Babel's Dawn

Motivation and Speech

New Caledonian crows are smart enough to use tools in the wild. Like chimpanzees, they strip leaves and probe with the remains to catch insects.

Download PDF version of post.

Summer time is goof-around time, but I want to respond to a comment made this week by drawing attention to an essay published in the current PNAS by Alex Kacelnik, “Tools for thought or thoughts for tools?” (extract here). It’s a meditation on tool use inspired by a paper (abstract here) reporting on crows and tools. The paper describes a housebred rook whose conspecifics do not normally use tools in the wild, but this rook did spontaneously create tools including shaping wire to form hooks, use different tools in a sequence, and other actions that suggest a sharp intelligence. New Caledonian crows are known to use tools habitually, but not these rooks.

The finding is of interest to this blog because the rise of tool use is so important to the story of the human lineage. The rise of tools, language, and intelligence are commonly taken as working together. Kacelnik’s paper examines another element, motivation.

Kacelnik considers three explanations for the unexpected ability of rooks to use tools:

1. The common ancestor of the rooks and New Caledonian crows was a tool user, but since then the rook lineage has lost the motivation to use tools but has kept the intelligence.
2. The common ancestor had the intelligence to use tools, and then the New Caledonian crow evolved the motivation.
3. Both species have the intelligence to use tools but the rooks do not normally use them because they lack the environmental pressures to motivate them.

This group of explanations intrigues me because we see the same problem with apes and humans. Humans are like the New Caledonian crows; we use tools naturally. The rooks are like the apes; they are smart enough to use tools, but don’t do it as regularly as us. Experiments have also show that apes are intelligent enough to use language at least at the pidgin level, but they never do it in the wild.

Working on this blog has sold me completely on the notion that the central evolutionary events leading to speech were the ones that created a social interdependence that motivates us to share perceptions.. That's why I was pleased to find that Kacelnik’s essay cites Michael Tomasello point that it is the social structure of humans that uses collaboration and shared goals, not intelligence, that makes us use language. We have, says Kacelnk, “a unique motivation to share psychological states with others.”

So one comment posted this week that overlooks the peculiar human psychology did irk me. It came in a lively defense of Derk Bickerton's book, and mainly I was glad to see the comments. Despite my grave doubts about his latest book, he’s a hero of mine and has been for over 25 years. But one of the comments (here) included the note, “If the FOXP2 gene is responsible for language then where is my talking finch, gorilla, and ferret? Would perhaps language somehow not provide an advantage to those animals as it does to us humans?” I’m skipping over the fact that nobody says FOXP2 is “responsible for” language to address the more serious issue of the talking finch, gorilla, and ferret. Language seems so useful to us that we can suppose any species would benefit from it, but that overlooks the motivation issue. Gorillas, ferrets, and even finches lack social structures that permit collaboration and social sharing, so they have no motive to speak, no matter how well their brains and genes might be able to handle the task.

Interfering with Metaphorical Thinking

Lady Death by Jin Devil Kazama seems surprising. but perhaps the artist speaks a language in which the word "death" is a feminine noun.

Download PDF version of post

The relation between speech and thought is an old and contentious topic, but it got a new push in an Edge.org essay (here) by Lera Boroditsky that summarizes work she has been doing for years. One point that struck me was that the analysis was very much in keeping with previous discussions on this blog about the relation between speech and attention (see, e.g., Benjamin Lee Whorf Revisited).

Defining Language

        John Milton (1608-1674) was a master at using language, but did he know what language is?

Download PDF of Defining Language

One of my most faithful readers and commenters asks (here) what I think of Derek Bickerton’s “notion that imagination, ‘de-localization’ or ‘offline thinking’ are the main characteristics of language.” It’s a worthy question and deserves a serious answer, so I suppose it is time to look at rival definitions of language.

The Idea of Language

The ingredients of speaking and toolmaking are similar. Both require a brain capable of complex imitation and a community that wants to share information. Toolmaking also requires hands capable of shaping tools, while speech requires a throat capable of vocalization.

Download The Idea of Language 060709.

I’ve been reading a longish paper that contributes much to the dispute on this blog over who was closer to the truth:

• Edward Sapir who said that speech is a non-instinctive, cultural function, or 
• Steven Pinker who insists that language is not a cultural invention.

The subtleties of distinction in such a debate can become confusing as each side concedes this or that element without giving up the main point. I think I’ve run across the cutting question that separates the two sides. Was language preceded by an idea or a mutation?

I put the question while reading an essay by Michael Arbib, “Invention and Community in the Emergence of Language: Insights from New Sign Languages;” which is included in a book published this past March, Foundations in Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience: Introduction to the Discipline.

Arbib is most famous for his notion of “the language-ready brain” and, to make things clear from the start of this post, he is on the side of language as an invention. His position, if I understand him, is that we evolved a brain that was ready to use language, but we had to come up with the idea of language by ourselves. Perhaps we can agree that if language began with an idea it was invented, while, if it did not it is biological.

PDFs of Posts to be Made Available

Starting with the previous post I will include a link for downloading a PDF of the post. They make for easier printing and forwarding to interested parties. I never quite know how a project on this blog will turn out, but I hope that all future posts will include this feature.

Is Language a Technology?

Thomas Edison was a well-publicized inventor. Was there an even greater long-ago inventor who gave us language?

Download PDF of this post

Last week’s post drew a comment (here)  that said language began, “The same way the wheel usage and invention began.” It’s a commonsense idea and worth pursuing. Is language a technology, an instinct, or something else?

The subtitle of the paper discussed last week is, “Language as Technology.” The phrase built on an idea quoted from Edward Sapir’s  Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech , “Walking is an inherent, biological function of man [but] speech is a non-instinctive acquired, ‘cultural function.’” [pp. 3-4]

Was Sapir right? Or was Steven Pinker correct-when he wrote, “Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. …[It is] a biological adaptation to communicate information.” [The Language Instinct, p. 5]

Humanized Mice

In my next post I planned to discuss a paper in the latest issue of Cell titled, "A Humanized Version of FOXP2 affects Cortico-Basal Ganglia Cells in Mice" (abstract here). A large team lead by Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute has substituted a human FOXP2 gene for a mouse FOXP2. I was amused to see that one result has been to display decreased exploratory behavior, but of course we cannot yet make any statements based on this technique yet. It is the start of a long inquiry. But I see that Carl Zimmer has posted a pretty good report on the paper on his blog, "The Loom" (here) and since I have something else I also want to discuss anyway, I'm going to refer the curious to that post.

Classical Linguistics Defended

Ferdinand de Saussure (185701813) is generally considered the person who formalized many common sense ideas about language and thereby turned philoogy into linguistics.

The editors of the online journal Biolinguistics are a bold lot, publishing articles that question the journal’s chief axiom that there is such a thing as a biological, language faculty. The current issue has a long paper (available here) by Dutch linguist Jan Koster that rejects the whole idea of any kind of biological organ or special faculty for language. Instead it presents a classical humanist portrait of language. Classical humanism can be summed up the pithy statement of Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things.” It contrasts with the religious notion that God is the measure of all things, and also with the more modern doctrine that physics, chemistry, and computation is the measure of all things. He sums up his case in the paper’s main title, “Ceaseless, Unpredictable Creativity,” and argues that “language is primarily a cultural phenomenon … [and like] the biosphere … human culture is ceaselessly creative in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable and presumably non-algorithmic or machinelike” [pp. 61, 69].

I’m sympathetic to the proposition, although when taken to Koster’s extreme it pretty much does away with this blog’s role. The origin of speech in his eyes is as biological as the origin of computer programming.

Darwinius masillae

This blog rarely has occasion to notice a 47-million year old fossil, but watching CBS News last night I heard Katy Couric declare the discovery of the long sought missing link between humans and animals (video here). The claim is absurd on its face even if you take the notion of a missing link seriously. That link is supposed to be THE fossil that connects humans with apes, so presumably it cannot be a fossil that is millions of years older than the apes. It seems to be quite a lovely fossil, but has nothing to offer this blog.

If you want a more detailed look at the story, check out Carl Zimmer's post here and the AP's debunking story is here.

The First Words

I’ve been on the road for most of this week, but I want to post at least a short note on a report that adds a bit more evidence to last week’s post that wondered if the earliest languages were much more stable than current ones. While traveling I read Mark Pagel’s  paper in  Nature Reviews: Genetics (“Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator,” abstract here).  He discusses the most stable words in languages and not surprisingly they are also the most basic words.  Qualities that make them stable include: frequency of use, no need to borrow an alternate term from another language, and their references are so basic there is no need to revise them when cultural shifts occur. Thus, even without the arguments discussed in last week’s post we should expect the early language to be more stable than languages today. 

Also valuable in the article is reference to what many of the first 200 words might have been. Morris Swadish compiled in the 1950s. I’ve heard vaguely of the list, always with a dubious tone of voice, but Pagel persuades me that it is a valuable heuristic device. In plain English, it provides a rule of thumb that can get people started thinking about a particular language. And now that I have read through the list there is plenty of food for thought. One thing that seems likely is that most of the first 200 words ever used are indeed on it. Snow might have come later, but and, at, and there… how long can any speaker get along without them? The full list:

A Cultural Law of Gravity

Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection. His paper provides a framework for thinking about how culture and environment constrain varieties to stay true to type and also how changes enable varieties to stray indefinitely from the original type.

It is now well established that language cannot follow just any old rules. Linguists a few decades back thought there was no limit to the variety of language, but research has since identified a number of formal constraints that mark boundaries. Language can work within those borders, but not cross them. The trouble with those borders is understanding what these constraints mean psychologically and neurologically. There must be some reason beyond the formal rules for why these constraints existed. We hardly know how to think about these matters, let alone explain them. A letter in the most recent issue of Nature reminds me, however, that clues are coming in from, of all places, songbirds.

Loaded Questions

The Ptolemaic system of the universe explained many things and defined which questions were legitimate and which should not be asked. The system was destroyed by people who asked questions it had no place for.

Late in his book Adam’s Tongue, Derek Bickerton presents a list of conditions that any theory of language origins must satisfy. They are:

• The selection pressures had to be strong.
• The selection pressures had to be unique.
• The very first use of language had to be fully functional.
• The theory musn’t conflict with anything in the ecology of the ancestral species.
• The theory must explain why cheap signals should be believed.
• The theory must overcome primate selfishness. [pp. 165-166]

Mathematicians and metaphysicians can think in this absolutist way, but scientists should be more cautious.

From Protolanguage to True Language

Pidgin speakers use the closest contemporary approximation to protolanguage, but it is hard to find records of their language because they are in such a low status in their societies. The picture shows migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi and surely they use some pidgin to communicate with one another, and just as surely both their employers and the migrants despise the pidgin they speak.

Derek Bickerton’s most important contribution to the study of language origins was the idea of a protolanguage that was spoken before full language appeared, and it remains the most important idea in his new book, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. Put simply, protolanguage is a simple language, but Bickerton is more specific than that and puts the matter more formally. He also reveals that he had a series of e-mail exchanges with Noam Chomsky on the subject of protolanguage and, as he tells it, he came out on top.

A Critic's Chance to Say What He Is For

Derek Bickerton is one of the most striking critics of the search for language origins. He does not mince words when he thinks you’re wrong. Now it is time for him to look in the other direction and tell us what is right. He sums up the thesis of his new book, Adam’s Tongue in its subtitle: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. In other words, humans and language made each other, or to use a fancier term, they co-evolved. Surprised? Neither am I. It turns out that Bickerton is a more exciting critic than proponent.