This Is the Voice
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42. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language, 150.
43. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language, 158.
44. Russ Rymer, Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 90.
45. James T. Lamiell, “Some Philosophical and Historical Considerations Relevant to William Stern’s Contributions to Developmental Psychology,” Journal of Psychology (2009), 217, 66–72.
46. Charles Darwin, “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” Mind 2 (1877): 285–94.
47. “Dad Has Full Convo with His Baby,” YouTube, uploaded June 5, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IaNR8YGdow.
48. Lynne Murray and Colwyn Trevarthen, “The Infant’s Role in Mother–Infant Communications,” Journal of Child Language 13, no. 1 (1986): 15–29.
49. Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Language 50, no. 450part 1 (December 1974): 696–735.
50. A. M. Liberman, F. S. Cooper, D. P. Shankweiler, and M. Studdert-Kennedy, “Perception of the Speech Code,” Psychological Review 74, no. 6 (1967): 431–61.
51. Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy, “Perception of the Speech Code,” Psychological Review 74, no. 6 (1967): 431–61.
52. N. J. Enfield, How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 42–43.
53. Enfield, How We Talk, 51–55, recounts experiments by Sara Bögels and F. Torreira, “Listeners Use Intonational Phrase Boundaries to Project Turn Ends in Spoken Interaction,” Journal of Phonetics 52 (2015): 46–57.
54. David Brazil, The Communicative Value of Intonation in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
55. Anne Wennerstrom, The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 261.
56. Chad Spiegel and Justin Halberda, “Rapid Fast-Mapping Abilities in 2-Year-Olds,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 109 (2011): 132–40.
57. Pinker, The Language Instinct, 270.
58. The sociolinguist Robbins Burling, in his essay “The Slow Growth of Language in Children,” writes that “Producing a syntactic construction should be looked upon as only the final stage in a long developmental process,” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rburling/Slowgrowth.html.
59. Pinker, The Language Instinct, 29.
60. Matt Ridley, Genome (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 93.
61. Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), 191.
62. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, How Babies Talk, 50.
TWO: ORIGINS
1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Collier & Son, 1909), 174–75.
2. Victor Negus, The Mechanism of the Larynx (London: William Heinemann, 1929), v11.
3. Negus, The Mechanism of the Larynx, 14.
4. Konstantinos Markatos, et al., “Antoine Ferrein (1693-1796)—His Life and Contribution to Anatomy and Physiology: The Description of the Vocal Cords and Their Function,” Surg Innov 26, no. 3 (2019): 388–91, doi:10.1177/1553350619835346.
5. Gunnar Broberg, “Classification of Man,” in Linnaeus: The Man and His Work, ed. Tore Frangsmyr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 167.
THREE: EMOTION
1. Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution (New York: Plenum Press, 1990).
2. Current Topics in Primate Vocal Communication, ed., Elke Zimmermann, John D. Newman, and Uwe Jürgens (Springer Verlag, 1995). Quoting a German language study: M. Monnier and H. Willis, “Die integrative Tätigkeit des Nervensystems beim meso-rhombo-spinalen Anencephalus (Mittelhirnwesen 1953), Monatsschr. Psychiat. Neurol. 126: 239–273.
3. W. R. Hess, Hypothalamus and Thalamus (Stuttgart: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1969).
4. Uwe Jürgens and Detlev Ploog, “Cerebral Representation of Vocalization in the Squirrel Monkey,” Experimental Brain Research 10 (1970): 532–54.
5. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1886).
6. Eugene S. Morton, “On the Occurrence and Significance of Motivation-Structural Rules in Some Bird and Mammal Sounds,” American Naturalist 3 (1977): 855–69.
7. John Ohala, “Sound Symbolism,” http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ohala/papers/SEOUL4-sound_symbolism.pdf.
8. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin, 2005).
9. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
10. Cornelius J. Werner et al., “Altered Amygdala Functional Connectivity in Adult Tourette’s Syndrome,” European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 260 (2010), Suppl 2:S95, S99, doi:10.1007/s00406-010-0161-7.
11. Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2008). Pinker also wrote about the limbic system’s role in swearing in the article “What the F***,” The New Republic, October 8, 2007, https://newrepublic.com/article/63921/what-the-f.
12. Edward Hitchcock and Valerie Cairns, “Amygdalotomy,” Postgraduate Medical Journal 49 (December 1973): 897.
13. Not to be confused with spasmodic dysphonia, a congenital speech disorder originating in the brain’s motor centers, particularly those that activate opening and closing of the vocal cords for phonation. The vocal cords permanently slam together, producing a choked, wobbling, stop-start quality to the voice. The Kennedy clan has the gene for spasmodic dysphonia: you hear it in Robert Kennedy Jr.’s strangulated speech. Former NPR talk show host Diane Rehm is another famous sufferer—although she has a different version: her laryngeal spasms cause the vocal cords to stay open, preventing the proper chopping action of the airflow, creating a weak, breathy-sounding voice.
14. Jim Farber, “For Shirley Collins a Folk Revival of her Very Own,” New York Times, November 7, 2016. Farber documents that Collins stayed silent as a singer, despite entreaties in the early 2000s from a new generation of fans, including Graham Coxon of the rock band Blur and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth. However, in 2016, Collins, at eighty-two, recorded an album, Lodestar. Her voice, several octaves lower than the ethereal voice of her youth, has an austere, ragged tone that suits the bleak mood of the songs. Only in rare moments do her vocal cords seem to seize up, choking off a note prematurely.
15. Personal conversation with a leading voice surgeon who requested anonymity.
16. John R. Krebs and Richard Dawkins, “Animal Signals: Mindreading and Manipulation,” Behavioural Ecology, An Evolutionary Approach, eds. Krebs and Dawkins (London: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1984) 380–402.
17. Author interview with Klaus Scherer, May 9, 2018.
18. Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed (New York: Owl/Henry Holt, 2007), 6–12.
19. Author interview with Scherer.
20. Klaus R. Scherer, “Vocal Communication of Emotion: A Review of Research Paradigms,” Speech Communication 40, no. 1–2 (April 2003): 227–56.
21. Gladys E. Lynch, “A Phonophotographic Study of Trained and Untrained Voices Reading Factual and Dramatic Material,” Archives of Speech 1, no. 1 (1934): 9–25.
22. From a story by Dustin Hoffman that he now partly recants: http://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/article/the-quotable-laurence-olivier.
23. G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, trans. A. Cuthbertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), quoted in Ekman, Emotions Revealed.
24. Scherer, “Vocal Communication of Emotion: A Review of Research Paradigms,” 227–56.
25. Klaus Scherer and Rainer Banse, “Acoustic Profiles in Vocal Emotion Expression,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 3 (1996): 614–36.
26. R. W. Picard, “Affective Computing,” MIT Technical Report #321 (1995), https://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/95.picard.pdf.
27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_86GQiEO
jp4.
28. Picard, “Affective Computing,” 2.
29. Author interview with Björn Schuller, August 2018.
30. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: HarperPerennial 2007). This edition includes an essay that updates the original 1995 book and notes, on page 14 of the added material, how speech technology had advanced “tremendously.”
31. Labeling emotions remains the most significant stumbling block, Schuller explained to me. But he, and others, are learning to get around it.
32. Picard, “Affective Computing,” 8.
33. Picard, “Affective Computing,” 15.
FOUR: LANGUAGE
1. M. Christiansen and S. Kirby, “Language Evolution: Consensus and Controversies,” Trends in Cognitive Science 7 (2003): 300–307, quoted by the evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch in his superb book The Evolution of Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15. Fitch, whom I came to know personally during our week together in the Amazon in 2007, helped spur my interest in language origins, and his book was indispensable to me.
2. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746).
3. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862).
4. Müller’s theory—later parodied by rivals as the “Ding Dong theory”—sought to trace, in ancient Indo-European tongues, the roots of the biblical Adam’s names for the animals.
5. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 354.
6. A. R. Wallace, “The Development of the Human Races Under the Law of Natural Selection,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2 (1864), clviii–clxxxvii.
7. Darwin actually draws a parallel between the hand and the vocal organs: “One can hardly doubt, that a man-like animal who possessed a hand and arm sufficiently perfect to throw a stone with precision, or to form a flint into a rude tool, could, with sufficient practice, as far as mechanical skill alone is concerned, make almost anything which a civilized man can make. The structure of the hand in this respect may be compared with that of the vocal organs, which in the apes are used for uttering various signal-cries, or, as in one genus, musical cadences; but in man the closely similar vocal organs have become adapted through the inherited effects of use for the utterance of articulate language.” The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1882), 50.
8. Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 87.
9. Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 87.
10. Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 87.
11. Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 88. Darwin actually references Dr. Frederick Bateman’s book On Aphasia (1870), which drew extensively on Broca’s research with stroke patients.
12. Edward Sapir, “Herder’s Ursprung der Sprache” (1907), 2, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/386734.
13. Sapir, “Herder’s Ursprung der Sprache,” 142.
14. Edward Sapir, Language (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1921), 21–22.
15. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Science in Review,” New York Times, June 18, 1950, 104.
16. B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957).
17. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, 462–63. “The selection of an instinctive response by its effect in promoting the survival of a species resembles, except for enormous differences in time scales, the selection of a response through reinforcement.”
18. Noam Chomsky, “A Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” in Language 35, no. 1 (1959): 26–58. The entire eviscerating takedown is posted online: https://chomsky.info/1967____/.
19. Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1972), 97. Of the belief that language arose from Darwinian natural selection, Chomsky wrote that there is “no substance to this assertion.”
20. Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon 1975), 59.
21. Chomsky floated this idea, somewhat tentatively, in his early book Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 55–57. In response to strong pushback from notable scientists, Chomsky has only grown more outspoken, not to say belligerent, on this point, stating, in a 2013 lecture posted to Youtube, that language arrived “as an instrument of thought,” and that “the modern dogmas about language and communication are just wrong,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR_NmkkMmO8&feature=youtu.be, 16:48-17:04.
22. Steven Pinker has applied the critical term “guru” to Chomsky often, including in The Language Instinct (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007), 11, and in an interview with me, “The Interpreter,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2007, 131.
23. Christine Kenneally, The First Word (New York: Penguin, 2007), 70.
24. Later work by Lieberman and colleagues showed that apes and monkeys can make other schwa-range vowels: those in “bit,” “bet,” “bat,” “but,” and “bought,” which expand the repertoire of nonhuman primate sounds, but not enough for intelligible language, since they omit the all-important “point vowels,” eee, ah, ooo. Philip Lieberman, Edmund S. Crelin, Dennis H. Klatt, “Phonetic Ability and Related Anatomy of the Newborn and Adult Human, Neanderthal Man, and Chimpanzee,” American Anthropologist, 74 (1972), 287-307.]
25. Lieberman’s student, Tecumseh Fitch, would offer fascinating insight into why the proto-human larynx would have descended even before speech evolved: the bigger throat resonator increased the threat sound in a size-bluffing shout or growl—a highly useful adaptation in so puny, weak, slow-running and easily preyed-upon a creature. Fitch also showed that some animals, like the red deer, also evolved a permanently descended larynx, presumably for the same “size bluff” reasons. Tecumseh Fitch, “Comparative vocal production and the evolution of speech: Reinterpreting the descent of the larynx, in The Transition to Language, ed. A. Wray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21–45.
26. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Collier & Son, 1909), 176.
27. Edmund S. Crelin, Anatomy of the Newborn: An Atlas (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1969).
28. Detlev Ploog, “The Evolution of Vocal Communication,” in Nonverbal Vocal Communication,” eds. Hanus Papousek, Uwe Jurgens, and Mechtild Papousek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17.
29. Edmund S. Crelin, The Human Vocal Tract: Anatomy, Function, Development and Evolution (New York: Vantage Press, 1987).
30. Philip Lieberman and Robert McCarthy, “Tracking the Evolution of Language and Speech,” Expedition 49, no. 2 (2007): 17.
31. The tiny trace of Neanderthal DNA found in modern African populations is from the humans who returned to Africa, bringing some Neanderthal genes with them.
32. Lieberman sites a 1964 Harvard University photo facsimile of Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 110
33. Philip Lieberman, The Biology and Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 329.
34. Lieberman, The Biology and Evolution of Language, 34, 35, 225, 331.
35. Philip Lieberman, B.G. Kanki, A. Protopappas, E. Reed and J.W. Youngs, “Cognitive Deficits at Altitude,” Nature 372 (December 1994) 325.
36. Myra Gopnik, “Feature Blind Grammar and Dysphasia,” Nature 344 (April 19, 1990): 715.
37. Pinker, The Language Instinct, 302–39.
38. Faraneh Vargha-Khadem et al., “Praxic and Nonverbal Cognitive Deficits in a Large Family with a Genetically Transmitted Speech and Language Disorder,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 92 (January 1995): 930–33.
39. Faraneh Vargha-Khadem et al., “Neural Basis of an Inherited Speech and Language Disorder,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 95 (October 1998): 12695–700.
40. Faraneh Vargha-Khadem et al., “Neural Basis of an Inherited Speech and Language Disorder,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 95 (October 1998): 12695.
41
. Wolfgang Enard et al., “Molecular Evolution of FOXP2, a Gene Involved in Speech and Language,” Nature 418 (August 2002): 869–72.
42. Wolfgang Enard, et al., “A Humanized Version of FOXP2 Affects Cortico-basal Ganglia Circuits in Mice,” Cell, 137, no. 5 (2009), 961–71.
43. S. Haesler et al., “Incomplete and Inaccurate Vocal Imitation After Knockdown of FoxP2 in Songbird Basal Ganglia Nucleus Area X,” PLOS Biology (December 4, 2007). When these researchers used targeted viruses to interrupt FOXP2’s expression in the brain of baby zebra finches during the period when they learn their songs, the birds could not properly sing, despite concerted tutoring by adult finches.
44. Lieberman and McCarthy, “Tracking the Evolution of Language and Speech,” 16.
45. The interview appeared in the free handout newspaper for the homeless, Spare Change News, 1999.
46. Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?,” Science 298 (November 22, 2002): 1569–79.
47. Ray Jackendoff and Steven Pinker, “The Nature of the Language Faculty and Its Implications for Evolution of Language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky),” Cognition 97 (2005): 211–25.
48. Daniel L. Everett, “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” Current Anthropology 46, no. 4 (August–October 2005): 621–46.
49. Author interview with Daniel Everett, January 2007.
50. Everett, “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” 644.
51. Author interview with Brent Berlin, June 29, 2006.
52. John Colapinto, “The Interpreter,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2007, 118–37. The rest of this chapter draws on the research I did for the article.
53. Unfortunately, Fitch has never published the results of these tests.
FIVE: SEX AND GENDER
1. Tom Gamill and Max Pross, “The Pledge Drive,” Seinfeld, Season 6, Episode 3, original airdate, October 6, 1994.
2. Anthropologist David Puts in a YouTube lecture at the Leakey Foundation: “Being Human,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8jsR8u2y9w, uploaded November 1, 2016.