The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (44 page)

This chapter must end on a sad and urgent more. Languages are perpetuated by the children who learn them. When linguists see a language spoken only by adults, they know it is doomed. By this reasoning, they warn of an impending tragedy in the history of humankind. The linguist Michael Krauss estimates that 150 North American Indian languages, about 80% of the existing ones, are moribund. Elsewhere, his counts are equally grim: 40 moribund languages (90% of the existing ones) in Alaska and northern Siberia, 160 (23%) in Central and South America, 45 (70%) in Russia, 225 (90%) in Australia, perhaps 3,000 (50%) worldwide. Only about 600 languages are reasonably safe by dint of the sheer number of their speakers, say, a minimum of 100,000 (though this does not
guarantee
even short-term survival), and this optimistic assumption still suggests that between 3,600 and 5,400 languages, as many as 90% of the world’s total, are threatened with extinction in the next century.

The wide-scale extinction of languages is reminiscent of the current (though less severe) wide-scale extinction of plant and animal species. The causes overlap. Languages disappear by the destruction of the habitats of their speakers, as well as by genocide, forced assimilation and assimilatory education, demographic submersion, and bombardment by electronic media, which Krauss calls “cultural nerve gas.” Aside from halting the more repressive social and political causes of cultural annihilation, we can forestall some linguistic extinctions by developing pedagogical materials, literature, and television in the indigenous language. Other extinctions can be mitigated by preserving grammars, lexicons, texts, and recorded speech samples with the help of archives and faculty positions for native speakers. In some cases, like Hebrew in the twentieth century, the continued ceremonial use of a language together with preserved documents can be sufficient to revive it, given the will.

Just as we cannot reasonably hope to preserve every species on earth, we cannot preserve every language, and perhaps should not. The moral and practical issues are complex. Linguistic differences can be a source of lethal divisiveness, and if a generation chooses to switch to a language of the mainstream that promises them economic and social advancement, does some outside group have the right to coerce them not to on the grounds that it finds the idea of them keeping the old language pleasing? But such complexities aside, when 3,000-odd languages are moribund, we can be sure that many of the deaths are unwanted and preventable.

Why should people care about endangered languages? For linguistics and the sciences of mind and brain that encompass it, linguistic diversity shows us the scope and limits of the language instinct. Just think of the distorted picture we would have if only English were available for study! For anthropology and human evolutionary biology, languages trace the history and geography of the species, and the extinction of a language (say, Ainu, formerly spoken in Japan by a mysterious Caucasoid people) can be like the burning of a library of historical documents or the extinction of the last species in a phylum. But the reasons are not just scientific. As Krauss writes, “Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism.” A language is a medium from which a culture’s verse, literature, and song can never be extricated. We are in danger of losing treasures ranging from Yiddish, with far more words for “simpleton” than the Eskimos were reputed to have for “snow,” to Damin, a ceremonial variant of the Australian language Lardil, which has a unique 200-word vocabulary that is learnable in a day but that can express the full range of concepts in everyday speech. As the linguist Ken Hale has put it, “The loss of a language is part of the more general loss being suffered by the world, the loss of diversity in all things.”

On May 21, 1985, a periodical called the
Sun
ran these intriguing
headlines:

John Wayne Liked to Play with Dolls

Prince Charles’ Blood Is Sold for $10,000
by Dishonest Docs

Family Haunted by Ghost of Turkey
They Ate for Christmas

BABY BORN TALKING—DESCRIBES HEAVEN
Incredible proof of reincarnation

The last headline caught my eye—it seemed like the ultimate demonstration that language is innate. According to the article,

Scientists, of course, cannot take such reports at face value; any important finding must be replicated. A replication of the Corsican miracle, this time from Taranto, Italy, occurred on October 31, 1989, when the
Sun
(a strong believer in recycling) ran the headline “BABY BORN TALKING—DESCRIBES HEAVEN. Infant’s words prove reincarnation exists.” A related discovery was reported on May 29, 1990: “BABY SPEAKS AND SAYS: I’M THE REINCARNATION OF NATALIE WOOD.” Then, on September 29, 1992, a second replication, reported in the same words as the original. And on June 8, 1993, the clincher: “AMAZING 2-HEADED BABY IS PROOF OF REINCARNATION. ONE HEAD SPEAKS ENGLISH—THE OTHER ANCIENT LATIN.”

Why do stories like Naomi’s occur only in fiction, never in fact? Most children do not begin to talk until they are a year old, do not combine words until they are one and a half, and do not converse in fluent grammatical sentences until they are two or three. What is going on in those years? Should we ask why it takes children so long? Or is a three-year-old’s ability to describe earth as miraculous as a newborn’s ability to describe heaven?

All infants come into the world with linguistic skills. We know this because of the ingenious experimental technique (discussed in Chapter 3) in which a baby is presented with one signal over and over to the point of boredom, and then the signal is changed; if the baby perks up, he or she must be able to tell the difference. Since ears don’t move the way eyes do, the psychologists Peter Eimas and Peter Jusczyk devised a different way to see what a one-month-old finds interesting. They put a switch inside a rubber nipple and hooked up the switch to a tape recorder, so that when the baby sucked, the tape played. As the tape droned on with
ba ba ba ba…
, the infants showed their boredom by sucking more slowly. But when the syllables changed to
pa pa pa…
, the infants began to suck more vigorously, to hear more syllables. Moreover, they were using the sixth sense, speech perception, rather than just hearing the syllables as raw sound: two
ba
’s that differed acoustically from each other as much as a
ba
differs from a
pa
, but that are both heard as
ba
by adults, did not revive the infants’ interest. And infants must be recovering phonemes, like
b
, from the syllables they are smeared across. Like adults, they hear the same stretch of sound as a
b
if it appears in a short syllable and as a
w
if it appears in a long syllable.

Infants come equipped with these skills; they do not learn them by listening to their parents’ speech. Kikuyu and Spanish infants discriminate English
ba
’s and
pa
’s, which are not used in Kikuyu or Spanish and which their parents cannot tell apart. English-learning infants under the age of six months distinguish phonemes used in Czech, Hindi, and Inslekampx (a Native American language), but English-speaking adults cannot, even with five hundred trials of training or a year of university coursework. Adult ears can tell the sounds apart, though, when the consonants are stripped from the syllables and presented alone as chirpy sounds; they just cannot tell them apart
as phonemes
.

The
Sun
article is a bit sketchy on the details, but we can surmise that because Naomi was understood, she must have spoken in Italian, not Proto-World or Ancient Latin. Other infants may enter the world with some knowledge of their mother’s language, too. The psychologists Jacques Mehler and Peter Jusczyk have shown that four-day-old French babies suck harder to hear French than Russian, and pick up their sucking more when a tape changes from Russian to French than from French to Russian. This is not an incredible proof of reincarnation; the melody of mothers’ speech carries through their bodies and is audible in the womb. The babies still prefer French when the speech is electronically filtered so that the consonant and vowel sounds are muffled and only the melody comes through. But they are indifferent when the tapes are played backwards, which preserves the vowels and some of the consonants but distorts the melody. Nor does the effect prove the inherent beauty of the French language: non-French infants do not prefer French, and French infants do not distinguish Italian from English. The infants must have learned something about the prosody of French (its melody, stress, and timing) in the womb, or in their first days out of it.

Babies continue to learn the sounds of their language throughout the first year. By six months, they are beginning to lump together the distinct sounds that their language collapses into a single phoneme, while continuing to discriminate equivalently distinct ones that their language keeps separate. By ten months they are no longer universal phoneticians but have turned into their parents; they do not distinguish Czech or Inslekampx phonemes unless they are Czech or Inslekampx babies. Babies make this transition before they produce or understand words, so their learning cannot depend on correlating sound with meaning. That is, they cannot be listening for the difference in sound between a word they think means
bit
and a word they think means
beet
, because they have learned neither word. They must be sorting the sounds directly, somehow tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language. The module can then serve as the front end of the system that learns words and grammar.

During the first year, babies also get their speech production systems geared up. First, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. A newborn has a vocal tract like a nonhuman mammal. The larynx comes up like a periscope and engages the nasal passage, forcing the infant to breathe through the nose and making it anatomically possible to drink and breathe at the same time. By three months the larynx has descended deep into the throat, opening up the cavity behind the tongue (the pharynx) that allows the tongue to move forwards and backwards and produce the variety of vowel sounds used by adults.

Not much of linguistic interest happens during the first two months, when babies produce the cries, grunts, sighs, clicks, stops, and pops associated with breathing, feeding, and fussing, or even during the next three, when coos and laughs are added. Between five and seven months babies begin to play with sounds, rather than using them to express their physical and emotional states, and their sequences of clicks, hums, glides, trills, hisses, and smacks begin to sound like consonants and vowels. Between seven and eight months they suddenly begin to babble in real syllables like
ba-ba-ba, neh-neh-neh
, and
dee-dee-dee
. The sounds are the same in all languages, and consist of the phonemes and syllable patterns that are most common across languages. By the end of the first year, babies vary their syllables, like
neh-nee, da-dee
, and
meh-neh
, and produce that really cute sentencelike gibberish.

In recent years pediatricians have saved the lives of many babies with breathing abnormalities by inserting a tube into their tracheas (the pediatricians are trained on cats, whose airways are similar), or by surgically opening a hole in their trachea below the larynx. The infants are then unable to make voiced sounds during the normal period of babbling. When the normal airway is restored in the second year of life, those infants are seriously retarded in speech development, though they eventually catch up, with no permanent problems. Deaf children’s babbling is later and simpler—though if their parents use sign language, they babble, on schedule, with their hands!

Why is babbling so important? The infant is like a person who has been given a complicated piece of audio equipment bristling with unlabeled knobs and switches but missing the instruction manual. In such situations people resort to what hackers call frobbing—fiddling aimlessly with the controls to see what happens. The infant has been given a set of neural commands that can move the articulators every which way, with wildly varying effects on the sound. By listening to their own babbling, babies in effect write their own instruction manual; they learn how much to move which muscle in which way to make which change in the sound. This is a prerequisite to duplicating the speech of their parents. Some computer scientists, inspired by the infant, believe that a good robot should learn an internal software model of its articulators by observing the consequences of its own babbling and flailing.

Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them. Words are usually produced in isolation; this one-word stage can last from two months to a year. For over a century, and all over the globe, scientists have kept diaries of their infants’ first words, and the lists are almost identical. About half the words are for objects: food (
juice, cookie
), body parts (
eye, nose
), clothing (
diaper, sock
), vehicles (
car, boat
), toys (
doll, block
), household items (
bottle, light
), animals (
dog, kitty
), and people (
dada, baby
). (My nephew Eric’s first word was
Batman
.) There are words for actions, motions, and routines, like
up, off, open, peekaboo, eat
, and
go
, and modifiers, like
hot, all gone, more, dirty
, and
cold
. Finally, there are routines used in social interaction, like
yes, no, want, bye-bye
, and
hi
—a few of which, like
look at that
and
what is that
, are words in the sense of listemes (memorized chunks), but not, at least for the adult, words in the sense of morphological products and syntactic atoms. Children differ in how much they name objects or engage in social interaction using memorized routines. Psychologists have spent a lot of time speculating about the causes of those differences (sex, age, birth order, and socioeconomic status have all been examined), but the most plausible to my mind is that babies are people, only smaller. Some are interested in objects, others like to shmooze.

Since word boundaries do not physically exist, it is remarkable that children are so good at finding them. A baby is like the dog being yelled at in the two-panel cartoon by Gary Larson:

Presumably children record some words parents use in isolation, or in stressed final positions, like
Look-at-the
BOTTLE
. Then they look for matches to these words in longer stretches of speech, and find other words by extracting the residues in between the matched portions. Occasionally there are near misses, providing great entertainment to family members:

But these errors are surprisingly rare, and of course adults occasionally make them too, as in the Pullet Surprise and doggy-dog world of Chapter 6. In an episode of the television show
Hill Street Blues
, police officer JD Larue began to flirt with a pretty high school student. His partner, Neal Washington, said, “I have only three words to say to you, JD. Statue. Tory. Rape.”