The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (17 page)

Tomasello’s conclusions resonate deeply with observations made by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. Before Kanzi, Savage-Rumbaugh worked with two apes called Sherman and Austin. The apes had successfully acquired many signs and used them effectively. There didn’t seem to be anything odd about their language use until one day they were asked to talk to each other. What resulted was a sign-shouting match; neither ape was willing to listen. Language, wrote Savage-Rumbaugh, “coordinates behaviors between individuals by a complex process of exchanging behaviors that are punctuated by speech.”
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At its most fundamental, language is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally
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willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work. Symbols like words, said Tomasello, are devices that coordinate attention, just as pointing does. They presuppose a general give-and-take that chimpanzees don’t seem to have. For this reason, Tomasello explained, “asking why only humans use language is like asking why only humans build skyscrapers, when the fact is that only humans, among primates, build freestanding shelters at all…At our current level of understanding, asking why apes do not have language may not be our most productive question. A much more productive question, and one that can currently lead us to much more interesting lines of empirical research, is asking why apes do not even point.”

Whether you are human or another kind of ape, one of the ways that gesture becomes ritualized and communicative is in being passed on by learning. As humans, we observe a gesture, and then we reproduce it by imitation. Imitation is crucial to the learning process, and we are not the only imitators in the animal world. Lori Marino, one of the researchers who explored the ability of dolphins to recognize themselves in mirrors, said that “imitation is an everyday behavior with dolphins.” They are very good at shadowing, imitation in real time. “If you make certain hand gestures in front of the tank in a captive facility, they will be able to follow your hand, even when you’re moving your hand back and forth in different ways. They also seem able to pick up patterns very well and anticipate patterns, so if you set up a certain pattern going and then you stop, they seem to anticipate what the next step in the pattern is.”

Frans de Waal speaks of the difficulties of measuring fleeting and ephemeral behaviors like imitation. “A lot of the cognition studies are on technical cognition, like: Can they count? How do they use tools? Do they understand gravity? Social intelligence is more difficult,” he said.

Particular difficulties arise with imitation studies, as de Waal explained:

 

What people do, for example, in these imitation studies is they put an experiment in front of the chimpanzee and they show how to do something, and then they see the chimp imitate. But I think imitation also requires that you identify with the person and that you like the person actually. If you look at humans who imitate, children who imitate, they imitate the people they know and they like, and they want to be like Mom or they want to be like Dad or their big brother or whatever. They’re not imitating a random person. It’s very selective. I think the scientists who have failed to come up with these social learning tasks on chimpanzees, to some degree, have worked with the wrong paradigm. They put a human in front of the animal, which is already a different species, and the human may not have much of a relationship with them. I think we can only resolve these issues by focusing on behavior among animals themselves.

 

De Waal has been studying the ways that capuchins imitate one another. The experimenters train one capuchin to perform a task, and while other monkeys watch it, they attempt to determine if any imitation is taking place. De Waal is also probing the relevance of who gets imitated—if a capuchin is more likely to imitate its mother, for example, than an unrelated male.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s experiences with Kanzi back up de Waal’s observation about laboratory experiments. She noted that Kanzi’s mother, Matata, had two other children who never got the amount of attention from human caretakers that Kanzi did. She believes it was the significant relationships with humans in the period in which Kanzi was most sensitive to acquiring language that enabled him to pick it up.
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Other research suggests that imitation can be affected by who the original performer is. One recent study described the way a population of dolphins off the coast of western Australia passed on a tradition of tool use. These dolphins learned from adults in the pod to use sponges to forage on the ocean floor. But they didn’t just acquire the skill from any of the adults: the tradition seemed to be passed down solely from mother to daughter.

The combination of gestural communication and imitation can be as powerful as vocal communication. In human hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Ngatatjara of western Australia and the northern Déné of the Canadian subarctic, the transmission of knowledge about the environment and how to survive in it is achieved by observation and experimentation rather than by verbal explanation. Moreover, studies have shown that a group learning how to manufacture a stone flake (such as those used by Stone Age societies) from a teacher who only gestured took no longer at the task than, and were as good at it as, a group in which the teacher gave precise verbal instructions on how to make the flake.
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In modern humans gestures come in a variety of types. There is here-and-now pointing (this book, right here!), action gestures (she picked it up with one hand!), abstract pointing (and another thing!), and metaphorical gestures that make symbolic reference to people, events, space, motion, action. Most gestures are initiated with the right hand. They typically occur slightly before or at the same time as speech.

Gestures that accompany speech typically amplify the meaning conveyed by the speaker. Sometimes, gesture communicates information that isn’t explicitly stated in the verbal message it accompanies. For example, a speaker may move his fingers stepwise in a spiral while saying, “I ran all the way upstairs.” The listener can infer that the staircase was spiral even though the fact was not stated.
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While gesture doesn’t break up into wordlike segments, there are rules about the way gestures can be combined. And as obvious as the meaning of many gestures is when they are used by people while they are talking, listeners can usually guess at the meaning of a gesture without sound only 50 to 60 percent of the time. (Think about gesturing while saying, “I had a big ball” and “The guy had a huge hot dog.”)

For a long time gesture was more or less ignored in linguistics, and elsewhere it received little attention. Researchers considered it paralinguistic, meaning that it was merely supplementary to language, perhaps useful in terms of emphasis but ultimately a secondary and unimportant phenomenon. People assumed that gesture was only for the benefit of the listener and justified removing it from serious consideration for the simple reason that it could be removed. It is possible, after all, to hear and understand someone even if you don’t look at him. (In the same way, structure in language has been treated as separate from meaning, because you can go a long way analyzing both of them without reference to the other. Similarly, intonation has been largely ignored within Chomskyan linguistics.) The assumption was that because you could separate them in analysis, they worked independently in the body and they therefore evolved independently of each other. But even though you can discover much about speech and language without worrying about gesture, the fact is they usually occur together in the real world. Speech is disembodied only on the phone or radio, and in evolutionary time these types of communication have not been around very long.

Today, like the study of language evolution itself, the field of gesture studies is undergoing a small revolution. More and more people are engaging in experimental studies of gesture, and researchers are discovering how complicated and interesting it can be. Conference organizers in the last few years have been surprised at the number of scholars who want to attend meetings about gesture. This mini-boom is part of the general trend to reconsider what used to be called the epiphenomena of language. In a relatively short amount of time, researchers have shown that speech and gesture, as well as gesture and thought, interact as language is being learned and even after it has been fully acquired.

Traditionally, developmental psychologists thought that children gestured simply because they saw their parents do so. They believed that infants acquired language separate from any gesturing and in a predictable pattern. There was a one-word stage, followed by a two-word stage, and once a child crossed a critical threshold into a three-word stage, her three words very rapidly became many structured sentences. Seen this way, language acquisition was quite miraculous: children went from one word to many in the space of two years.

Experts now agree the picture is more complicated. Strictly speaking, there is no one-word stage. The first sign of language is usually a gesture, which infants will make at about ten months. The best way to think about this process is that it begins with a one-element stage, and that element may be a word or a gesture, such as pointing. If you have ever seen a baby sit and whack his high chair table imperiously, demanding his lunch, you have witnessed the origins of language in the individual. Following the first one-element stage, there is a two-element stage, when word and gesture appear together. This combination can function like a sentence, as when a child says “eat” and points at a banana at the same time. Gesture-and-speech combinations increase between fourteen and twenty-two months. Children also show a three-element stage using both gesture and speech before producing three-elements in speech alone.
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Following this stage, speech starts to emerge as the prime method of communication.

These findings suggest that gesture doesn’t simply precede language but is fundamentally tied to it.
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In fact gesture and speech are so integral to each other in children that researchers are able to predict a child’s language ability at three years of age based on its gesturing at one year. They can also diagnose delays or problems that children might be having with language by examining their gestures.

For a long time the trend was to regard infants, much like animals, as mute and unthinking. Until they learned their first few words, it was thought that not a lot was going on inside their heads. And certainly, if you removed gesture from the language acquisition picture, children did seem eventually to pull language out of thin air. But when you take gesture into account, you can see the preliminary scaffolding of language even before a child has spoken a word, and the acquisition of language, while still incredible, looks a little less mysterious.

Developmental psychologists now talk about the cross-modality of language, meaning that language is expressed in various ways. Instead of the image of a brain issuing language to a mouth, from which it emerges as imperfect speech, think, rather, of language emerging in the child as an expression of its entire body, articulating both limbs and mouth at the same time.

Before the teaching of sign language became widespread, and more recently the use of cochlear implants, the fate of deaf children was contingent on their family situation. Most children who are born without hearing now receive systematic education in schools designed to help them, but there are still rare cases where children who are born deaf do not receive sign language instruction. Whether the reasons are socioeconomic or otherwise, these children are generally spoken to by their parents using normal language and gesture, and they must invent their own ways to express what they want. Susan Goldin-Meadow, who investigates gesture at her laboratory in Chicago, has studied a number of these children. The gestural language they invent is called homesign. Goldin-Meadow’s work on homesign and other gestures reveals a great deal about the way the ancient platform of gesture works in modern humans.

The versions of homesign used by each of these children share a number of traits, including the fact that they generally feature a stable list of words and a kind of syntax. Certain words will appear in a particular spot in a sentence depending on the role they take. There is structure in homesign words, as well as in homesign sentences. The symbols that homesigning children invent are not specific to a particular situation or time. For example, they might use a “twist” gesture to ask someone to open a jar, or to indicate that a jar has been twisted open, or to observe that it is possible to twist a jar open. Homesign symbols are also like words in that the number that can be invented appears to be limitless, as well as stable.
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Even though these children are exposed to a normal combination of gesture and speech by their parents, their own homesign doesn’t resemble their parents’ gesturing. Children who develop homesign pass through stages of development similar to those of hearing children who are learning speech. Moreover, the linear ordering of elements in a homesign utterance appears to be universal, regardless of the language community the children are born into. Interestingly, if hearing people gesture without speaking, their gestures start to look like the signs of homesigners.

How is it possible that these homesign children who are spoken to (even if they can’t hear the words) and gestured at end up gesturing communicatively in the absence of a sign education? Where does this facility for structure and words come from? Goldin-Meadow believes that sentence-and word-level structure are inherent.

Altogether, Goldin-Meadow’s studies show that gesture is highly versatile. It is used both with speech and without, and it differs depending on whether it is used with the spoken word. It takes a backseat when it accompanies language, and it becomes much more mimetic when it is used alone. When gesture carries the full burden of communication, says Goldin-Meadow, it becomes much more segmented. She likens it to beads on a string.