Memory and Language Acquisition©

by Maurice Hazan

April 2010

The mind is always in motion, trying to understand the rules of the moment, moving us towards pleasure and away from pain, engineering a better experience of our lives. Deciphering the meaning of our surrounding world. Seeing faces in the clouds.

In this article, Maurice Hazan distills his observation on teaching world languages during the past twenty-five years to students from two to seventy years old. Applying principles of active cognition and semantic memory, a new theory emerges: Neuro muscular rehearsal--the action of putting spontaneous speech into practice to create synapses and predictive memories.

The action of vocalizing new sounds allows the user to create synapses between neurons.  Every phoneme, morpheme, every word, and most short sentences are stored in synapses. In order to become communicative in a language, you must speak it.  Exposure to sounds 4 to 5 hours a week does not allow an average student to store a language in his active memory system.  Creating language synapses goes through neuro-muscular rehearsal, which is the action of repeating a sound with the goal of encoding it in a synapse, a storing device in the brain...

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