Thank heavens for parents who post baby babbling videos on YouTube.
The basic fact of this blog is that now the whole human species uses language, but at one time none of our ancestors did. The basic question of this blog is; what happened to makes us a verbal species?
A basic fact of the world holds that although language is natural in adults it is absent in all newborns. So what happened in between?
The second question can be answered, at least generally: at a couple of months of age infants begin to master voluntary control of their vocal cords (something chimps never do) and shortly thereafter they beginning making sounds that have no meaning, but establish emotional bonds. Then they their sounds do become meaningful as single words direct attention. A bit later come word strings. Finally, at age three, children become communal in a new way, socializing with their peers, speaking full sentences, and conversing.
If speech requires a muscular control not found in the great apes, you would expect some interest in discovering how that came about. What triggers the onset? Are there children with a birth defect that interferes with the process? If so, what genes might be at play here?
The old saying that ontogeny follows phylogeny is not always true, but I remain astonished at how little interest in seeing whether there might be some clues about language origins within the development of language in children. Back in 2008 a paper (M.H. Goldstein & J.A. Schwade, Social Feedback to Infants' Babbling Facilitates Rapid Phonological Learning) stated that, "Infants' prelinguistic vocalizations are rarely considered relevant for communicative development." The statement appears to be one of bald fact, but I wonder why that is. In babbling we have a behavior that is peculiar to the species and leads directly into the first words. Of course there is the occasional study, such as one by some Spanish investigators that investigated the babbling of infants in Catalonia and found support for their hypothesis "that babbling children can successfully use a set of prosodic patterns to signal intentional speech." So why not at least examine the possibility that ontogeny is following phylogeny and that in the history of the human lineage there was a period in which our ancestors babbled without using words?
Of course whenever I want to make this particular rant, I must pause to acknowledge Dean Falk's useful book, Finding Our Tongues. She presented the case for the importance of all pre-linguistic sounds made by both infant and care-giver. It would make sense to me if the field said, well, the critical work has been done by Falk so let's cite her and go on. But checking Google scholar on Feb. 16, 2015 finds she has been cited on 83 times while the theoretical balderdash in Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) claims 3,535 citations. So Falk presents direct evidence of something absolutely required for speech, yet the finding has not made its way into discussions of language origins. Falk also argues that mother-infant bonding in humans depends on sharing each other's emotional world. And she goes on to show that the pre-linguistic sounds are culturally shaped, not just the biological reflex of an infant.
Part of this inattention is just plain male blindness. Men seem to leave it to the womenfolk to study emotional relations. It is shocking to see that emotional communication has little standing in theorizing about language. I constantly see references to language as a system of stating propositions that are either true or false. Take that as your starting point and the emotional side of language disappears from consideration.
In my review of Thomas Scott-Philipps Speaking Our Minds, I noted that he posited as an axiom that there are only two types of communication possible: coded communications in which some natural behavior evokes a response, and ostensive-inferential communications in which the speaker has something to say and the listener realizes the speaker means to communicate something. This axiom removes the possibility of a culturally communicated emotional state and instantly dismisses Dean Falk's careful studies.
Such blindness leaves us wondering where Shakespeare and his artistic tribe fit into language, and also all those advertisements designed to establish some kind of emotional rapport between brand and customer. It also rules out political, religious and narrative expression. Still standing are technical writings, academic scholarship, and mathematical treatises, which are all fine things, yetnot everything. Any persuasive account of language origins is going to have to include, from the starting gate, the possibility of emotional expression. That means we need a theory of language that includes what babies say to their parents.
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