The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (14 page)

The more we learn about what’s going on in the heads of other animals, the more we realize that many different species have a lot to think about and their ways of thinking are quite sophisticated. Despite centuries of believing otherwise, we now know that it’s possible to have a complex inner and social life without syntax and words.
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Most significantly at this stage of language evolution research, the overwhelming accumulation of evidence for animal cognition resets the parameters of the problem—there can be no more easy assumptions about human uniqueness or the special status of our mental lives.

Researchers differ in how much they think our mental platform interacts with language, though most agree it has to have some role. At the most general level, examining the thinking of a broad range of species suggests how common certain types of cognition are among many animals. Narrowing the focus and looking at animals that live similar lives to ours or that are genetically closely related to us helps us consider what the mental life of our ancestors on the cusp of modern language might have been like. Based on the abilities of the chimpanzees, dolphins, parrots, and even crows described in this chapter, we can assume that their thought processes were already fairly complicated.

What does language bring to the mix? Ray Jackendoff, a linguist at Tufts, who fondly remembers the champagne atmosphere when he was a student of Chomsky’s generative linguistics in the 1960s, argues that when you introduce language into the well-developed mental platform of pre-linguistic hominids, you get profound ramifications of thought, material culture, and social structure. “Language does help us think better,” he said. “It doesn’t enable us to move from zero to actual thought. Monkeys do have thoughts, and
you have to have something to say
before there is something adaptive in saying it.”

Given the sea change in the way animal thought is viewed, Jackendoff outlined four logical possibilities for thinking about language evolution. First, some things that are necessary to language must have undergone no change at all from our pre-linguistic ancestors. Lungs and the basic auditory system belong in this group. Second, certain traits have appeared only in the human lineage, are relatively new, and are necessary for language but also serve a larger function. This group includes phenomena like pointing and the ability to imitate. Third, there are probably aspects of language that only humans have and that are used exclusively for language but are based on some alteration of a shared primate trait, like the shape of the vocal tract. Fourth, parts of language may be used exclusively for language and arise from a trait that is completely new and unprecedented in the lineage we share with other primates.

It is possible, Jackendoff acknowledged, that nothing fits in the third and fourth categories, and that language could be accounted for by traits and abilities that exist only in the first two. If this were the case, human language could be made up entirely of ingredients that are neither unique to our species or to language. Jackendoff, among others, doubts that this is the case. For example, he differentiates a number of abilities that seem to rely on conceptual systems that build on distinctions that can be made only in language. While these have not yet been studied extensively in primates (allowing us to rule them out as belonging to nonlinguistic cognition), they offer a good place to look for language-dependent cognition.

In a paper he co-wrote with Steven Pinker, Jackendoff described many ways of thinking that are not possible without language. These include fatherhood, moral concepts, tools made of three parts or more, ideas and systems of thought like the supernatural and formal and folk science, and kinship systems that make complicated distinctions like cross-cousins (mother’s brother’s child, father’s sister’s child) and parallel-cousins (mother’s sister’s child, father’s brother’s child).
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What about language and the concept of time? As with most other animal cognition research, we are just beginning to get a handle on how animals may think about time, whether consciously or subconsciously. Only recently we believed that animals lived forever in the present, unable to think about the future. But in 2006 Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call showed that orangutans and bonobos could plan for a future event. In a number of experiments Mulcahy and Call demonstrated that both kinds of animals were able to select from a range of tools the appropriate instrument for getting food out of a specially constructed device,
even though they wouldn’t have access to the device for up to fourteen hours
. This series of experiments is the first to show that nonhuman apes can plan for a later need. Because our common ancestor with orangutans lived earlier than fourteen million years ago, Mulcahy and Call suggest the precursor for mental time travel is at least this old.
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Mulcahy and Call demonstrated how the concept of the future and future needs is not specific to humans. But what about our most complicated concepts of time? It’s probably not possible to learn the way we carve up time without language, wrote Jackendoff and Pinker: “The notion of a week depends on counting time periods that cannot be perceived all at once; we doubt that such a concept could be developed or learned without the mediation of language.”
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Not only are ideas like a week reliant on the medium of language, but, Jackendoff and Pinker suggested, “more striking is the possibility that numbers themselves are parasitic on language—that they depend on learning the sequence of number words, the syntax of number phrases or both.”
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A new generation of experimenters has begun to engage in earnest with the ways language, ideas, and thinking may interact. Gary Lupyan, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, studying under Jay McClelland (one of the founding fathers of connectionism), believes that language may shape cognition: “The idea that language affects thought has a great deal of intuitive support. We feel that we think in language and think differently in different languages. Languages around the world vary to an enormous degree, and so it would seem people speaking these languages ought to categorize and think about the world differently. Language seems to embed itself in so many aspects of our everyday cognition that we must start considering how language has altered the functioning of cognitive mechanisms we share with other mammals.”

The question of whether language can affect the way we see or think about the world has long been controversial in mainstream linguistics. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, two linguists working in the early part of the last century, first popularized the notion that a specific language can shape thought in a particular way. But in the Chomskyan era their theory fell out of favor. It was assumed instead that thought is structured by universal grammar, the core set of linguistic principles that all humans share. If this were true, then any effect of language upon thought would be the same for all people, regardless of which language they speak.

Either way, intuition is not sufficient for making assumptions about language and thought. Now researchers are subjecting Whorfian ideas to experimental tests, like that by Lera Boroditsky, a psychology professor at Stanford. As Lupyan described it:

 

Boroditsky looked at speakers of Indonesian, a language that does not require tense marking. For example, an Indonesian speaker might say “I go,” and it could mean going yesterday, today, or tomorrow. In addition, while not requiring speakers to mark tense, Indonesian does require speakers to provide information about the actor, such as relative age. Boroditsky tested the Indonesian speakers’ memory for different scenes, like that of a picture of a boy about to kick a ball, a picture of a boy kicking a ball, and a picture of a boy having kicked a ball. She found that English speakers had better memory for the tense, while Indonesian speakers had better memory for who performed the action.

We are finding that influences of language seem to extend into areas previously thought to be too low-level to be affected by it. I’ve found that the ability to mentally rotate objects seems to be affected by whether we have a name for the object that’s being rotated. Language also changes how we remember colors and even actually see colors.

 

Research on color and language has a long history in psychology and linguistics because different languages divide the color spectrum differently. For example, among the many, many colors that it labels, the English language distinguishes blue from green, while many languages make no such distinction. In the past some studies have found that the way a particular language divides color can shape the way color is perceived, while others have found the opposite. The general consensus until now has been that different color labeling systems probably do not affect the color perception of individuals.

However, in 2006 Aubrey Gilbert and colleagues announced in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(PNAS) that the way a speaker’s language distinguishes color does affect the way he or she sees it. The nature of their experiment had the additional benefit of providing a clue as to why previous experimental results have been so contradictory. Apparently, the way you see color depends on what side of the brain you are using.
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Gilbert and colleagues hypothesized that if language is dominant on the left side of the brain, it should impact the perception of input in the right visual field. (The left side of the brain controls the right visual field, and vice versa.) They showed subjects colors with color words, and found that subjects were able to make faster judgments about colors and color categories in the right visual field when the color and the word matched. If there was a conflict between the color and the word on this side, they were slowed down in their responses. The wrong word interfered with their ability to decide what the color was. When they were asked to make a judgment about colors and words in the left visual field, using the nonlanguage-dominant side of the brain, they weren’t affected at all.

It’s not clear yet whether the language of color affects the way an individual physically perceives color in the world or whether the influence of language kicks in after some basic perception has taken place. Nevertheless, Gilbert’s experiments show that linguistic categories affect thought. Lupyan said, “What we are now learning is that besides communicating information, language seems to alter how the brain processes it. Individuals, like stroke patients, who suffer from aphasia—a condition characterized by varying degrees of language loss—do not just find it more difficult to communicate; they also find it more difficult to categorize, remember, and organize information. This is evidence that language is playing a role in these cognitive tasks.”

In his own research Lupyan addresses the question of how language in general, rather than specific languages, changes the way we perform cognitive tasks. He devised an experiment to tease out some of the ways words might affect how we think. Lupyan used a set of odd-looking clay creatures with prominent heads and strange pointy limbs, which he called aliens. His aliens fell naturally into two groups. In one, the creatures’ heads were fairly smooth, and in the other their heads were somewhat lumpy and misshapen. Crucially, the differences were subtle and not easy to articulate. He then told two groups of students that some of the aliens were friendly and some were not. The students’ task was to decide which was which, and then to assign them to separate groups. After they made each choice, students got feedback about whether they guessed right or wrong, meaning that as they went through the task, they basically learned that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.

Lupyan added a little piece of information to one of the test groups. After the members of the group found out whether their choice had been right or wrong, they were also shown a word. Lupyan told them that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the friendly and unfriendly aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious” (or vice versa). He found that even though both groups eventually learned the difference between the aliens with equal success, the group that had words to label them learned to distinguish them much faster than the non-word group. He concluded that language, specifically the act of naming something with a word, helps categorize.

“Separating language and thought is hard,” Lupyan acknowledged. “But it is precisely because of this that we have to start thinking of them as not separate things, but as a system. As language is learned, it alters how we process information. Just as when we learn to identify a face with a name, it alters how we treat a face—it’s not just a face, it’s my friend Mike—so learning language results in our automatic labeling of objects, actions, sounds, and even more abstract categories like emotions. This labeling categorizes the item and links it to other instances of the category.”

Language not only boosts cognition but can help or hinder thought, depending on the task in question. In 1990 Jonathan Schooler at the University of Pittsburgh demonstrated that when people were shown a face in a mock crime videotape and asked to write a description of it, they were worse at picking that face out of a subsequent lineup than people who hadn’t written their impressions down. “This makes sense,” said Lupyan, “if we think of linguistic descriptions as forcing us to think in categories. Writing ‘he had brown hair’ can impair later identification because ‘brown’ refers to a category and not a particular color.”

Other language and thought experiments have looked at how we process number. Because of researchers like Wynn, Hauser, and their colleagues, we know that certain aspects of number ability do not depend on language, as some animals can think numerically, and children and adults use various number and geometric concepts independently of language. Nevertheless, a recent experiment suggests that some numerical concepts are difficult to understand if they don’t exist in the language you speak.