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons. Partizanskaya station, Moscow Metro by A. Savin, Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons.

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What the bilingual brain tells us about language learning

By Arturo E. Hernandez

One of the most common questions people ask revolves around when and how to learn a second language. One common view is that earlier is better. There is good evidence for this view. A number of studies have found that the earlier a person learns a second language, the better they perform on a number of tests. Particularly sensitive to age is a person’s ability to speak without an accent and to detect speech sounds that are not present in their native language. For example, infants can detect sounds from a language not in their environment at six months of age. By 10 months of age they lose this ability. This suggests that the ability to detect speech sounds from around the globe is available to all infants but slowly fades away. Another arena where age plays a role is in the processing of grammar. Those who learn a second language later in life do not perform as well on tests of grammar as early learners. Hence, the ability to learn grammar and speech sounds appears to be very dependent on the age that one first learns a language.

Despite this general rule, there are some very interesting exceptions. For example, Christophe Pallier and his colleagues tested a group of adults who had been born in Korea and adopted as children in France between the ages of 4-8. This group of adults were asked to listen to sentences in Korean, French, or an unknown language. The results revealed no difference in their brain activity when compared to native French speakers. That is, both groups showed similar activity for French, Korean, and a foreign language. Furthermore, the Korean adoptees had no discernible accent. They sounded French. The results are intriguing because they suggest that a language can be lost even relatively late in childhood. This suggests that the age at which a language is learned is not the only predictor of how well a language is spoken as an adult.

This complex form of language representation is also found when observing the effects of brain damage on bilingual individuals. For over 100 years, neurologists and neuropsychologists had observed a lot of differences in the pattern of language loss in bilinguals. There were cases of people who lost access to one or both languages after suffering brain damage. Some lost access to the first language and others lost access to the second language. I also experienced a brief period of language inaccessibility when immersed in Portuguese, my third language. When I returned from my time abroad, I began to read about cases of bilingual aphasia. The resonance between language loss due to stroke and what I had experienced was interesting. I wondered why there was such a dynamic aspect to language access in bilinguals — questions that I began to ask myself 24 years ago.

Arturo Hernandez is currently Professor of Psychology and Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience graduate program at the University of Houston. He is the author of The Bilingual Brain. His major research interest is in the neural underpinnings of bilingual language processing and second language acquisition in children and adults. He has used a variety of neuroimaging methods as well as behavioral techniques to investigate these phenomena which have been published in a number of peer reviewed journal articles. His research is currently funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development.

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