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

[Olowkow]

...

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.

Well, it isn't really a matter of "optimism", but I really do appreciate your interest and speculation. To me it is trivially true that some adults are good at second language acquisition and some aren't. Sounds like the lady needed a publication.

As long as the reader of my posts comes away with the understanding that a child's first language acquisition is pretty much a phenomenal feat which is mediated by his innate talents, I don't use the word "miraculous", I have accomplished my mission. I sure wish we understood more about how it is done.

Beyond that, what you say could well be true I guess. I just don't know. I gave up cocktail party speculation about things I don't understand a long time ago. I began my foray into this discussion with something like, "It is very frustrating that we just don't know how, when, why language began."

I hope that the reader will reread some of the very basic examples of putative linguistic universals I have provided (they aren't my inventions) and give some thought to the complexity of thought that would need to be posited if children were born with no proclivity at all to grasp the generalizations (i.e. linguistic rule governed behavior) needed for linguistic development.

I still recall when it was the popular belief that the bilingual child, in a community of bilinguals, was confused about which words to use when speaking one language or the other, so consequently he randomly used Spanish words in English sentences, for instance. Learning two languages would surely cause hopeless problems for a kid. Well, it turns out that his use of such vocabulary, and more arcane multilingual constructions, had social and linguistic significance, and it is anything but random. It can be said to be rule governed behavior, or a sociolinguistic syntax of bilingualism.

 

[Piggy]

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.

You have half of that right and half of that wrong.

Learning and using language is just as hard-wired as those other behaviors.

Language is not the result of some generic seek/aquire behavior. We're specialized for it. We've studied enough babies' brains to know that by now.

So no, walking is not a meme, nor is puberty, nor is language.

Babies don't go about figuring out how to, say, ride bicycles or use forks or fly kites straight out of the womb before they could possibly have any sense of why these things might be of any use to them. But they do it with human language.

No one has to teach a baby how to crawl, or how to start speaking and learn to speak perfectly. They all do it as part of their mental/physical development.

You're letting the requirement of a language-environment misdirect you into the superficial conclusion that it's a meme we learn in the way we learn other memes. But experiment and common sense say different.

Just think about it.... Think about a kid you know who's learned to read and write, or yourself learning how. Remember how much time and effort it takes for that kid at that age to simply learn how to associate symbols with language.

What the learning/meme scenario requires us to believe is this: That same kid, at an even earlier age, has already mastered the language itself, despite the fact that no one is able to teach it to him, despite an even smaller capacity for learning than he already has as he struggles to read the word "balloon".

It's preposterous on its face.

We're also required to believe that evolution gave us some specialized hardware, which we use only for language, and left the software entirely to the fickle hands of culture. And that this arrangement has worked seamlessly.

Instead, what we see is a biological process which simply assumes a linguistic environment. And since all copies of the human pattern are destined to develop language, the instances of exceptions are so rare that most people have never even heard of them.

But the use of that particular mechanism is not sufficient to call the process learning in the same sense which we use to describe, say, learning to use a fork or fly a kite or wave hello.

It's a process of biological development, just as crawling and puberty are, even though each of these is a very different sort of process.

The learning/meme theory makes no logical sense, and is not supported by research.

 

[Prometheus]

Well, it isn't really a matter of "optimism", but I really do appreciate your interest and speculation. To me it is trivially true that some adults are good at second language acquisition and some aren't. Sounds like the lady needed a publication.

As long as the reader of my posts comes away with the understanding that a child's first language acquisition is pretty much a phenomenal feat which is mediated by his innate talents, I don't use the word "miraculous", I have accomplished my mission. I sure wish we understood more about how it is done.

Beyond that, what you say could well be true I guess. I just don't know. I gave up cocktail party speculation about things I don't understand a long time ago. I began my foray into this discussion with something like, "It is very frustrating that we just don't know how, when, why language began."

I hope that the reader will reread some of the very basic examples of putative linguistic universals I have provided (they aren't my inventions) and give some thought to the complexity of thought that would need to be posited if children were born with no proclivity at all to grasp the generalizations (i.e. linguistic rule governed behavior) needed for linguistic development.

I still recall when it was the popular belief that the bilingual child, in a community of bilinguals, was confused about which words to use when speaking one language or the other, so consequently he randomly used Spanish words in English sentences, for instance. Learning two languages would surely cause hopeless problems for a kid. Well, it turns out that his use of such vocabulary, and more arcane multilingual constructions, had social and linguistic significance, and it is anything but random. It can be said to be rule governed behavior, or a sociolinguistic syntax of bilingualism.

I am amazed every day watching my children (16mo and 3yo) acquiring their first languages. Our 3-yo understands French, and floored me a few months ago when she started spontaneously translating it for me without being asked (I only speak English). She used to speak French occasionally with her mother, but when she started spending time around other non-French-speaking children, she stopped, and will now only use it when asked a direct question ("How do you say X in French?"). The 16mo recognizes questions in both languages and answers equivalent questions with the same utterances and signs.

 

[Olowkow]

I am amazed every day watching my children (16mo and 3yo) acquiring their first languages. Our 3-yo understands French, and floored me a few months ago when she started spontaneously translating it for me without being asked (I only speak English). She used to speak French occasionally with her mother, but when she started spending time around other non-French-speaking children, she stopped, and will now only use it when asked a direct question ("How do you say X in French?"). The 16mo recognizes questions in both languages and answers equivalent questions with the same utterances and signs.

Exactly what I have witnessed so many times. I have even told the kids of my foreign friends, "please don't ever lose your (insert language here)", French, Russian, Thai, Chinese, Spanish, etc. It is a very valuable talent. I get "yeah, yeah, ...." Giggle, giggle. Just normal behavior, sorry.

The children want to identify with their peers. This is the overriding consideration. I have good friends from Paris, and their kids growing up here now, will no longer speak French with me, and correct "mom and dad" on their pronunciation of English. These are the results of the "sociolinguistic" considerations I mentioned. They are not members of a "bilingual community".

Me: Bien, qu'est-ce que t'as vu comme animaux dans le zoo?
Kid: We saw elephants and flamingos and monkeys.

On the other hand, I studied Spanish/English bilingual communities for many years, (migrant farm workers) and it is just remarkable to me how extensive the use of code switching is in their normal communication. Just one example is when speaking of things about school, they tend to use the language of the school....English, and when talking about what they did at home, or within their Spanish speaking community, they use Spanish, the language of their parents. It is also possible to observe "secret communications", in the language not spoken by those within earshot. In such circumstances, I really never noticed the inhibitions such as you mention, namely rejecting the language of the parents.

 

[Piggy]

Btw, I forgot to mention in the last post that there are case studies which knock the last plank out of the learning/meme theory.

The most famous of these is the case of Nicaraguan signers, who developed a sign language spontaneously in a language-deprived environment.

And then there are the cases of children in areas where pidgins are spoken. In one generation, they convert the pidgin into a creole with a complete grammar.

This would not be happening, because it could not happen, if language were a meme.

It can only happen if our brains develop, rather than learn, grammar. And as has been pointed out above, grammar is language.

Sounds (that is, the bits which are memic) are not language. Nor are gestures language. You have to have something to fill that role, but whatever it is, it can vary arbitrarily.

What does not vary arbitrarily is the development and use of language. In that sense, it is analogous to walking. A person may end up walking in superficially different ways depending on culture (most evident at formal events such as military parades, funerals, and weddings) but one doesn't end up walking because of culture.

Same for language. How you speak is, on the most surface level, determined by culture. But the fact that you speak is determined by biology.

 

[Piggy]

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.

I think it depends on what you mean by "acquire languages".

As adult human beings in the real world, we think of "acquiring a language" as "being able to get along with the language among native speakers". In other words, if you can understand and be understood without any fuss, you have acquired the language.

But to folks who study language acquisition, the difference between native proficiency and other levels of proficiency can't be shrugged off so quickly as they are in the article.

Some people can acquire new languages post-puberty well enough to be taken for a native. But most can't. And even the ones who do have to study the language if they want to learn it quickly. (Have the adult learners simply sit around with native speakers and get no instruction, and we'll see how quickly they acquire their target language compared to babies.)

The ability to acquire a first language (or languages) is the same in all neurologically and physically normal people, but the ability to acquire a second language varies a great deal. So there must be a significant difference between the processes.

But certainly, this apparatus we have for picking up language doesn't shrivel up and disappear after puberty. Not surprising, since we are continually updating our understanding of our own language throughout adulthood.

Nonetheless, for most people, there's a critical period during which one picks up language automatically without any instruction at all. Biology closes that door once it can be reasonably certain that the job is done. (And after all, if an individual hasn't acquired language by puberty, it's best if it doesn't reproduce.)

 

[Olowkow]

So, I just happened to look for the names of some of the whiz kids from the 70's in linguistics, and Haj Ross, Jim McCawley, Postal, George Lakoff, Chuck Kisseberth, and of course Chomsky, etc. are all there.
They were very productive and incredibly bright guys. Those were the halcyon days!
For those who found my brief description of constraints in English, some of which have been claimed to be universals, to be interesting, here are some more.

Just click on "heavy NP shift" for example, and you will get examples of this constraint. The point of all of this stuff is "How on earth do we learn these things?" Native speakers will agree upon arcane and subtle things that we have never given the slightest thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Ross
Ross's 1967 MIT dissertation is a landmark in syntactic theory and documents in great detail Ross's discovery of islands. Ross is also well known for his onomastic fecundity; he has coined many new terms describing syntactic phenomena that are well-known to this day, including copula switch, Do-Gobbling, freeze(s), gapping, heavy NP shift, (inner) islands, myopia, the penthouse principle, pied piping, pruning, scrambling, siamese sentences. sluicing, slifting, sloppy identity, sounding, squib, squishes, viability, and syntactic islands. Relating to syntactic islands, he also coined the terms "left-branch condition", "complex-np constraint", "coordinate structure constraint", and "sentential subject constraint". In phonology, he suggested the term conspiracy to Charles Kisseberth.

Good grief! I just noticed that I began a post with "so"! Now that's a linguistic meme! I'm infected.

 

[Piggy]

Good grief! I just noticed that I began a post with "so"! Now that's a linguistic meme! I'm infected.

Fwiw, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf begins quite intentionally with "So" and I think it's a truly brilliant work that will become the standard translation for our age of English.

So you're in good company.

 

[Prometheus]

I think it depends on what you mean by "acquire languages".

As adult human beings in the real world, we think of "acquiring a language" as "being able to get along with the language among native speakers". In other words, if you can understand and be understood without any fuss, you have acquired the language.

But to folks who study language acquisition, the difference between native proficiency and other levels of proficiency can't be shrugged off so quickly as they are in the article.

This is certainly true, although I don't think that the author of that article was shrugging it off at all. Rather, I think she was writing from the point of view of advocating for adult language learners. One of the difficulties faced frequently by language teachers with adult students is that the meme "kids learn languages easily; adults don't" is prevalent and often serves to erode the confidence and persistance of adult language students unnecessarily. Her conclusion is not that adults can achieve native proficiency as easily as children do, but rather that, given proper instruction designed to account for the differences between how children and adults acquire language, adults can achieve an impressive level of, "being able to get along with the language among native speakers," even more quickly than many children can.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I'm only speculating that this line of reasoning may be tangentially related to the topic of this thread.

Some people can acquire new languages post-puberty well enough to be taken for a native. But most can't. And even the ones who do have to study the language if they want to learn it quickly. (Have the adult learners simply sit around with native speakers and get no instruction, and we'll see how quickly they acquire their target language compared to babies.)

AFAIK the ability to attain native-like proficiency in a second language with no overt instruction tapers off rapidly well before puberty. It does remain relatively easy for older children to get there given instruction and community support. This is actually at the root of a lot of public misunderstanding of Bilingual Education.

The ability to acquire a first language (or languages) is the same in all neurologically and physically normal people, but the ability to acquire a second language varies a great deal. So there must be a significant difference between the processes.

But certainly, this apparatus we have for picking up language doesn't shrivel up and disappear after puberty. Not surprising, since we are continually updating our understanding of our own language throughout adulthood.

Nonetheless, for most people, there's a critical period during which one picks up language automatically without any instruction at all. Biology closes that door once it can be reasonably certain that the job is done. (And after all, if an individual hasn't acquired language by puberty, it's best if it doesn't reproduce.)

True. What's really interesting to me though, is how that door gets closed, and whether it can be pried back open, at least a little. That's another thread, though.

 

[Olowkow]

Originally Posted by Piggy
The ability to acquire a first language (or languages) is the same in all neurologically and physically normal people, but the ability to acquire a second language varies a great deal. So there must be a significant difference between the processes.

True. What's really interesting to me though, is how that door gets closed, and whether it can be pried back open, at least a little. That's another thread, though.

Really good question, and not necessarily another thread.

I have not kept up on the literature of language acquisition, but I always felt that a child was forming a view of reality, or a world view in some real sense by acquiring his first language. I have never debated this with any experts, but I find it hard to see any other motive. That thing that barks has to have a referent in the world of his mind's eye....a "doggy", and once that need is satisfied, the child goes about other things, and only refines these references. This the "innate" part of the quest for a language system.

Of course, I am implying all that goes along with that referent... syntax, semantics etc. Just wild speculation on my part though.

 

[Piggy]

This is certainly true, although I don't think that the author of that article was shrugging it off at all. Rather, I think she was writing from the point of view of advocating for adult language learners.

Oh, I agree. I didn't phrase that very well. I was trying to say that, for people who specialize in first-language acquisition, the difference is fundamental, whereas in the article it wasn't. "Shrugged off" was a bad choice of words.

 

[Piggy]

What's really interesting to me though, is how that door gets closed, and whether it can be pried back open, at least a little. That's another thread, though.

My guess would be that some proteins instrumental in sexual maturation also have the function (through some chain of events) of relieving the brain of that particular task so it can reallocate resources.

A safe bet for the brain.

If that's true, then it would mean that for the vast majority of people the door stays closed, but for a few it might remain ajar.

I literally just finished watching The Linguists, and one of the fellows documented, a panlinguist, said he was learning language groups for fun as a pre-teen. So did he manage to wedge that door open by continually keeping those neuro-routes in use, which otherwise would have atrophied? Or was he born with a brain that both drove him to be extremely interested in language (quite rare in small kids) and equipped him to retain an ability to acquire new ones?

I dunno.

 

[drkitten]

My guess would be that some proteins instrumental in sexual maturation also have the function (through some chain of events) of relieving the brain of that particular task so it can reallocate resources.

A safe bet for the brain.

Timing doesn't seem to work out; the "critical period" for language acquisition is well before anything interesting w.r.t. sexual maturation seems to happen.

And the critical period doesn't appear to be sex-linked, whereas sexual maturity does (girls mature faster).

Take the word "sexual" out of your hypothesis and it becomes much more plausible in my opinion.....

One of the things that we do know about infant brains and the "critical period" is that the number of synapses in the human brain increase from birth to about three years old, but decreases thereafter; I've heard it described as "the human brain is literally sculpted into its final shape." My hypothesis is that the spare neurons are used to process all possible languages, and the ones that aren't needed are eliminated, so you've literally lost the ability to "acquire" (as a first language) a tonal language because you've lost the physical equipment you would use to acquire it.

 

[Elind]

Which of these questions can and has science provided some answers for?

Anyone with links to books, papers, studies, ideas etc...

Try the CD series "The Story of Human Language" by Professor John McWhorter.

Available from The Teaching Company.

 

[Prometheus]

Timing doesn't seem to work out; the "critical period" for language acquisition is well before anything interesting w.r.t. sexual maturation seems to happen.

And the critical period doesn't appear to be sex-linked, whereas sexual maturity does (girls mature faster).

Take the word "sexual" out of your hypothesis and it becomes much more plausible in my opinion.....

One of the things that we do know about infant brains and the "critical period" is that the number of synapses in the human brain increase from birth to about three years old, but decreases thereafter; I've heard it described as "the human brain is literally sculpted into its final shape." My hypothesis is that the spare neurons are used to process all possible languages, and the ones that aren't needed are eliminated, so you've literally lost the ability to "acquire" (as a first language) a tonal language because you've lost the physical equipment you would use to acquire it.

I can't remember a citation at the moment, but a while back I read some research that showed by around 3 years, toddlers actually lose the ability to hear differences between phonemes that are not used in the native language.

 

[drkitten]

I can't remember a citation at the moment, but a while back I read some research that showed by around 3 years, toddlers actually lose the ability to hear differences between phonemes that are not used in the native language.

Yes, I've read the same papers, but don't have the citations to hand.

 

[Piggy]

Timing doesn't seem to work out; the "critical period" for language acquisition is well before anything interesting w.r.t. sexual maturation seems to happen.

And the critical period doesn't appear to be sex-linked, whereas sexual maturity does (girls mature faster).

Take the word "sexual" out of your hypothesis and it becomes much more plausible in my opinion.....

One of the things that we do know about infant brains and the "critical period" is that the number of synapses in the human brain increase from birth to about three years old, but decreases thereafter; I've heard it described as "the human brain is literally sculpted into its final shape." My hypothesis is that the spare neurons are used to process all possible languages, and the ones that aren't needed are eliminated, so you've literally lost the ability to "acquire" (as a first language) a tonal language because you've lost the physical equipment you would use to acquire it.

Yes, that makes more sense.