Babel's Dawn

Crying With an Accent

Crying babies once required vocalization for calming down, but the modern world has found a quicker method. Better be careful not to burn the baby.

The most interesting and important contribution in Dean Falk‘s new book Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language is its discussion of pre-verbal vocalizations that go on between mother and infant during the first year. Thanks to her, I have a deeper appreciation of the complexity of vocalization. It is not just a matter of somehow increasing the human tendency to make noises.

Meanwhile, concerning another post, a visitor to the blog last week (“Uzza”) commented, “You seem to imply a progression, babbling --> words -->language, but since a language must exist as input for babbling, the patterned repetition of phonemes, that would be a circular argument.” I confess to having been startled by this comment as I had never before seen it put so starkly that babbling depends on the prior existence of language. I think Falk would be surprised as well since that argument, if successful, would send her back to the drawing boards. However, thanks to Falk I have a better sense of what’s wrong with Uzza’s bold position.

Where Shall I Put the Baby?

The women’s  movement has made serious contributions to the study of human evolution by considering issues that male scholars ignored. Anthropologist Dean Falk has explored mother and infant relations among primates and produced a book, Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language, that explores new ground. Theoretically, anybody could have studied its issues, but men don’t seem to have gotten around to it. Take lullabies, for example. We all know something of them, but women appear to have wondered about them. The footnotes on the topic all refer to women (Sandra Trehub, Anna Unyk, and Laurel Trainor).

Lullabies are used throughout the world to soothe infants and lull them to sleep. They are distinctive from other songs—so much so, in fact, that adults listening to songs in unfamiliar languages can distinguish the lullabies from the equally slow nonlullabies. [p. 36]

 So there we have another item to the very short list of things that are unique and universal to the human group. Why wasn’t that one pointed out by somebody 50 years ago? Why didn’t I wonder about it 40 years ago?

Meanwhile Back With the Group

The Group and the Individual are mutually dependent. Is there a way to talk about the whole as a unit, or must we choose between them whenever we talk about social change?

This blog’s long-time emphasis on the role of cooperation and community in human evolution got some extra attention this week. My alma mater,Washington University in St. Louis,  sponsored a conference on “Man the Hunted” which presented evidence that human evolution owes much more to the lineage’s role as prey than as predator. I thought about covering the event, but did not because its focus was too far from speech. However, I have also read a provocative essay in the latest issue of Group Analysis by a psychotherapist, Claire S. Bacha, on “Becoming Conscious of the Human Group” (abstract here). The paper is much too speculative to be received as the solution to any puzzles, but it is still important. I don’t believe I have ever read a more radical understanding of the nature of the “Human Group.”

A Tale Without Episodes

Radio transmitters provide a misleading metaphor for speech. They encourage the notion of a signal that must be encoded and then decoded rather than an active tool whose meaning comes from where it directs one's attention.

The pieces have fallen together in a position I did not anticipate when I began this blog. None the less, last week’s post has left me feeling that I now understand the basic outline of the story of speech origins. “Basic outline” means I don’t have dates, but I do know the outline of what evolved and even how it happened.

FOXP2 Gene Over 1.5 Million Years Old?

The Neanderthal genome includes the human version of the FOXP2 gene. In my most recent post on that finding (see: Narrowing Down the Suspects) I said:

The original dating of the appearance of the FOXP2 gene in its human form put it between 200 and 100 thousand years ago. Many arguments about the recency of language have claimed authority based on that date, and now find their cards are very weak. ... In November 2006 this blog reported on a paper presented at a conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa claiming that the original dating effort on FOXP2 had been grossly in error and the true date of the human version of the gene was 1.8 to 1.9 million years ago. ... I have emailed the paper’s main author, Karl Diller, to ask for an update on his work, but have not yet had a response.

Now I have gotten a response. In a nutshell, he is sticking by his earlier findings:

It is true that the [original] date for FOXP2 was widely cited before the
Neanderthal results, but I would say that hardly anyone believes anymore
that the FOXP2 mutations were recent. The accepted date for the common
ancestor with Neanderthals is ~660,000 years ago. We stand by the genomic
evidence and our date of 1.8 or 1.9 million years ago for the FOXP2
mutations.

More

Carl Zimmer reminds me of a letter Molecular Biology and Evolution (here) arguing that the Neanderthal gene is a contaminant from inbreeding with Homo sapiens. These things will be argued for some time, and as I said in my Narrowing Down the Suspects post:

... all dates on this gene are likely to be taken with several grains of salt without multiple, independent confirmations.

Episodes on the Highway of Life

Post #300. The counter from the folks at Typepad.com tells me this is my 300th post. In words it adds up to a full novel by Charles Dickens. My persistence on this beat has only been possible because serious papers relevant to speech origins keep appearing. I have not yet hit the wall and hope I can keep on running.

One of the persistent mysteries of speech origins is the growth of complex sentences. Chomsky and his disciples argue that language began with full syntax and complex sentences in place. Their point is that baby speech—one, two, or three words combined without syntax—does not provide the kind of running start that makes syntactical speech any easier than it would be if you just jumped straight to the syntax. Thus, there is no reason to assume that the human lineage ever went through a stage of speaking baby talk or pidgin (also known as protolanguage). The logic is strong, but the penalty for this argument is that it ignores the fact that speech in children does begin with simple sentences and it forces theorists to abandon the idea that language evolved as a form of communication between individuals. Instead it began as a tool for superior thinking. (See: Chomsky’s Theory of Language Origins)

This blog presses the view that words pilot attention and that speech is a tool for creating joint attention. That idea does nicely with basic utterances, especially childish sentences like biggie doggie, but it does not really explain how or why we got around Chomsky’s objection and began spouting sentences with a subject and a verb. So I was happy to see that the January issue of Experimental Brain Research has a paper by New Zealander Michael C. Corballis that argues “grammatical language evolved primarily to communicate episodes” [p. 557]. If right, the Chomskyan objection will finally have a strong retort.