Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  Chomsky’s work with linguistics waned as he became more outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. His political activism (he calls himself a libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist) has made him one of the most controversial intellectual figures in the USA. His linguistic theories, too, have divided opinion.

  How We Learned to Talk

  Dr Michael Tomasello is the Florida-born co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He divides his time between their spanking new building near the university and Leipzig zoo’s splendid open-plan primate enclosure.

  Tomasello’s studies with the great apes and how they communicate and interact socially with each other have expanded in recent years to the observation of children and how they acquire language. His findings amongst the apes and children have led him to reject the idea of a language gene or a human instinct for language. He is at odds with the likes of Noam Chomsky, arguing that human language evolved out of a need for social interaction. ‘Human communication is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise,’ he says, and the first signs of this communicating which you see in young children are the two basic types of human gesture: pointing and pantomiming. Pointing is arguably the most fundamental type of human gesture. Tomasello describes this scenario: You’re standing in a line. The line has moved forward, and a man hasn’t noticed because he’s talking to the person behind him. Someone from still further back points him to the newly opened space. There’s a universal understanding of what is meant by the pointing: ‘Hey, there’s a space. Move up!’ Tomasello illustrates the other type of basic human gesture, pantomiming, or signing for the imagination, as he calls it, with another scenario: You’re at the front of the lecture hall, ready to give a lecture. A friend in the audience fiddles with her shirt button, frowning at you. You look down at your own, and, sure enough, it’s unbuttoned. Tomasello argues that these simple gestures are actually a form of complex communication; our pointing and miming to each other is a kind of cooperation that is unique to humans.

  Experts call this shared intentionality or recursive mind reading. In simpler terms, it’s a sort of unspoken shared goal to collaborate, an awareness of what the other person is thinking. For instance: We’re sitting beside each other; I’m looking at a book on the table; you’re looking at the book; I know that you’re looking at it and I know that you know that I know. Apes apparently don’t think like this. The theory is that conventional languages – first signed and then vocal – developed from these natural gestures of early man. Language evolved because humans needed it to survive and prosper; they needed to be able to do more than gesture – to organize themselves, to pass on knowledge, to gossip, to plan. Tomasello doesn’t reject the idea that the ability to speak, to produce sounds that apes can’t articulate, may be genetic, but he argues that the reason we evolved speech was to allow us to communicate more effectively – so the communication, the awareness of shared cooperation, was already there.

  Man’s first language, according to Tomasello, would have been a signed one. It’s the natural progression from pointing and pantomiming. He explains it with another scenario. Imagine two groups of children who have never communicated with anyone. Each group is isolated on its own desert island, one group with their mouths covered with duct tape, so unable to talk, the other with their hands tied behind their backs, so unable to gesture. We know what would happen with the first group, because it’s what happens to deaf children who are brought up in families where no one knows sign language. When these children come together they develop a sophisticated sign language with grammar and syntax. We don’t know what would happen with the children whose hands have been tied, but Tomasello thinks it unlikely that they would have been able to invent their own structured vocalization. They might have emotional responses – screams, howls, etc. – and be able to mimic sounds, like apes, but their sounds would not be language.

  Looking at how children develop allows you to witness how, through the awareness of shared cooperation, they quickly move from gesturing to talking. In evolutionary terms could they be at the stage that early man was? And if so, what propelled the pointing early man to make that leap forward to fully fledged language? Well, it would have been an immense evolutionary advantage for a group to develop the speech skills necessary for the creating and passing on of knowledge. Whether it was language itself or other cognitive functions that propelled homo sapiens forward is one of those chicken-and-egg questions that keep recurring

  FoxP2 – the Language Gene

  The Holy Grail for those who argue that humans are born with an innate language ability must surely be scientific proof that we are genetically wired to communicate in a way that no other animal is. Scientists now believe they’ve found the answer – well, part of the answer – with the discovery of a so-called language gene. In London in the 1990s, a family known simply as the ‘KE family’ came to the attention of researchers at Oxford University. Over half of the thirty-seven family members, extending over three generations, were born with severe speech and language difficulties. They struggled to speak grammatically correct sentences and they couldn’t move their tongues or jaws properly when they tried to speak. When the researchers examined the unaffected members of the family as well as the affected ones, they identified a single gene as the apparent cause of the speech problems. The FoxP2 gene, which stands for Forkhead Box Protein P2, is a transcriptional regulator – in layman’s terms, it switches genes on and off during the creation of a body’s tissue. All the members of the KE family who had speech problems had a damaged FoxP2 gene. As further evidence, the researchers identified a boy, known as CS, who was unrelated to the KE family but had similar speech and language problems. He too had the faulty FoxP2 gene.

  FoxP2 gene (Forkhead Box Protein P2) ‘the Language Gene’

  Human FoxP2 appears to affect tissue growth in the brain, giving us the ability to shape very precisely the sounds we make with our mouths. Two copies of the gene are needed, one from the mother, one from the father. A fault seems to have developed at the embryo stage of those members of the KE family with speech problems. They had only one copy of the gene, and this fault distorted the normal genetic sequencing required during the early development of the regions in their brains associated with speech and language.

  So does this mean humans are the only species with the FoxP2 gene? Have Chomsky et al. been proven correct? Well, no. The gene has been identified in all mammals. In fact, the only difference between human FoxP2 and chimp FoxP2 is two amino acids; with mice, it’s just three. FoxP2 affects birdsong: zebra finches are just seven amino acids away from humans. If you take away the gene, the birds can’t learn their songs. It’s even thought to help bats with echo location. What researchers now speculate is that those two amino acid differences between humans and chimps led to the evolution of language in humans whilst chimps remained language-less. FoxP2 was not necessarily the gene which gave humans language, but it certainly influenced humans’ ability to speak, enabling anatomical changes such as the lowering of the larynx and development of fine motor movements of the mouth and the lips.

  In the labs at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, scientists have been working with mice to calculate at what point in evolution the specifically human version of the FoxP2 gene developed. Dr Wolfgang Enard believes that human FoxP2 developed 120,000 to 200,000 years ago, at roughly the same time as the emergence of homo sapiens. A variation in the gene of just two amino acids could have spread through the generations to the entire human population. The genetic sequencing of Neanderthal Man has now been completed and, rather thrillingly, he too had the same FoxP2 gene as homo sapiens. This doesn’t mean that 30,000 years ago (before they died out) Neanderthals were enjoying their version of a Homeric epic round the fire, but, according to Dr Enard, it does suggest that they may have communicated with a more elaborate system of grunting than first thought. The discovery of a hyoid bone in a
recently uncovered Neanderthal skeleton, crucial in the vocal apparatus of homo sapiens, means there’s no reason why they should not have been competent linguists. But we’ll never know for sure. What is certain is that the mapping of the human genome is in its infancy. Dr Enard reckons there could be anywhere between 10 and 1,000 language genes. ‘This is hopefully the first of many language genes to be discovered,’ says Enard. ‘It is compatible with the hypothesis that language could have been the decisive event that made human culture possible.’

  ‘All Gone Sticky’

  Steven Pinker is one of the foremost linguistic experts in the world, author of many bestselling books on language and a professor at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology. He is, without doubt, the most high-profile, and some would say most controversial, disciple of Noam Chomsky.

  Pinker has built on some of Chomsky’s theories to create his own view on linguistics. His work is more technical and less abstract than Chomsky’s; rather than looking at the deep structures within the mind, he is fascinated by the surface manifestations – how a child learns to speak, why complex grammars are useful and what part natural selection plays.

  ‘Language at a bare minimum needs words,’ explains Pinker, ‘and the words have to be the same words that everyone else is using. If you had your own private language, if it were even possible for language to just spring out of the brain, it would be completely useless, no one would understand a word you’re saying. So the child has to be attuned to the words that are floating around in the linguistic environment and to the sound patterns and to the rules of grammar that order them in meaningful sequences.’

  We usually think of that input as coming from parents, although children are more attuned to their peers than to their parents, as any immigrant will attest. If you move from Britain to America and your children grow up with American children, they will end up with an American accent. So there is an environmental component, but, says Pinker, ‘there also has to be some kind of talent in the child’s brain that allows them not just to parrot back the exact words and sentences they’ve heard. It’d be very upsetting if that’s what your child did. We expect children right from the beginning to compose their own sentences, to abstract the rules of combination, the rules of grammar, so that they can talk about new events and new thoughts and take the familiar words but rearrange them in new sequences.’

  So can a young child actually come up with a sentence that’s entirely original, perhaps never before uttered in the history of their language?

  Steven Pinker, one of the world’s leading linguists

  Pinker says yes, right from the beginning, from the time when children first start putting two words together, some of those combinations are clearly from their own creativity. An example: a child whose hands are covered with jam and wants his mother to wash them. The mother washes off the jam, and the child says, ‘All gone sticky.’ Pinker explains: ‘Now that doesn’t correspond to any adult English sentence, but the child had those three words and had the formula that put them in that order to express the idea of the passing of a state. So that’s already involving, almost without it being a tense, a sense of past: “gone”. And so, even without apparently using a sophisticated series of words, there was a sense of saying something once happened, and it’s now over. There’s the concept of a change of state, and moreover there’s the ability to put words together in brand new sequences that had not been previously memorized but that express a coherent thought.’

  He gives another example: ‘more outside’, i.e. a child wants to be taken out.

  ‘That’s quite a cognitive feat to have the concept of addition or repetition which had been associated with the word more, and to put those two words together in a way that doesn’t exactly map on to adult syntax but that an adult can certainly comprehend. And that combination, that little baby micro-sentence, came from the linguistic creativity of the child’s mind. The mother or father would never have said “more outside”, but the mother would often have said “more”, and the baby associates “more” with more food, but to transfer that to something as abstract as the outside is an act of language no matter how primitive it seems.’

  Pinker elaborates by saying that, right at the beginning of language learning, when the first pairs of words are being put together, we use words in conjugational and inflectional forms, like when a child says, ‘He sticked it on the paper,’ or ‘He teared the paper,’ or ‘We holded the baby rabbits.’ We know these forms haven’t simply been parroted from adults, because adults don’t put regular past-tense endings on irregular verbs like stick and tear, but the child has clearly abstracted a cognitive equivalent of a rule of grammar: to form the past tense, add ‘ed’. So that allows the child to come out with forms that are new for the child and haven’t simply been memorized from what they hear from their parents or peers.

  The essence of language is to combine things according to rules. So you stick a subject and a predicate together and you get a sentence. This combination can be done in sequence. So you can talk not just about the rat but also the rat who ate the cheese. And you can talk not just about the cat but the cat who killed the rat who ate the cheese. But you can also stick one phrase inside another. Take this example: The boy that I saw the day that I was having my teeth done left. And then when you put a noun phrase inside a noun phrase you get the boy’s mother or, adding still more, the boy’s mother’s friend, which is a noun inside a noun inside a noun. So you get: The boy’s mother’s friend that I saw the day that I was having my teeth done left. ‘It’s an extremely powerful information-processing technique,’ says Pinker ‘because it means with a very small tool kit you can do an infinite number of things. In the case of language, what it gives us is the ability to talk about an unlimited number of ideas using the fixed vocabulary that we acquired at our mother’s knee.

  The Wug Test

  One of the early experiments that aimed to see just how children acquired these grammatical rules without seemingly trying was conducted in 1958 by one of Chomsky’s contemporaries, Jean Berko Gleason, now Professor Emerita at Boston University.

  A sprightly woman in her seventies, Jean still has a passionate curiosity about how language works, though with fewer answers and less certainty than when she started out more than fifty years ago. She has brought her original Wug cards with her – simple, hand-drawn pictures of an imaginary animal. Jean tells a group of children aged between two and four that this animal is called a wug; then she shows a picture of two wugs to see if they can make the connection and make wug into the plural wugs. Some do, some don’t. She tries other animals and then action pictures like a man balancing a kettle on his head to see how the children cope with verb tenses of an imaginary verb. The interchange with one of the children, Julian, is revealing:

  Jean: Okay, okay, now this is another creature, this one’s called a tass. That’s a tass.

  Julian: Yeah, okay.

  Jean: Now, there’s another one, there are two of them. So there are two.

  Julian: Tass.

  Jean: Tass.

  Julian: Tass.

  Jean: Two tass. Okay. Okay, very, very good. Okay. This is a man who knows how to spo. He is spoing. He did the same thing yesterday. Yesterday, what did he do, yesterday he… ?

  Julian: Um, balanced the, a kettle on his head.

  Jean: Well, yes he did, but he was spoing yesterday so yesterday he … ?

  Julian: Spoed.

  Jean: Perfect. Very, very good. He spoed. Okay. Now, this is a man who knows how to gling. He is glinging. He did the same thing yesterday, what did he do yesterday, yesterday he … ?

  Julian: Glinged

  Jean: Glinged, very, very good. Very good.

  The Wug Test

  Jean carries on for half an hour, and it’s clear there’s quite some variation in the children’s ability to form these grammatical structures. She explains that much depends on the individual child’s development; a few months makes a huge difference i
n a two-, three- or four-year-old.

  So what is Jean’s take on the whole nature/nurture debate? She believes that what makes us human beings is our capacity to build our brains. ‘Young kids’ brains are not formed when they’re born, there’s not some organ in them that is grasping language. They have areas that will ultimately be specialized for language but it’s through experience, it’s through hearing language, it’s through interacting with people who use language with you that you build the language in your brain, because you have that capacity.’

  Feral Children

  If you were to take a healthy newborn baby, nothing wrong with it, physiologically able to hear and speak, and then you were to shut the baby away from all human contact, what language would the baby speak when it uttered its first word? Would it be that putative language that Adam and Eve spoke before the Tower of Babel and the unleashing of thousands of languages? Or gibberish? Or would it speak at all?

  At various times in history, experiments have been carried out to isolate children from society, with the express desire of finding this original language. The idea horrifies us now, but in times of despotism and a somewhat laissez-faire approach to human rights, such experiments were possible. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about Psammetichus I, ruler of Egypt in the seventh century BC. The pharaoh wanted to settle the question of who were the oldest people of mankind, so he gave two newborn babies to a shepherd and ordered him never to speak to them. The hope was that the first word either of the children uttered would be in the root language of all people. One day the children held their hands out to the shepherd and cried ‘bekos’. The pharaoh was informed that bekos was what the people of Phrygia – modern-day Turkey – called bread and so he decided that the Phrygians were the oldest people in the world.