The origin of language when, where, why, how?

[Piggy]

No.

You don't learn to shiver, blink, and grow hair. In fact, you can't even learn to stop shivering, blinking, and growing hair. People shiver, blink, and grow hair in the same way all over the world.

Language, however, is quite different. If you're not taught language, you won't spontaneously develop it. (See the rather famous example of Genie or the other feral or feral-like children for examples.)

That's a quibble.

The genes assume that the individual will grow up around language (just as they assume it will grow up around water and oxygen).

If language is absent from the environment, or if the brain or ears are somehow damaged, then things go wrong.

But normally, as you know, we're not taught language at all; we develop it, just as we develop other cognitive and physical capacities that we're hard-wired to develop. Attempts to "teach" very small (language-acquiring) kids the grammar of their language result in no difference at all. It's like trying to teach them to get taller.

Language is a biological function. It is not a meme.

 

[drkitten]

That's a quibble.

Not at all. A gene is a physical replicator that is passed down through (sexual) reproduction. A meme is a mental replicator that is learned.

But normally, as you know, we're not taught language at all; we develop it,

No, we learn it. We "develop" pubic hair -- we don't acquire those from the environment. We "learn" language from the environment.

This is actually fairly easy to illustrate with adoptive children; a Chinese newborn adopted by a Norwegian family will "develop" dark hair and eyes according to the children's genes, but will "learn" to speak Norwegian with a completely native accent.

 

[Piggy]

Not at all. A gene is a physical replicator that is passed down through (sexual) reproduction. A meme is a mental replicator that is learned.

Right, so what I'm saying is that your points regarding language are both quibbles with respect to its being a meme or not.

The ability to use language is clearly not a "mental replicator that is learned".

Yes, there are significant differences between language and shivering and blinking, but they are all biological functions, and none of them are memes because biological functions are not memes.

Puberty is probably a better analogy. It's a hard-wired developmental process. And while there are certainly many memes surrounding puberty, puberty itself is not a meme, it's a biological mandate.

Ditto language. It is not a meme. It is something that all normal human bodies do because they are programmed to do it.

It's certainly true that the particular language one learns is dependent on environment, and this makes it different in an important respect from puberty, but that doesn't change the fact that acquiring and using language is biologically pre-programmed.

As you know, a baby begins acquiring language well before it can make any use of it. It does so because its brain is wired to pay special attention to language in very particular ways and to set specific parameters and acquire vocabulary.

And as it grows, the child uses language as a matter of course, just as it crawls and walks as a matter of course. This is not learned behavior. Language is no more a meme than walking is.

As for cases like Genie and Victor, they are also quibbles in this context because they only show that the biological process can derail if there's something absent in the environment which the process expects and requires.

If, for example, some necessary protein were absent when expected during fetal development, we can certainly imagine an unfortunate child born without a blink reflex.

No, we learn it. We "develop" pubic hair -- we don't acquire those from the environment. We "learn" language from the environment.

This is actually fairly easy to illustrate with adoptive children; a Chinese newborn adopted by a Norwegian family will "develop" dark hair and eyes according to the children's genes, but will "learn" to speak Norwegian with a completely native accent.

No, we don't learn it. We develop it, just as we develop hand-eye coordination.

Both require input from the environment, but this is not a problem because the environment (with so few exceptions as to be negligible) always provides adequate input.

The example you give here makes no sense.

The Chinese newborn has genes which determine its hair and eye color, and also has genes which determine that it will learn whatever language is spoken around it. Or whichever languages are spoken around it.

The child will not know (without study) why its hair and eyes are dark. It will also not know how it came to speak Norwegian, or even what the rules of Norwegian grammar are. And yet it will have dark hair and eyes, and it will have acquired Norwegian without a single bit of instruction.

 

[Prometheus]

Linguists, like any other scientist, look for counterexamples to proposed constraints or hypotheses all the time. Often, it is just lack of understanding rather than a real counterexample. It reminds me of the claim made to the evolutionary biologist, "Yeah, well why do we still have monkeys then?"

I used to give talks on bilingual code switching. I always made it very clear, repeatedly, that everything I was saying was relevant only for "communities of bilingual speakers". Sure enough, there was usually someone who, in a very self satisfied manner, would stand up and claim, "Well, my wife is from Germany, and she can say,........" Of course, she is not a member of a linguistic community of bilinguals, so his "counterexample" was just a distraction.

Without an understanding of "deep structure", it is pretty difficult to argue for a counterexample in transformational syntax.

Perhaps, but if you don't actually specify which "deep structure" a given rule supposedly applies to, you can hardly blame people for pointing out apparent counterexamples to the syntax rules you present.

 

[Prometheus]

If language is a meme, then shivering, blinking, and growing hair are memes.

The propensity to develop grammar may be inborn, but the process of language acquisition involves the creation and transmission of memes. Lot's of interesting research going on regarding mirror neurons and language development may soon yield interesting results in this area.

 

[!Kaggen]

Thanks all for the contribution so far its been interesting.

Likely first there was the upright gait which lead to neotany which led to a period of accelerated brain development.

Homo sapeins sapiens, modern gracile form is at least 60,000 years old, somewhere before then. Modern language groups are more recent.

DD, your observation of Neotany which led to a period of accelerated brain development is interesting and is the subject of this book I am reading.

http://www.amazon.com/Development-Dynamics-Humans-Other-Primates/dp/0932776299

here is a review

http://www.iscid.org/papers/Luskin_DevelopmentalDynamicsReview_071505.pdf

The author argues convincingly that neotony, as a characteristic human developmental trait, had a decisive influence on our abilities to develop speech via liberated breathing (upright gait, efficient system of sweat glands), retention of dimensions of the first dentition, deep location of the larynx(hypermorphosis), longer learning period, large fore brain (hypermorphosis), hand as prehensile organ (mouth freed from prehensile function, use of tools).

 

[Piggy]

The propensity to develop grammar may be inborn, but the process of language acquisition involves the creation and transmission of memes. Lot's of interesting research going on regarding mirror neurons and language development may soon yield interesting results in this area.

True.

I'm not arguing against that, btw.

Specifically, I'm arguing against the contention that "language is a meme".

That's a whole nother kettle of fish.

 

[macdoc]

the fact that acquiring and using language is biologically pre-programmed.

Not sure I agree with that entirely - kids are terrific at Rubik's cube and that falls off with age just as language acquisition does.

Language may just be the focus.

ASL has no linguistic aspect, it is not dependent on physical characteristics....I suspect kids show the exact same facility in picking that up.

Without an enriched and responsive environment language does not develop.

 

[Piggy]

Think of it this way...

Another way to phrase the OP is: "Where the heck did grammar come from?"

Because it's grammar that makes language language, rather than of a set of signs.

We can imagine a species evolving a non-spoken language, so the evolution of the vocal apparatus isn't key to the question, even if it does help us arrive at answers about the evolution of speech in humans (like "when" and "where").

Of course the brain's not evolving in a jar somewhere, and there's a complicated dance between what it's doing and what other parts are doing and what's happening outside -- if there weren't, we couldn't have evolved to develop our capacity for speech in the way we all do, by observing it in use -- but still, the critical component is the development of syntax-handling in the brain for that specific purpose. That makes or breaks the deal.

So this takes us to the "why" and "how".

If language itself (not just components, like the sound dog or the string of letters "perro") is a self-replicating idea, then it resides in the culture, like the ability to weave grass bridges or the idea that exposing the sole of a shoe is rude.

And I suppose you could argue that any individual language is an enormous web of memes. Which would be true enough -- in the sense that when the memes vanish, the language is dead -- but it would not be entirely accurate because the fundamentals of language aren't memish; they vary in systematic ways.

But even taking the English-as-meme-sytem and French-as-meme-system viewpoint, we still can't call language itself a meme, because it doesn't reside in the culture.

I'll come back to the comparison with puberty, because although the biological process is the same everywhere, the cultural process -- that is, what a person actually goes through -- has a good deal of variation.

Language has gone a bold step farther out into the hybrid space, of course. You could say it successfully outsourced part of one of its primary jobs (getting new individuals to speak) to the user community. A biological process, a universal developmental process in humans, which relies on that same process having worked elsewhere in order for it to work in each new case. As long as people are using language around the baby, it will come to use it.

So it's a meme machine, certainly, and it relies on the memes it churns out -- depends on plenty of them being in the environment -- to create new machines.

But the machine itself is not a meme, and what it does is not a meme. And that fact has some impact on the answers to the OP.

 

[Piggy]

Not sure I agree with that entirely - kids are terrific at Rubik's cube and that falls off with age just as language acquisition does.

Language may just be the focus.

ASL has no linguistic aspect, it is not dependent on physical characteristics....I suspect kids show the exact same facility in picking that up.

Without an enriched and responsive environment language does not develop.

I'm not sure I follow you here, but if you're implying that kids may be good at picking up language when they're young in the same way, or for the same reasons, they're good at solving a Rubik's cube, the research is solidly against that.

Babies' brains start scouring the environment for language almost immediately, and by the time the baby starts babbling its brain has made some important decisions about how it is going to process language.

We're literally born ready to learn language, and we can't help ourselves from doing it if we're physically normal, and no one can stop us from doing it without some extreme and greatly harmful intervention.

I don't know what you mean when you say that "ASL has no linguistic aspect", but yes, kids pick it up essentially the same way they pick up spoken language. The brain is ready and able to parse grammar, whether it comes from sounds or gestures.

Amazingly, kids raised together without language will create their own out of thin air, and it will obey the universal rules of human grammars (just as kids raised together in a community of pidgin speakers will invent a grammar for it spontaneously, even though none of them could describe to you what that grammar is).

It's true that the environment must be language rich (that is, there's got to be a pretty regular stream of language in actual use among real humans). But it doesn't actually have to be that responsive.

In any case, as long as that language is there, it all happens automatically.

 

[macdoc]

language is not inherent - scouring the environment is.

Language is a meme or construct - I think you are conflating two different structures - one inherent to our biology the other not.

 

[Piggy]

language is not inherent - scouring the environment is.

Language is a meme or construct - I think you are conflating two different structures - one inherent to our biology the other not.

No, I'm dead serious.

Babies are programmed to scour the environment specifically for human language, and their brains start processing it and making decisions about it long before the baby has any idea what any of it means and long before it ever attempts to use it.

ETA: A baby does not have any such biological-driven tendency to identify eating utensils, for example, and to figure out, before it has any use for them, which ones its culture uses, and to stop making hand motions that would help it use the utensils of other cultures but not the ones of its own culture. A baby is hard-wired to treat language differently. Babies are also hard-wired to treat human faces differently. And a baby is hard-wired to start crawling and walking, just as it's hard-wired to start speaking.

Language certainly is "inherent to our biology".

Otherwise, we have to imagine that this one skill -- this amazingly difficult skill which people can't even describe how they do -- is somehow taught perfectly to all physically normal kids with a 100% success rate, and is learned by them with a 100% success rate, while they're toddlers! And that this happens worldwide, generation after generation after generation.

Obviously, no purely learned skill, no matter how useful, is going to have that kind of success rate from all parents and all babies and toddlers.

So common sense procludes thinking of language as a meme, even if the research didn't contradict that conclusion.

Acquiring and using language is biologically automatic in physically normal humans in a normal (i.e. non-speech-deprived) environment, languages vary in systematic ways which we would not expect if they were the product of pure learning, and language can be affected in predictable ways by brain trauma.

No meme acts like that.

 

[macdoc]

Babies, crawl and walk on their own and stick things in their mouth and explore their world - that is hard wired.

without stimulus of hearing language or seeing asl it does not happen and few unfortunates have had that happen to them.

You are confusing the construct of language with the inherent seek/acquire of the young.
They are not one and the same.

a baby does not learn to walk by watching or listening.

walking is not a meme
language is.

 

[marplots]

Babies, crawl and walk on their own and stick things in their mouth and explore their world - that is hard wired.

without stimulus of hearing language or seeing asl it does not happen and few unfortunates have had that happen to them.

You are confusing the construct of language with the inherent seek/acquire of the young.
They are not one and the same.

a baby does not learn to walk by watching or listening.

walking is not a meme
language is.

I disagree. Gravity teaches a baby to walk as much as living in an environment with sounds teaches a baby to speak. The ability to acquire language is more like the ability to acquire a callus -- yes, environmental input is required, but the ability is inborn. A baby does watch and listen when it learns to walk, in just the same way as language. They sense what happens when I do this instead of that; the one action leading to a vertical posture and the other a fall.

Both ways of looking at it are just comments on the environment a baby finds themselves in. Without language to imitate and react to, a baby wouldn't speak (at least not normally) and without gravity and the same sort of trial and error, they wouldn't learn to walk.

Put them in an environment where singing is the norm and they will sing instead. Put them in waterworld and my expectation is that they would learn to swim instead of walk.

 

[Olowkow]

The literature on child language acquisition is voluminous.

Not only is a young child a virtual linguistic rule machine in one language, if he is confronted with a multi- or bilingual community, he will sort out the appropriate social and linguistic behaviors associated with use of each language. In effect, a syntax and phonological system of each language plus a set of rules for combining or switching among the languages is learned. It would be virtually impossible for a child to ever learn a language if he needed to be taught these rules.

Instead, he is born with an ability to extrapolate the principles from observed linguistic behavior. It is just remarkable, as any parent can attest.

The "meme" business is just a red herring.

 

[macdoc]

You are trying to conflate an artificial environment .....human interaction for language skills which is dependent on with inherent ability to walk.

This family did not "learn" to walk on all fours - it has a genetic defect. Bipedalism is inherent not learned.

what a baby learns in terms of communication is a human construct.

Walking, eating, sleeping, ***********, defecating is not.

We may overlay social conventions on them....they will still happen.
Language will not occur spontaneously without an interactive environment.

Back to the OP I suspect it grew out of a system of signs and sounds to the forms we have today.....lingual and signage.....both still are effective forms and are cultural artifacts - not built in biology.

The facility with the artifacts certainly has been groomed by evolution and breeding but it is not inherent biomechanics the way walking is.

 

[!Kaggen]

Theory of mind

Simon Baron-Cohen (1999) argued that theory of mind must have preceded language use, based on evidence of use of the following characteristics as much as 40,000 years ago: intentional communication, repairing failed communication, teaching, intentional persuasion, intentional deception, building shared plans and goals, intentional sharing of focus or topic, and pretending. Moreover, Baron-Cohen argues that many primates show some, but not all, of these abilities. Call and Tomasello’s research on chimpanzees supports this, in that individual chimps seem to understand that other chimps have awareness, knowledge, and intention, but do not seem to understand false beliefs. Many primates show some tendencies toward a theory of mind, but not a full one as humans have. Ultimately, there is some consensus within the field that a theory of mind is necessary for language use. Thus, the development of a full theory of mind in humans was a necessary precursor to full language use.

from wiki Origin of language

This idea in the wiki article jumped up at me and also reminded me of the work of Prof. David Lewis-Williams

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Cave-Con...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285650406&sr=1-1

see review feature from the Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Abstract

David Lewis-Williams is well-known in rock-art circles as the author of a series of articles drawing on ethnographic material and shamanism (notably connected with the San rock art of southern Africa) to gain new insights into the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe. Some 15 years ago, with Thomas Dowson, he proposed that Palaeolithic art owed its inspiration at least in part to trance experiences (altered states of consciousness) associated with shamanistic practices. Since that article appeared, the shamanistic hypothesis has both been widely adopted and developed in the study of different rock-art traditions, and has become the subject of lively and sometimes heated controversy. In the present volume, Lewis-Williams takes the argument further, and combines the shamanistic hypothesis with an interpretation of the development of human consciousness. He thus enters another contentious area of archaeological debate, seeking to understand west European cave art in the context of (and as a marker of) the new intellectual capacities of anatomically modern humans. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest west European cave art now place it contemporary with the demise of the Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago, and cave art, along with carved or decorated portable items, appears to announce the arrival and denote the success of modern humans in this region. Lewis-Williams argues that such cave art would have been beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals, and that this kind of artistic ability is unique to anatomically modern humans. Furthermore, he concludes that the development of the new ability cannot have been the product of hundreds of thousands of years of gradual hominid evolution, but must have arisen much more abruptly, within the novel neurological structure of anatomically modern humans. The Mind in the Cave is thus the product of two hypotheses, both of them contentious — the shamanistic interpretation of west European Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and the cognitive separation of modern humans and Neanderthals. But is it as simple as that? Was cave art the hallmark of a new cognitive ability and social consciousness that were beyond the reach of previous hominids? And is shamanism an outgrowth of the hard-wired structure of the modern human brain? We begin this Review Feature with a brief summary by David Lewis-Williams of the book's principal arguments. There follows a series of comments addressing both the meaning of the west European cave art, and its wider relevance for the understanding of the Neanderthal/modern human transition.

full article here
http://web.wits.ac.za/NR/rdonlyres/...illiamsLawsonHelskogWhitleyMellarsTheMind.pdf

 

[Prometheus]

Not sure I agree with that entirely - kids are terrific at Rubik's cube and that falls off with age just as language acquisition does.
Language may just be the focus.

ASL has no linguistic aspect, it is not dependent on physical characteristics....I suspect kids show the exact same facility in picking that up.

Without an enriched and responsive environment language does not develop.

Turns out, this may not be true after all:

http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/87-9dig.htm

 

[Olowkow]

Turns out, this may not be true after all:

http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/87-9dig.htm

Well, Ms. Schleppegrell is apparently an educator, not a child language acquisition researcher. She is merely pointing out some very obvious truths, and some of her opinions about second language acquisition in the classroom setting which may or may not be true.

If you would like to convince us that "this may not be true after all", it may be to your advantage to give some bona fides for this writer and the organazition NTLF, as well as some quote from the article that bolsters this claim.

This has little or nothing to do with the way an infant performs his task of acquiring generalizations about syntax and morphology using linguistic input as data. Just the simple fact that he realizes that the vocalizations he is hearing are significant for communication is quite noteworthy.

There is considerable variation, but this is a rough time line of CLA:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/acquisition.html

During the second year, word combinations begin to appear. Novel combinations (where we can be sure that the result is not being treated as a single word) appear sporadically as early as 14 months. ...

Somewhere around age three, a child can be shown a "wug" (nonsense and novel word for a toy) and when asked what "these toys" (a bunch of them) are, will respond "wugs" [wugz], with correct morphology and phonology.

 

[Prometheus]

Well, Ms. Schleppegrell is apparently an educator, not a child language acquisition researcher.

Appropriate, given that she is not talking about child language acquisition per se.

She is merely pointing out some very obvious truths, and some of her opinions about second language acquisition in the classroom setting which may or may not be true.

Granted. Of course there's always her bibliography at the end of the article should you be interested in verifying those opinions.

If you would like to convince us that "this may not be true after all", it may be to your advantage to give some bona fides for this writer and the organazition NTLF, as well as some quote from the article that bolsters this claim.

"This" refers to the notion that ability to acquire language drops off with age. I'm not necessarily interested in convincing anyone one way or the other, since I don't hold a strong opinion on the matter myself. I only linked the article because I happened to read it last week it seemed like an interesting aside that may be tangentially related to the matter at hand.

This has little or nothing to do with the way an infant performs his task of acquiring generalizations about syntax and morphology using linguistic input as data. Just the simple fact that he realizes that the vocalizations he is hearing are significant for communication is quite noteworthy.

Perhaps I'm more optimistic than you. It seems to me that if, in fact, adults are capable of acquiring language as well as children but that they must do so in a different way than children do, then that may well inform the discussion of how language developed in the first place, as well as that of whether any non-humans may be able to acquire language as well. Just speculation, at this point, though.
[/QUOTE]