[1]The small Turkish town of Kuşköy, tucked into
an isolated valley on the rainy, mountainous
Black Sea coast of Turkey, looks ........ like the
other villages ∈ the region. Kuşköy is
[5] remarkable not for how it looks but for how it
sounds: here, the roar of the water is ........
accompanied by loud, lilting whistles – the
distinctive tones of the local language. Over
the past half-century, linguists and reporters,
[10] curious about what locals call “bird language,”
have occasionally struggled up the footpaths
and dirt roads that lead to Kuşköy. So its
thousand or so residents were not surprised
when biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün
[15] showed up and asked them to participate ∈a
study.
Whistled languages, although unusual,
have been ........ for centuries. Most of the
examples that have been documented arose
[20]∈ places where it might otherwise be hard to
communicate at a distance. All are based on
spoken languages: Kuşköy’s version adapts
standard Turkish syllables into piercing tones
that can be heard from more than half a mile
[25] away.
How does the brain handle a language that
renders words as something like music?
Although neuroscientists have long
understood that brain functions do not divide
[30] ........ between the \left and \right hemispheres,
the former appears to play a consistently
dominant role ∈ our understanding of
language regardless of whether the language
is tonal or atonal, spoken or written, signed
[35] with the hands or clicked with the tongue.
The \right hemisphere, meanwhile, seems to
govern our understanding of pitch, melody,
and rhythm. Güntürkün tested this cranial
division of labor with thirty-one volunteers, all
[40] fluent ∈ both spoken and whistled Turkish, to
listen to pairs of different syllables played
simultaneously through headphones, one ∈
each ear. When he gave them spoken
Turkish, the participants usually understood
[45] the syllable played through the \right speaker,
suggesting that the \left hemisphere was
processing the sound. When he switched to
whistled Turkish, however, the participants
understood both syllables ∈ roughly equal
[50] measure, suggesting that both hemispheres
played significant roles ∈ the early stages of
comprehension.
Although the technique used isn’t as
precise as laboratory techniques, his results
[55] are tantalizing. “They tell us that the
organization of our brain, ∈ terms of its
asymmetrical structure, is not as fixed as we
assume.” “The way information is given to us
appears to change the architecture of our
[60] brain ∈a radical way.” He now wonders
whether people whose spoken-language
comprehension is damaged by a lefthemisphere
stroke could learn to understand
a whistled dialect, much as some people with
[65] stroke-damaged speech can communicate by
singing.
The opportunity to study whistled Turkish,
however, is fading. In 1964, a stringer for
the Times reported that children ∈Kuşköy
[70] were learning to communicate by whistling
before they started school, and that both men
and women regularly gossiped, argued, and
even courted via whistle. Three years later, a
team of visiting linguists observed that
[75] whistling was widely used ∈ both the village
and the surrounding countryside. But
Güntürkün found that few, if any, young
women had learned the language, and that,
although some young men were fluent
[80] whistlers, they had learned the skill as
teenagers, more out of pride than any
practical need. In a small town filled with nosy
neighbors, texting affords a level of privacy
that whistling never did.
Adapted from: NIJHUIS, M. The Whistled Language of Northern Turkey. Available at: . Accessed on August, 20th, 2015.
The word all (l. 21) refers to
