The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

by Christine Kenneally

  Chimpanzees are also known to be good at generalizing and applying the patterns of one task to another. It is this ability that makes them such exceptional subjects in cognitive experiments. Monkeys, in contrast, can’t generalize. They may be close relations, but if they learn how to use a joystick in one experiment, they have to relearn how to use it for the next.

  The ability to grasp the concept of number, like most other mental talents, was believed to belong only to speaking humans, until researchers began to explore it in babies and other animals. Since these investigations began, the evidence for a shared, fundamental comprehension of numbers has mounted. Babies are able to identify numbers below four exactly, and they can represent large numbers approximately. In 1992, in one of the first experiments of this kind, the researcher Karen Wynn showed infants a Mickey Mouse doll and then hid it behind a screen. Wynn then showed the children another doll and placed it behind the screen as well. When the screen was removed, children were startled if they saw only one doll, and they looked longer at the object. Further experiments demonstrated that children were able to understand the addition and subtraction of up to three objects.5

  As research on the natural abilities of infants has accumulated, so it has for animals. In 1999 two researchers at Columbia University announced that they’d taught two rhesus monkeys to count to four using images of shapes on a computer screen. The monkeys were also able to understand the difference between smaller and larger numbers with greater sets of images.6

  Marc Hauser, who is head of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard, and his colleagues have shown that monkeys can, like children, grasp small numbers precisely and approximate large numbers. They can also perform the same kind of addition that babies can. Hauser replicated Wynn’s experiment, but instead of human babies he used rhesus monkeys as subjects. Like the children, the monkeys were startled when the numbers didn’t correctly add up. In later experiments the researchers further investigated the ability of the monkeys to understand addition and subtraction of amounts up to three. These findings also held true for domesticated dogs.

  In 2006 French scientists announced that children and adults from the Munduruku, an isolated group of indigenous Amazonians, had demonstrated that they understood and were able to use concepts from geometry even though their language has no words for those concepts. When investigators showed them drawings of parallel lines and right-angled triangles, they were able to use the geometric relationships to locate hidden objects. The Munduruku did as well as American children on the same test.7

  In another experiment, two researchers from Duke University determined that infants only seven months old grasped certain numerical concepts. The experimenters showed the infants videos of adults and at the same time played them recordings of adults speaking. The infants displayed a clear preference for watching the group of adults that matched the number of people they could hear speaking. This doesn’t mean that babies can count, but at this preverbal level they grasp number sufficiently to be able to match it in the visual and the auditory domains.8 The choice of adults and voices, experimenters point out, was not arbitrary. Not even children who are much older can perform in the same way if they are asked to match objects that matter less to them or that are less obviously related, like drumbeats and black dots. The infants’ natural mental abilities are shaped by their environment. They are much smarter than we imagined, but their intelligence doesn’t get expressed as abstract, computational efficiency; it’s all about being human.

  Many of the animals that demonstrate complicated thinking turn out to have a fair bit in common with one another and with us. Even though many of them are not that closely related to humans, they share many traits that seem as important as DNA. Hyenas, whales, elephants, humans, baboons, crows, and parrots all have long lives, extended periods of childhood, complicated systems of communication, and their societies are made up of individuals with distinct roles and relationships.

  Accounting for the connection between phenomena like individuality and cognition is a fairly recent development. “In most studies of long-lived animals with elaborate social systems, the individual is extremely important because they have extremely varied experiences,” said Betty’s researcher Alex Kacelnik.

  This is a familiar enough idea when we apply it to humans, who are pleased to take the performance of our best and brightest as evidence of our species’ abilities. If you went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at the Picassos, you wouldn’t treat the art as just the work of one individual in highly special circumstances, but would likely examine it as an expression of what it means to be human. “We have different standards,” Kacelnik said. “If a chess master says that he uses some unconscious process to learn what the next set of possible moves is, we call that inspiration and cognition. But say that you were to train an animal to play chess and you reward it for making appropriate moves in particular configurations of the board, you would not call that cognition. You would say that the animal has used trial and error. But you would be observing the same thing.” Exploring the social complexity of an animal’s life involves treating individual acts as part of the genius of the species rather than as exceptions to it.

  Katy Payne and her assistant Melissa Groo at Cornell’s Bioacoustics Research Program investigated elephant social complexity. Groo screened a video of a young female elephant calf they call Elodie, taken at the Dzanga-Sangha National Park in the Central African Republic. Elodie’s antics took place in a bai, a muddy clearing in the middle of a forest, the elephant equivalent of a village square. Different families, each led by a matriarch, visit the bai over the course of a day, and at any one time up to eighty elephants might be scattered about. The young elephants play while the adults flap ears and rumble and thunder at one another. The elephants spend a lot of time using their feet and trunks to construct mud wells, holes that are a few feet in diameter. They stand in them and eat mineral-rich mud from the bottom. Generally, the dominant individuals (typically large adult males) occupy the best wells, while less dominant individuals stand around nearby waiting for a chance to slip in.

  In the video Elodie enters the frame from the left. She is a tiny thing, trotting on huge feet, and she heads for a hole ruled by an enormous male. Given her size and sex, Elodie should be last in line for access to the well, but she walks in and plunges her trunk straight down next to the male’s trunk; she is almost standing on her head—fat, round rump thrust up into the air and the rest of her not visible over the rim. Lamar, the male, is momentarily baffled by the interloper, so he lets her in. But quickly he recovers himself and pokes her in the butt with his tusks. Elodie screams and scoots out, and her mother, as always hovering by, jolts forward in response. “She is a nervous wreck,” says Groo. But Elodie is not. Within a minute she sidles back up to Lamar and squirms into the hole again.

  “You never see Elodie’s behavior in other juveniles,” Groo said. “It is a unique strategy.” The ability to accommodate individualistic behavior like Elodie’s within a group is an indicator of intelligence. It means that for elephants, as for humans, society operates according to a layered set of rules—on one level there are expected modes of behavior, yet on another level rules can be broken. This kind of flexibility requires a mental agility that would not be necessary in a social system based on a rigid behavioral pattern.

  Lamar eventually tires of Elodie’s intrusion and walks away, leaving the pit to her. But another male decides it is now his turn. Elodie’s mother tries to stand in the way of her daughter’s competitor and ward him off, but she is subordinate to him and quickly backs down. The male moves in on Elodie. He is not as big as Lamar, but he still towers over the baby elephant. Elodie will not budge, however, and shortly he yields and walks away.

  Like crows, elephants are biologically distant from humans, yet like us they live long lives in structured societies where “childhood” is an extended period of learning out of which individualistic behavior emerges. The social de
mands of elephant society are intense. They include, Payne explained, growing up in a crowded community with members that change and develop over the years. For males, it means living in a very vocal, collaborative female society for their first twelve to fifteen years and then moving into a more silent, solitary, competitive existence. In their new world they make temporary associations and coalitions with other males, and they rise and fall in dominance as they go in and out of musth (heat). Like humans, female elephants live years past their reproductive stage. This means, Payne said, that elephant society is more sophisticated than societies in which the members do not live long, because the elders can impart their wisdom. Older females pass on social learning, like how to interact with hundreds of other familiar elephants, and also practical information, like where the best water hole or fruit tree can be found. This requires memory, knowledge, and the ability to learn that knowledge.9

  Other researchers have commented on the sophisticated ways that members of animal groups such as these relate to one another. Frans de Waal calls the set of rules and relationships found in such complicated groups social syntax. Ray Jackendoff agrees there is a parallel to be drawn between the role of syntax in language and in social situations: “If you look at what the other primates are doing, you have to attribute some concepts to them. Not all of them by any means, but tracing who’s related to whom and therefore who one is entitled to commit aggression against, these kinds of things require combinatorial structure, and they suggest that the meaning was around before the language.” (See chapter 9 for more on the mental platform for syntax.)

  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.10 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).11

  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.12

  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.”13 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.”14

  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.