Babel's Dawn

Is Speech as Old as Language?

 

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Gestures
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Stephen Colbert not only talks about gestures, he makes them throughout his talk. My favorite is the gesture accompanying the reference to a foaming mug of pinot grigiot.

One of the steady disputes on this blog concerns the role of gesture (hand signs) in language origins, so I always welcome new evidence on this issue. PlosOne has recently published a paper titled, "Chimpanzee Signaling Points to a Multimodal Origin of Human Language," by Jared Taglialatela, Jamie Russell, Jennifer Schaeffer, and William Hopkins. Alert regulars at Babel's Dawn may recall previous discussions of work by Taglialatela. He is investigating speech origins by studying chimpanzee brains and determining how language-ready the ape brain was. (See: Broca's Area in Chimpanzees?; Ape Cries are Complex; How Different are Ape Brains from Ours?) This latest paper argues that from the beginning human language has combined vocalization and gesture. That's in keeping my arguments on this blog, but how much confidence can we have in this latest work?

Three Free Papers Worth Reading

Work on my book is coming to a climax and I am also taking a little family break to enjoy Columbus Day -- so I don't have time to do a full posting. But the latest issue of Biolinguistics is available online and has several papers that normally would inspire a post of its own. Check out:

Emergent vs Localized Processes

Fist to fist, this picture shows how things emerge from the body rather than by being stored in the body.

Elliott D. Ross’s paper on the brain (abstract here) discussed in my last post has plenty more food for thought. In particular, Ross discusses the subject of brain efficiency which, I confess, was a new idea for me but one that immediately shows its utility in suggesting topics for human and speech evolution.

The Talking Brain

Homo ergaster two million years ago was at the back end of the brain's growth period. What was that brain growth all about and how did it influence speech?

Perhaps the best known fact about human evolution is that recently our brain has gotten much bigger. Starting about 2.5 million years ago, and following a reasonably straight slope, it continued growing until about 200,000 years ago. Australopithecus brains were about the size of modern chimpanzee brains. With the appearance of the Homo lineage the brain started growing and kept it up until the arrival of ours truly, Homo sapiens. Surely this development must have included something about language, but what?

The June 1 issue of The Neuroscientist gives much food for thought in a paper by Elliot D. Ross titled, “Cerebral Localization of Functions and the Neurology of Language” (abstract here). The paper reviews how the brain works and examines the production of language in detail as an extended example. Most importantly, it shows how fully integrated language production is in the brain. It makes the idea that language might be some sort of big-bang hopeful monster as almost childishly naïve, and it also supports the argument that this level of integration puts an older date to the origins of speech.