The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (38 page)

5. Tomasello and Hare also ran the experiment with dogs, and the canines had no problem interpreting the cooperative pointing. The researchers attribute the dogs’ sensitivity to the human-behavior agenda to their domestication.

6. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, “Why Are We Afraid of Apes with Languages?”

7. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. Shanker, T. J. Taylor,
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind.

8. T. M. Pearce, “Did They Talk Their Way Out of Africa?”

9. S. Goldin-Meadow et al., “Explaining Math: Gesturing Lightens the Load.”

10. S. Özçalişkan, S. Goldin-Meadow, “Gesture Is at the Cutting Edge of Early Language Development.”

11. J. M. Iverson, S. Goldin-Meadow, “Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development.”

12. S. Goldin-Meadow, “What Language Creation in the Manual Modality Tells Us About the Foundations of Language.”

13. The children were asked to solve problems like 4+5+3=?+3. The adults were asked to solve problems like x
²
-5x+6= (__)(__). S. Goldin-Meadow et al., “Explaining Math: Gesturing Lightens the Load.”

14. S. Goldin-Meadow, S. M. Wagner, “How Our Hands Help Us Learn.”

15. In recent years, linguists have studied two very interesting cases where small deaf communities invented a sign language, the first in Nicaragua and the second among the Al-Sayyid Bedouin group in Israel. In both cases, the inception of the language has been pinpointed in time, and the codification of grammar in ensuing generations has been traced. The resulting syntactic conventions are taken as evidence of innate linguistic structure. These investigations are fascinating and important, but whether they reveal innate properties of language is considered controversial. The most salient criticism is that the deaf individuals are communicating with people who already have language. Surely the success or failure of the interpretations made by listeners who are not deaf (including, in the case of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin group, all of the deaf individuals’ parents) guides the way the sign language evolves. These issues, which also relate to the investigation of homesign, are yet to be resolved. (Also see the comments of Michael Arbib and Simon Kirby in the epilogue.)

Chapter 8. You have speech

1. E. Balaban, M. A. Teillet, N. Le Douarin, “Application of the Quail-Chick Chimera System to the Study of Brain Development and Behavior.”

2. S. Nadis, “Look Who’s Talking.” 3. According to Ramon Ferrer i Cancho (see chapter 15), the statistical analysis of higher order entropies is not statistically accurate. The kind of analysis carried out by Doyle and McCowan gives false “orders” when the data sample is not large, as is the case with their study. Ferrer i Cancho says that the conclusions drawn by Doyle and colleagues are not necessarily wrong, but more work is needed to make them really strong.

4. Incidentally, researchers have shown that humans consolidate spoken language during sleep. It’s known that many different memory tasks are improved by sleeping, and the complications of speech are no exception. Scientists from the University of Chicago showed that subjects who were trained to recognize a small set of words were also able to better recognize a set of novel words that contained the same sounds as the training set. The test subjects’ performance was excellent after training but declined with time. After sleep, it completely recovered. Other researchers have monitored the brain of songbirds during sleep and discovered that the parts of the brain activated during singing while awake were reactivated during sleep, suggesting that in the way we dream of speech, songbirds dream of singing.

5. W.T. Fitch, “Comparative Vocal Production and the Evolution of Speech: Reinterpreting the Descent of the Larynx.”

6. T. Nishimura et al., “Descent of the Larynx in Chimpanzee Infants.”

7. W.T. Fitch, “The Evolution of Speech.”

8. Ibid.

9. According to Lieberman, it’s been shown that when children learn American English, boys round their lips in an attempt to lengthen their vocal tracts and make their voices sound deeper. Girls pull their lips back over their teeth, making their voices higher pitched.

10. F. Ramus et al., “Language Discrimination by Human Newborns and by Cotton-Top Tamarin Monkeys.”

11. R. Tincoff et al., “The Role of Speech Rhythm in Language Discrimination: Further Tests with a Non-Human Primate.”

Chapter 9. You have structure

1. “…[T]here are, if anything, more data available to the neonate than is strictly required for phonological acquisition.” P. Carr, “Scientific Realism, Sociophonetic Variation, and Innate Endowments in Phonology.” April McMahon quoted Carr in a presentation about the evolution of phonology at the 2004 Evolution of Language conference in Leipzig.

2. K. Zuberbühler, “A Syntactic Rule in Forest Monkey Communication.”

3. At the 2006 Rome Evolution of Language conference, Seyfarth joked that the size of an animal’s vocal repertoire is best predicted by how long a scientist has been studying its species.

4. The term “syntactic nuts” originated with Peter Culicover, professor and chair of linguistics and director, Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University.

5. S. Pinker, R. Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special About It?” 15–16.

6. P.W. Culicover, R. Jackendoff,
Simpler Syntax
.

7. In addition, in the mainstream view idioms (where meaning is more than a combination of the separate meaning of the words: “She laughed her head off,” “He hit it out of the park,” “He had a cow”) would be considered peripheral, but Jackendoff believes that idioms and the special structural tools they offer are as important to language as basic ordering of words.

8. J. H. McWhorter,
The Power of Babel,
188.

9. P.W. Culicover, R. Jackendoff,
Simpler Syntax,
541.

10. E. Pennisi, “Speaking in Tongues.”

11. T.W. Deacon,
The Symbolic Species,
71. Especially important, says Deacon, is not to “underestimate what can be represented by non-symbolic means,” 397.

12. R. Jackendoff,
Foundations of Language,
253.

13. D. A. Schwartz, C. Q. Howe, D. Purves, “The Statistical Structure of Human Speech Sounds Predicts Musical Universals.”

14. M. D. Hauser, J. McDermott, “The Evolution of the Music Faculty.”

15. At the 2002 Harvard Evolution of Language conference, Jelle Atema, a research fellow in the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, entertained attendees by playing a facsimile of a Neanderthal flute.

16. Motherese, or infant-directed speech, is characterized by lots of swings between high and low pitches, short statements, and repeated vowels. It is one of the few true universals in language; all humans do it the same way, no matter what language they speak. For this reason, motherese has been proposed as a candidate language fossil. Instead of analyzing it only as an adaptation to support a child’s comprehension, the linguist Elizabeth Peters at Florida State University says it’s plausible that motherese is a descendant of our ancestors’ proto-language. Steven Mithen, who wrote
The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body,
advocates a return to ideas promoted by Rousseau, Darwin, and others; specifically, that modern language was preceded by a holistic, musical protolanguage. Says Mithen, this stage of linguistic evolution helps explain phenomena like the “inherent musicality of infants.” Robin Dunbar is another scholar who has written a detailed account of why language evolved with respect o music. In
Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language,
Dunbar proposes that language evolved to facilitate social bonding. Interestingly, he proposes a stage where linguistic sophistication was preceded by group chorusing.

17. In a 2003 interview Trehub spoke about how, in addition to parents, groups like the Taliban understood the power of music. “Those in charge have always known the power of music, which is why they’ve sought to control it one way or the other,” she said. The Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, and in doing so, she explained, they removed the potential of others to stir the emotions of the population. In such emotion, a revolt could begin.

Chapter 10. You have a human brain

1. Except for the basal ganglia and a very small piece of the occipital lobe.

2. For all children who undergo hemispherectomy because of a seizure disorder, postoperative progress depends on many factors, including whether the seizures have been brought under control. In Lacy’s case, as happens sometimes for other children, a second operation was required to remove a small remaining piece of tissue that continued to cause seizures.

3. E. Bates, F. Dick, “Beyond Phrenology: Brain and Language in the Next Millennium.”

4. E. Bates, “Comprehension and Production in Early Language Development.”

5. S. Knecht et al., “Degree of Language Lateralization Determines Susceptibility to Unilateral Brain Lesions.”

6. P. Lieberman, “On the Nature and Evolution of the Neural Bases of Human Language,” 38. 7. Ibid., 38–39.

8. Ibid., 57–58.

9. Elizabeth Bates died in 2003.

10. E. Bates, “Construction Grammar and Its Implications for Child Language Research.”

11. E. Bates, F. Dick, “Language, Gesture, and the Developing Brain.”

12. E. Bates, F. Dick, “Beyond Phrenology: Brain and Language in the Next Millennium.”

13. E. Bates, “Comprehension and Production in Early Language Development.”

14. Using imaging to resolve questions about the online processing of tiny increments of language is a new and controversial field.

15. L. K. Tyler, W. D. Marslen-Wilson, E. A. Stamatakis, “Differentiating Lexical Form, Meaning, and Structure in the Neural Language System.”

16. W. D. Marslen-Wilson, L. K. Tyler, “The Lexicon, Grammar, and the Past Tense.”

17. The authors say, “[E]vidence for differentiation of function in the adult brain is in no way evidence per se against an emergentist view.”

18. K. D. Long, G. Kennedy, E. Balaban, “Transferring an Inborn Auditory Perceptual Predisposition with Interspecies Brain Transplants.”

19. Y. Kozorovitskiy et al., “Experience Induces Structural and Biochemical Changes in the Adult Primate Brain.”

20. S. L. Williams, K. E. Brakke, E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, “Comprehension Skills of Language-Competent and Nonlanguage-Competent Apes,” 314.

21. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, R. Lewin,
Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind.

22. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. Shanker, T. J. Taylor,
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind.

23. The relationship between the size of your brain and what you eat is a very interesting one. Said Lori Marino: “The species that are the most highly encephalized tend to be the ones that have a more complex dietary strategy, and hunting is a very complex dietary strategy, much more so than picking leaves off a tree. Even in primates, if you take two monkey species that are similar in many ways, but one is an insectivore and one is a foliavore, the insectivore will tend to be more highly encephalized. It could be that there is something about carnivory or, more generally, complexity in dietary strategy that requires a bigger brain. Eating leaves can be complex, depending upon the kind of information that you have to process about the leaves. Eating fruits can be complex. But eating other animals is probably the most cognitively demanding, because you have to process information about the changing behavior of another animal, and you can get into arms races where the prey changes because of the predator, and then the predator changes to match that—and it ratchets up. Being a hunter doesn’t mean that you’re going to develop a language but as a hunter you start having more complicated things to talk about…and if you have human language you’re probably going to be a carnivore not an herbivore.”