The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

by Christine Kenneally

  5. P. Lieberman, Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain, 166. For all their differences, Lieberman is not unlike Chomsky. Both men have a reputation for being provocative and intimidating. When I speak to Lieberman, he is as frank in his assessment of his opponents’ intelligence as Chomsky is. “He’s an idiot!” he says of one researcher. “That paper is crazy!” he says of another’s publication. Chomskyan linguistics, according to Lieberman, is based on “infant school mathematics.” Still, like most of the researchers I speak to, he is ultimately democratic. At the end of a conversation in which he laid waste to the ideas of one academic, he added with complete sincerity, “Of course, you should go talk to him.”

  6. In a 1990 e-mail to Chomsky, Pinker wrote that he thought the subject was one about which reasonable people could disagree.

  II. If You Have Human Language…

  1. There is, apparently, a firm bottom end of 19,599 genes. In a similar example of anthropocentrism, a special type of brain cell, known as a spindle cell, has been long thought to be specific to humans and great apes. In 2006 it was announced that whales also have spindle cells.

  2. Neuroscientists don’t get squeamish, said de Waal, because neuroscientists know that the emotional centers we have are exactly the same as those of other animals. They can be studied in animals, even rats. If you look at the dualisms that we live in, he said, such as the dualism between human and animal, mind and body, nature and culture, you see that the dualism between mind and body has completely fallen apart under the influence of neuroscience.

  3. If crocodiles had human language, there’d be no lurking alone along the riverbank or floating loglike and dangerous on the water’s surface. Instead, they would be constantly communicating, maybe comparing notes on death rolls and indigestion. Instead of birthing fifty babies and indifferently letting them loose on the world, they’d be talking to them in exaggerated tones, cherishing their every sweet croak, and construing their flailing little gestures and sounds as meaningful. They would, in short, be human, not crocodilian.

  4. In The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins follows the trail of the human species back through time, highlighting where the path of our ancestors links up with the paths of other species’ ancestors.

  5. Other tools enjoyed by orangutans include cleaning implements. Lyn used to give an orangutan a bucket and a mop, and it would clean its cage to entertain itself. She also gave the ape a long stretch of rope, and it would spend hours tying and untying knots. Orangutans are not just good tool users; they are very good at deception. They have been known quietly to conceal metal in their mouths, and once their keepers have gone for the day, to use it to open their cage doors. (Usually you can tell if a chimpanzee is trying to conceal something—it just can’t hide its excitement.) One apocryphal orangutan story is about an ape that would hide metal in his mouth, every night let himself out of his cage, get a mop and a bucket, and then let himself back in. Each morning his keepers would find him cleaning. The joke, of course, is that they’d let him finish cleaning before they took the contraband metal away. There is a great deal more documentation for chimpanzee tool use in the wild and in experimental situations. It’s been suggested that the main difference underlying tool use in chimpanzees and orangutans is one of temperament.

  Chapter 5. You have something to talk about

  1. Animal tool use was debated in Darwin’s time. In The Descent of Man, he notes (p. 83) the claim that tool use is a uniquely human endeavor and provides many counterexamples: “It has often been said that no animal uses any tool; but the chimpanzee in a state of nature cracks a native fruit, somewhat like a walnut, with a stone…I have myself seen a young orang put a stick into a crevice, slip his hand to the other end, and use it in the proper manner as a lever. The tamed elephants in India are well known to break off branches of trees and use them to drive away the flies; and this same act has been observed in an elephant in a state of nature…Brehm states, on the authority of the well-known traveller Schimper, that in Abyssinia when the baboons belonging to one species (C. gelada) descend in troops from the mountains to plunder the fields, they sometimes encounter troops of another species (C. hamadryas), and then a fight ensues. The Geladas roll down great stones, which the Hamadryas try to avoid, and then both species, making a great uproar, rush furiously against each other. Brehm, when accompanying the Duke of Coburg-Gotha, aided in an attack with fire-arms on a troop of baboons in the pass of Mensa in Abyssinia. The baboons in return rolled so many stones down the mountain, some as large as a man’s head, that the attackers had to beat a hasty retreat; and the pass was actually closed for a time against the caravan. It deserves notice that these baboons thus acted in concert.”

  2. E. D. Jarvis et al., “Avian Brains and a New Understanding of Vertebrate Brain Evolution.”

  3. The “renaming” of the bird brain was an unusual event. Scientists generally get on with their work using the language already at their disposal. (See the writing of Richard Lewontin and Terrence Deacon for particular sensitivity to the effect of metaphors on science. Also, recall Philip Lieberman’s explanation of the effect of the brain-as-computer and other metaphors in chapter 4.) One implication is that we will now be able to draw a more direct comparison between birds and mammals. On the publication of “Avian Brains and a New Understanding of Vertebrate Brain Evolution,” one scientist suggested that the bird will become the new laboratory rat. This may be overenthusiastic. Rats, after all, are phylogenetically closer to humans.

  4. Many explanations for mirror self-recognition after the first Gallup experiments were couched in terms of the primate body or brain. One theory had it that self-awareness somehow evolved from handedness, arising as we swung, one hand after the other, through the trees. Another explanation said that self-recognition was associated with our unique frontal lobes. Of course, dolphins don’t have hands, and they have a very different brain structure.

  5. K. Wynn, “Addition and Subtraction by Human Infants.” Note that some researchers do not believe Wynn’s experiments show sensitivity to number but to mass/contour instead.

  6. E. M. Brannon, H. S. Terrace, “Representation of the Numerosities 1–9 by Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta).” Terrace is the scientist who trained Nim Chimpsky.

  7. S. Dehaene et al., “Core Knowledge of Geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group.”

  8. K. E. Jordan, E. M. Brannon, “The Multisensory Representation of Number in Infancy.”

  9. If we hope to judge fairly an animal’s ability to think, researchers must enter their world as much as possible. Payne exemplifies this more than most. Twenty years ago, she pursued a hunch and discovered that much elephant communication takes place over long distances, well below the level of human hearing. Until Payne’s finding, no one knew that we had been seeing and hearing only half of the elephant’s world. What will the mental world look like when we no longer insist on measuring it in terms of human intelligence? Payne believes the traditional ordering of nature into a pyramid with Homo sapiens at the top will change; “sapiens,” said Payne, “is a hilarious term.”

  10. It’s not that animals are mute thinkers. They are fully expressive for their purposes. However, our form of communication has a profoundly ramifying effect on our thought.

  11. S. Pinker, R. Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special About It?” 6.

  12. N. J. Mulcahy, J. Call, “Apes Save Tools for Future Use.”

  13. S. Pinker, R. Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special About It?” 5–7.

  14. Pinker and Jackendoff distinguish between numbers in this regard and those that can be subitized.

  15. A. L. Gilbert et al., “Whorf Hypothesis Is Supported in the Right Visual Field but Not the Left.”

  16. P. Gordon, “Numerical Cognition Without Words.”

  Chapter 6. You have words

  1. R. M. Seyfarth, D. L. Cheney, P. Marler, “Monkey Responses to Three Different Alarm Calls.”

  2. Not everyone ag
rees with the signature whistle interpretation. See B. McCowan, D. Reiss, “The Fallacy of ‘Signature Whistles’ in Bottlenose Dolphins.”

  3. V. M. Janik, L. S. Sayigh, R. S. Wells, “Signature Whistle Shape Conveys Identity Information to Bottlenose Dolphins.”

  4. Of course, for all three, the vocalizations occur in completely different social and biophysical contexts. Human speech is transmitted through the air. Dolphins make sound underwater, and elephants communicate across a wide pitch range (compared to ours) both through the atmosphere and the ground.

  5. The exception to this rule is onomatopoeia, where the sound of a word evokes the sound or action it describes—e.g., hiss, tinkle, buzz, hum. These words are rare, and the closeness of their sound-meaning connection is fairly subjective.

  6. S. Pinker, R. Jackendoff, “The Faculty of Language: What’s Special About It?” 12.

  Chapter 7. You have gestures

  1. Baboons have a rich repertoire of gestures in addition to the muzzle wipe. The adult males exchange complicated greetings, where they make particular facial expressions, assume certain postures, embrace each other, and briefly handle one another’s genitals—kind of like a handshake but with the most vulnerable part of the body.

  2. Wallis was introduced by Josep Call, a highly experienced researcher, and afterward, Call showed a video of chimpanzees in the wild, mentioning that he hadn’t noticed any muzzle-wipe behavior in the animals. On the spot, Wallis got him to replay some frames of his video. She pointed out at least five examples of a movement that looked like a muzzle wipe. Call was visibly startled to see the gesture, then he laughed and turned to the audience: he recounted yet another time that Wallis was told by a primatologist that he had never seen the gesture she was talking about. Then, too, Wallis got the primatologist to replay some of his own footage, and she pointed out what he had missed. Some make the case that we’ve been observing chimpanzees and other animals for so long now—fifty years—we are not going to find anything that would surprise us. And yet until Wallis showed her videos of the baboons’ muzzle wipe, it could have been said that there was no evidence for this gesture—despite the fact that it exists and is ubiquitous. Wallis was the only one to see it and take it seriously, and her experience shows how easy it is for experts to miss what is right before their eyes. Ideally, science would be based on observations of all reality, but it is not like this, and animal science is even less so. Instead, the picture is blotchy. Each researcher who announces findings about animal behavior has made choices along the way about what observations are possible, what they have time for, and what they have money for. For instance, if the available spot to observe a gesturing gorilla is four meters away, the researcher may not be able to note the animal’s facial expressions because the faces of gorillas are very dark and hard to see. With a lighter-faced animal, like a chimpanzee, four meters would be no problem. In some cases, this partial gathering of information won’t matter, but it’s possible the facial expressions accompanying the gestures would alter the conclusions. There are other practical considerations as well. Tomasello observed that it would be interesting to study throwing in chimpanzees, but it’s not something that any researcher is willing to do—if they reward throwing behavior, the chimpanzees will start throwing their feces at the researchers.

  3. D. A. Leavens, W. D. Hopkins, “The Whole-Hand Point.”

  4. Orangutans are quite cooperative, as are bonobos, which raises the possibility that we didn’t evolve to become cooperative from being noncooperative, but that chimpanzees evolved away from this trait.

  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 x2-5x+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 neonat
e 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.