Babel's Dawn

Unique Properties of the Human Mind

Cats that look like humans and humans that look like cats are unknown to nature, but commonplaces of speech. How can that be?

The April issue of the Journal of Anatomy is devoted to review articles on the evolution of humans. The result is as handy as an up-to-date textbook. What’s more, all the articles appear to be free. So I suggest readers jump to the journal’s table of contents and start downloading those PDFs. The article most directly concerned with issues on this blog is “A natural history of the human mind: tracing evolutionary changes in brain and cognition” by a team from The George Washington University’s Mind, Brain and Evolution Center (Chet C. Sherwood, Francys Subiaul, and Tadeusz W. Zawidzki). The most useful part of the article for readers of this blog is probably its listings of mental traits that humans share with apes and traits that are unique to humans. Listening, sharing information, and expressing a boundless imagination all rest on the unique traits.

BioScience Article

An article I wrote about the Evolang conference in Barcelona is available for free online at the BioScience site here. BioScience is the magazine of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Autism and Joint Attention

Joint Attention is often thought to require catching another's eye and a willingness to look in the eye.

It has long seemed to me that if we understood the origins of speech, we would better understand what it is that sets humanity apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Many people come at the issue from the other end. They claim to identify what it is that sets humanity apart, and then try to relate their conclusion to speech. The proposed X factor might be rational thought, recursive syntax, having a theory of mind, symbolic thinking, tool using, etc. Sometimes the proposed X turns out to exist elsewhere in the primate world, but even when the assumption stands, the approach turns the problem of speech origins into a two step affair:

1. Explain the origins of X, and,
2. given X, explain the origins of speech.

I have tried to simplify the problem by coming at from the other end. Learn something about the origins of speech and see what X emerges. After last week’s post (here) it seems to me that an X may have emerged.

Speech Includes Gesture

Some gestures stay in the mind as sharply as the most memorable phrase.

Simone Pika has published a useful review of ape gestures in the First Language journal, “Gestures of apes and pre-linguistic human children: Similar or different?” (abstract here). I don’t suppose it will bowl anyone over with its finding that while both apes and children can make imperative gestures (e.g., give me food) human children, but not apes, also make “gestures for declarative purposes to direct the attention of others to some third entity, simply for the sake of sharing interest in it or commenting on it” [p. 131]. But when all the different sorts of ape gestures are drawn together it is quite evident that the really peculiar aspect of speech is the presence of what this blog calls the speech triangle, and what Pika calls triadic form. That is, humans are peculiar in having a speaker, a listener, and an outside topic.

Dyadic gestures—actions used to attract attention to the actor—are common enough among apes, but informative triads among apes in the wild are almost unknown. (The one exception: a free bonobo once was observed probably pointing out human observers hiding in the bushes.) Pika says a little ambiguously, “It is therefore quite puzzling why only human beings comment on outside entities simply to share experiences.” I would put it a little differently. It’s quite puzzling how we came to comment on outside entities when no other animal seems to share the need. Once we can give a solid explanation for that puzzle, we will have come a long way in understanding why humans are different.

Just How Sane Are We?

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” Shakespeare put that line in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, first staged in the 1590s, and I doubt that anyone at the play’s opening thought the idea was new. Thus, a whole book asserting that we mortals do indeed have our foolish side might seem unnecessary. But a series of doubters have appeared since Puck had his laugh, people who insist that, to paraphrase Dr. Pangloss, we mortals are the most rational of all possible species. Now there is an idea that could give both Puck and his audience a hearty laugh. Who, you might demand, argues such nonsense?

From the Mouthes of Babes

Derek Bickerton is an interesting fellow, an odd man out who goes his own way even when he writes his memoirs. Most memoirs are, by definition, accounts of a person’s life. “I was born on a sunny day in the year of our lord 19__.” No such sentence is to be found in Bickerton’s memoirs. He does have a scene in which a driver almost crashes head on into an oncoming car, but this bit of personal recounting is so unusual that it left me wondering how he had happened to put that moment into his book. Bastard Tongues: A trailblazing linguist finds clues to our common humanity in the world’s lowliest languages is an account of “the world lowliest languages” and how they came to be as they are. The memoir side of it appears only in the fact that it describes how the author came to understand pidgin and Creole languages in his fashion. I should think the book will irritate scholars who have a different understanding of the subject. Fortunately, however, I’m not a scholar and I’m in complete agreement with Bickerton on his main theme.

Broca's Area in Chimpanzees?

Broca's area was the first region of the brain identified as specializing in speech production.

Broca's area is the best known region of the brain that is critical to speech production. If damaged it produces difficulties in speaking grammatically-complex sentences. It is one of those areas whose evolution seems critical to the story of speech origins. Now comes a report from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center that chimpanzees have a homologous region of the brain that is active when they communicate. (See: Jared P. Taglialatela et al March 11 Current Biology, abstract here) The authors speculate that "the neurological substrates underlying language production in the human brain may have been present in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees."

Reality Blogging: The Survivors

Souvenir of the Evolang conference in Barcelona.

Most of the Evolang conference did not consist of paradigm-smashing presentations or PowerPoint shows that pointed in a new direction. The bulk of presentations and poster displays were the result of the normal hard work and fact gathering that is the foundation of scientific success. The professionals on the scene were very much encouraged by the numbers of students who had come to Barcelona, and by the range of their work. More than one speaker professed eagerness to see the results of the work that will be presented at Evolang 2028, but we don’t have to wait 20 years to spot the trends. The conference organizers handed out a book of papers and abstracts (costly, but available here) presented at the conference that provides a fine overview of range of work being done today.

Brain Changes for Language

I'm getting a little backed up as I go over the Barcelona results and prepare to review a couple of new books. Meanwhile news continues. I have a story on the backburner, but I see that another blogger has done a good job of presenting it, so why don't I just send browsers over to that site? Check out Neurophilosophy's account of brain changes to support language right here.

Semantics Returns from the Grave

Barcelona is a modern city that remembers the old. It made a fine site for the 7th Evolang conference.

The Evolang conference in Barcelona that ran from March 12 through 15 gave a strong boost to two ideas that Terrence Deacon promoted as anti-Chomskyan heresies in his book The Symbolic Species: Language and the Brain Co-Evolved (discussed in last week’s post) and Language’s controlling element is semantics, not syntax. For non-linguists this idea is plain common sense, but for linguists of the Chomsky era it is a resurrection as shocking as watching dead Lazarus return from his tomb.

Co-Evolution Idea Won Big in Barcelona

Audience at a presentation of the Evolang confererence in Barcelona.

Last week’s post summarized the outcome of the just-completed Evolang conference in Barcelona by reporting the collapse of the long dominant paradigm of generative grammar founded by Noam Chomsky and expanded by many others. The old paradigm made no contributions to the new results reported in Barcelona; reports often contradicted the generative paradigm; some speakers directly and energetically criticized the old paradigm and got away scott free in the discussions that followed. So what did the Barcelona conference leave its participants to build on?

Paradigm Lost

Barcelona's Museum of Science hosted the Evolang 2008 conference that ran this past week from March 11-15.

The Barcelona conference on the evolution of language has ended and I want to digest what I have learned about the way forward. However, it is clear that the old paradigm of speech is the fruit of a generative grammar can no longer stand. (Generative grammar is the theory launched by Noam Chomsky that mathematical rules and algorithmic procedures can be written precisely enough to “generate” all the possible sentences of a natural, human language and only the possible sentences. In other words, it can generate a sentence like The boy took a swing at the ball, but not The ball took a swing at the boy.)

Neanderthals Had Language

Neanderthals had language comparable to that of Homo sapiens, Bordeaux-based archaeologist Francisco D’Errico told participants in the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Saturday, March 15, 2008). This claim totally discards the older Big Bang theory that said language arose only very recently (40 to 75 thousand years ago), and also challenges the Out-of-Africa theory that proposes Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 200 thousand years ago and spread over the rest of the world, carrying language and culture with them, beginning about 60 thousand years ago. A new history will have to be written.

Recursion Can Be a "Side Effect"

A second attack on the importance of recursive processes in producing sentences took place today (Saturday March 15, 2008) at the Evolang conference in Barcelona. A few hours after Derek Bickerton argued that recursive processes are not needed to generate sentences, Joris Bleys argued in a workshop that even if they are needed they require no special evolutionary jumps to appear. Recursion (the transformation of preliminary phrases into final sentences by embedding some preliminary phrases into others) can simply be a side-effect of trying to keep linguistic knowledge as simple as possible. If the Bickerton and Bleys papers stand there seems to be no syntactical reason why language should be limited to humans.