
Introduction
Typically, when we think of language as a system of communication peculiar to people in a particular social milieu, we might immediately imagine the language we speak, such as the Irish variety of English or, maybe, the Okinawan variety of Japanese. In turn, we might further imagine language as a kind of verbal[1] or visual code[2] we come to know and use as a key sign of both belonging to and being able to decode the discourse of others in a certain geographic location or ethnic background. This general sense of knowing a particular language, however, captures only a fraction of understanding human language as a manifestation of profoundly complex and unseen natural processes unfolding throughout the stages of human development — our neurological functioning,[3] cognitive abilities,[4] levels of conscious awareness,[5] psychological states,[6] physiological health,[7] and sensory perception.[8]
The complex, interrelated, and dynamic processes of language acquisition, for instance, say much about why humans even possess what we call language and how, through a particular language, we can perform a staggering array of activities. One of those astonishing feats is the ability to manipulate people’s perceptions by laying, through symbols and vocalizations, the conceptual grounds for the acquisition of new knowledge, the formation of biases or assumptions, and even the propagation of deceptions — practices described by many researchers as cognitive framing[9].
Since we live in a time now dominated by those who seek to manipulate reality and to control thought and speech[10, 11], it is useful to consider the incredible ease with which human perception of the empirical world can be molded to fit a certain politically acceptable point of view[12] which people today are increasingly compelled to adopt[13]. After all, much research[14, 15, 16] has, since the rollout of the Coronavirus narrative, sought to understand how most of earth’s population was effectively herded into the world’s largest medical and psychological experiment ever conducted[17, 18]. In looking back to the work of Jacques Ellul[19], this article examines how deceptions, appearing in the major forms[20, 21] of propaganda today, can be best understood as coordinated government-funded operations of framing[22, 23, 24] which are aimed at agitating and integrating the public into an organized program of collective mass obedience.
A Starting Place for Manipulation: The Womb
It has in recent years been patently obvious that many people have been acting almost unconsciously as uncritical consumers of any new political agenda offered up for consumption, no matter how absurd.[25, 26, 27] Since consciousness is intimately interrelated to language,[28] a logical starting place for discussion of manipulation is the in-utero development of the language faculty. Maybe the most fascinating features of human behavior and facility are that languages begin unfolding prenatally. Psychologists DeCasper and Spence[29] hypothesized that babies experience their mothers’ speech in the womb, that language acquisition begins to unfold during the latter stages of pregnancy, and this prenatal exposure to the vibrations of the mother’s verbal output influences later postnatal auditory preferences.
DeCasper and Spence tested their theory with sixteen pregnant women who were given the task of reading a certain children’s story to their unborn babies twice daily over the final six weeks of their terms. After the babies were born, the experiment was repeated with only eight of the subjects. Obervations focused on the nonnutritive sucking behavior of the babies as they were exposed to recordings of two distinctly different stories: one comprised of eight mothers in the experimental group reading The Cat in the Hat and those remaining in the control group reading The King, the Mice and the Cheese — a tale composed of distinctly different rhyme and pace.
The researchers concluded that the newborns preferred listening to The Cat in the Hat, the story they had heard frequently as developing fetuses. Their subsequent reactions to the familiar story as newborn infants provide further evidence for the theory[30] that residual experiences excite and arouse a range of emotions. The 1986 experiment, as well as others that have since replicated the findings, indicates that human beings begin developing a certain level of conscious awareness of language at about 37 weeks’ gestation[31] by virtue of our responses to the prosodic features of speech[32] we detect in utero — stress, rhythm, and rhyme as embedded in the syntactic structures[33] of the language.
Equally impressive were other discoveries in studies of perceptual recognition in newborns. Regarding the development of visual acuity, Bushnell et al. (1989)[34] showed that in just one hour after their delivery infants are able to differentiate between their mother’s face and a stranger’s. Neonates displayed significantly more sucking responses to video representations of their mothers, suggesting that individual recall of the distinct features of the mother’s face was an obvious clue to the incredible speed with which infants formed significant powers of visual awareness.
Added to these findings are other related studies by Walton and Bower (1993)[35] that have shown infants do form, with amazing speed, mental representations that exhibit some of the properties of prototypes of familiar images, which add further weight to Prototype Theory[36, 37] as an explanation for how humans effectively process the incredibly complex sensory phenomena we encounter each moment. Referring, also, to studies done of fetal motor activity in response to stimulation of the maternal sympathetic nervous system, Bertau (2013) notes that the “fetus plays an active role in its own ontogeny and pregnancy outcomes, preparing a successful transition to its postnatal environment”.[38]
Social Integration: Beyond the Uterus Toward Community
What do these fascinating discoveries about the developmental stages of hearing and sight tell us about language and communication? Since the baby’s adaptation to a communal setting outside the womb accelerates quickly with social and emotional integration into the family, the development of language is necessarily interwoven with neurological maturation and serves as a key mechanism for constructing personal identity and self-awareness. From a neurological perspective, language acquisition unfolds through dynamic interactions across certain brain regions — Broca’s area[39] governing speech production and Wernicke’s area[40] governing language comprehension.
The appearance of linguistic capabilities is also closely tied to cognitive development. As children develop language skills, they develop increasingly sophisticated cognitive abilities, including abstract thinking, mathematical reasoning, self-awareness, social cognition, and emotional regulation. It is hardly any wonder why in times of societal upheaval that despots, for example, would emerge and undertake censorship campaigns to curb the use of certain words since the word itself mediates cognition and has the inherent potential to trigger human imagination[41] beyond the politically mandated, accepted, or prescribed.
Regarding neurological functioning, language development is supported by neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to form, recognize and reorder, if needed, synaptic connections. During crucial developmental stages, particularly in early childhood, the brain reveals remarkable plasticity during development of the language centers. Neuroimaging studies[42, 43] have shown that children, especially from multilingual environments, tend to exhibit enhanced neural connectivity and potentially greater cognitive flexibility. It’s likely why creativity expressed in children is so astonishing to adults who have forgotten they had already had their imaginative faculties largely effaced by the powerful socializing processes typical of formal schooling.
Since psychological identity emerges within this linguistic framework, language cannot be understood merely as a communication device, but moreover as a key mechanism for the successful construction of the self. As we learn how to articulate our thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions, we develop a narrative sense of ourselves, and this narrative identity is dynamically constructed through linguistic interactions with others as well as ourselves through dialogues and internal monologues. The intimate relationship, therefore, between language and psychological health is profound.
To sum up, the intricate interplay across neurological functioning, language development, and psychological identity has engendered interdisciplinary research revealing an incredible complexity of human consciousness and self-understanding. This close interrelation between consciousness and speech can help explain why humans need no special instruction in the acquisition of language and in the formation of cultural concepts such as truth, love, hate, and war.[44] Through lived experience, our routine exposure to natural languages and their conceptual representations as metaphors embedded in speech deepens our neurological connections across words[45], their nonliteral symbolic representations, their auditory and visual associations and mental imagery. From the womb as we break free from the dominant influences of our mothers’ voices and expand our network of interactions in the larger society, we naturally gravitate to other influences that might justifiably serve to meet our mental and emotional needs in our expanding social and psychological universe. What this all means for our social development and integration with communities outside the family is nothing short of momentous.