Babel's Dawn

A Note on Mirror Neurons

This blog has not made much of a fuss about "mirror neurons," the name given to neurons that fire both when an individual does something and when the individual observes another individual do something. For example, a neuron might fire when a monkey reaches for a carrot and when the monkey sees another reach for a carrot. I have stayed away from discussing these nerves because it seemed to me the research hasn't gotton to the next stage: explaining how human mirror neurons differ functionally from monkey mirrors. Nevertheless, technical speculations about language evolution sometimes mention mirror neurons as critical to understanding actions and imitating them. So I was startled to see that in the latest issue of The Journal of Neuroscience (Oct. 29, 2008) there is a paper denying that humans even have mirror neurons. (Paper summary here.) So I suppose more time will have to pass before this blog reports on them.

On Being Human

This is a group, not a herd, not a pride, not even a troop, but a group-aware bunch of us.

Over the decades I have been in many conversations with well-educated people on the issue of just what, if anything, distinguishes humans from animals. It seems obvious from the success of the species that there must be something unique, But it has been very hard to state just what it is about humans that enables us to speak, adapt to so many environments, figure out so many of nature’s secrets, travel to so many distance spots, trade for such variable things, worship such a range of gods, create so many works of art, erect such remarkable habitations, and use so many tools.

Chimpanzees use tools too and have a sense of self as well. All primates are social. Chickens can show rational behavior. Those retorts and a hundred others have been recited in bull sessions since my college years. The talks went around and around, landing nowhere. So it is a relief and a surprise to find that working on this blog has produced something new, an answer.

Ape Cries Are Complex

An orangutan gives the thumbs up sign. (Story here.)

In his book Origins of Human Communication Michael Tomasello argues that language began as gesture alone and at some point vocalization joined in and eventually took over as the main linguistic “modality” although gesture has remained and important. (This blog has made four posts about Tomasello’s book [#1, #2, #3, #4]). The evidence offered for this scenario is threefold:

First, many ape gestures are individually learned and flexibly used, including in combination, whereas this is not true of ape vocalizations.

Second, many ape gestures are used with attention to the attentional state of the recipient, which is mostly not even relevant in ape vocal communication. …

It is also important evolutionarily that gestural communication is more sophisticated in apes (humans’ closest relatives) than in monkeys and other mammals, whereas something close to the opposite is true of vocal communication. [p. 35]

A paper in the September 11 issue of Cerebral Cortex, however, suggests that Tomasello may have been underestimating the nature of ape vocalizations.

The One Model that Works

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is a firm defender of generative grammar, but reading his defense has made me even more confident of the notion that language is perception by other means.

A book review in the current issue of Biolinguistics (registration free but required) has persuaded me that only the speech-as-group-perception model (favored by this blog) can account for the evolution of speech. (See: What I’ve Learned About Language) That’s not to say the idea that “language is perception by other means” is the only view around, far from it. It is just that none of the many rival definitions of language proposed to account for its evolution have clear rebuttals to the objections proposed by orthodox generative-grammarians, and neither have the orthodox any way of accounting for the origins of their subject.

I have come to (or perhaps just been strengthened in) that opinion after reading Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s review of Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s book, Evolution in Four Dimensions (reviewed on this blog some time ago; see Selection Without Genes). The review (available here) leaves me with two certainties:

• Generative grammarians are looking but still have no idea how to account for the natural origins of language as they describe it.

• The forceful objections generative grammarians can raise to other accounts of language do not hold for the perception theory. Indeed, they reinforce it.

The Logic of Language Evolution

Cooperation is the key to team sports, as when one baseball player makes an out at second base and throws the ball to first base for a second out. The ape world has no equivalent to the Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance relationship.

Human language is “cooperative communication.” It emerged from ape gestures that became collaborative pointing and pantomiming. Later cooperative communication switched modalities to become vocalized. That thesis is the heart of the evolutionary process presented in Michael Tomasello’s new book, Origins of Modern Communication. His account may be the most logical and detailed that I have seen.

The Emergence of Grammar

A monkey begs from a tourist in Bali. Was asking for help the beginning of language?

The syntax that holds sentences together relies heavily on the joint attention and the common ground shared by speaker and listener, says Michael Tomasello in his new book, The Origins of Human Communications. It is this shared understanding that allows sentences to be intelligible despite the ambiguity of their words and structure. This common ground also explains how children are able to learn to speak grammatically despite the fact that they hear only a small number of examples, and those are often carelessly structured and pronounced. The cognitive and emotional “infrastructure” supporting human communications—not some computational language generator—accounts for our ability to learn, use, and understand strings of words.

Edward S. Klima (1931-2008)

I just noticed an obituary (here) for Edward Klima. One of the things this blog simply takes for granted is that sign languages are real languages. Klima, along with his wife Ursula Bellugi, are the people most responsible for making that assumption easy.