Skinner

Skinner on Language Acquisition

Another leading theorist pertaining to language acquisition is B. F.
Skinner, a man who opposes Chomsky's linguistic theory with his
behaviorist approach. Skinner believes that beahvior explains the speaker's
verbal activity as an effect of environmental contingencies: audience
response. Via operant conditioning, behaviorists such as Skinner have
shown that techniques of positive reinforcement shape the repertoires of
individual behaviors; reinforcement of appropriate grammar and language
would therefore lead to a child's acquisition of language and grammar.
Chomsky devalued Skinner's proposal that "It is hardly possible to argue
that science has advanced only for repudiating hypotheses concerning
'internal states.' " Skinner retaliated by proclaiming that scientists must
research this internal states of they prove to be "the only useful guide to
further research." For many years, Chomsky and other notable professors
questioned the validity of Skinner's thoughts but he declined from refuting
their criticism; thus, many proclaimed Skinner to be about 35 years behind
his time and labeled him as one of the "psychologist nuts."

Skinner's Theory of Language Development
By Walter Johnson, eHow Contributor , last updated November 09, 2011
Skinner's Theory of Language Development
B.F. Skinner's theory of language development is no different from his
general theory of behaviorism. It is a simple theory based, like all of
Skinner's work, around a structure of rewards and punishments, each
reinforcing certain types of behavior as good or bad. People begin to
repeat actions that lead to pleasure and avoid actions that lead to pain. This
is called "conditioning," which is the same thing as creating a habit.
Behaviorism
Skinner's theory of behaviorism is central to his view of language. Human
beings define right and wrong relative to their conditioned experienced of
pleasure and pain, respectively. A certain action, if it receives a painful
response, will be avoided, while those with a pleasurable response, or a
reward, will be considered good. Human behavior is totally conditioned by
this pleasure/pain nexus. Behaviour, then, is the creation of habitsa habit
is developed with an action, done repeatedly, that receives a reward of
some kind. Language is no different.
Features
Children begin to speak nonsense words, or babble. None of these are
provided with any reward. As soon as the child begins to mimic the
language of his parents, the interest of the parent is piqued. The result is
that children, when they speak a recognizable word, are rewarded by their
parents. As a result, those words and phrases are remembered and the
nonsense words (that get no attention) are forgotten.
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Benefits
Skinner's theory is extremely simple and easy to apply. This is its main
benefit. People do respond to rewards, especially over time, and become
habituated to those actions that have lead to praise. This simplicity makes
performing research and understanding behavior very easy. Humans are
merely animals responding to external stimuli only.
Problems
Skinner has had his share of critics. Problems with Skinner's theory of
language development are substantial. Skinner does not take into
consideration the complexity of grammar, which cannot be explained
through mere imitation of parents. Even more, children often have a hard
time imitating the complex sounds of their parents in the first place.
Writers like N. Chomsky hold that biological necessity is a better
explanation for language development. Chomsky's view, to put it simply,
is that human beings need language to cooperate and therefore survive.
Therefore, the human mind is already wired to receive language.

Effects
Skinner's theory reduces human beings to mere machines, or at best,
bundles of nerve endings responding to external rewards and punishments.
Most of the criticism of Skinner, and Chomsky included, have considered
his approach exceptionally simplistic and unable to explain the complex
reasons and ideas of humans.
Theories of Language Development
The Learning Perspective
The Learning perspective argues that children imitate what they see and
hear, and that children learn from punishment and
reinforcement.(Shaffer,Wood,& Willoughby,2002).
The main theorist associated with the learning perspective is B.F. Skinner.
Skinner argued that adults shape the speech of children by reinforcing the
babbling of infants that sound most like words. (Skinner,1957,as cited in
Shaffer,et.al,2002).
The Nativist Perspective
The nativist perspective argues that humans are biologically programmed
to gain knowledge. The main theorist associated with this perspective is
Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky proposed that all humans have a language acquisition device
(LAD). The LAD contains knowledge of grammatical rules common to all
languages (Shaffer, et.al, 2002).The LAD also allows children to
understand the rules of whatever language they are listening to. Chomsky
also developed the concepts of transformational grammar, surface
structure, and deep structure.
Transformational grammar is grammar that transforms a sentence. Surface
structures are words that are actually written. Deep structure is the
underlying message or meaning of a sentence. (Matlin, 2005).
Interactionist Theory
Interactionists argue that language development is both biological and
social. Interactionists argue that language learning is influenced by the
desire of children to communicate with others.
The Interactionists argue that "children are born with a powerful brain that
matures slowly and predisposes them to acquire new understandings that
they are motivated to share with others" (Bates, 1993; Tomasello, 1995, as
cited in shaffer, et al., 2002, p.362).
The main theorist associated with interactionist theory is Lev Vygotsky.
Interactionists focus on Vygotsky's model of collaborative learning
(Shaffer, et al., 2002). Collaborative learning is the idea that conversations
with older people can help children both cognitively and linguistically
(Shaffer, et.al, 2002).

There is perhaps nothing more remarkable than the emergence of language
in children. Have you ever marvelled at how a child can go from saying
just a few words to suddenly producing full sentences in just a short matter
of time? Researchers have found that language development begins before
a child is even born, as a fetus is able to identify the speech and sound
patterns of the mother's voice. By the age of four months, infants are able
to discriminate sounds and even read lips.
Researchers have actually found that infants are able to distinguish
between speech sounds from all languages, not just the native language
spoken in their homes. However, this ability disappears around the age of
10 months and children begin to only recognize the speech sounds of their
native language. By the time a child reaches age three, he or she will have
a vocabulary of approximately 3,000 words.
Theories of Language Development
So how exactly does language development happen? Researchers have
proposed several different theories to explain how and why language
development occurs. For example, the behaviorist theory of B.F. Skinner
suggests that the emergence of language is the result of imitation and
reinforcement. The nativist theory of Noam Chomsky suggests that
language in an inherent human quality and that children are born with a
language acquisition device that allows them to produce language once
they have learned the necessary vocabulary.
How Parents Facilitate Language Development
Researchers have found that in all languages, parents utilize a style of
speech with infants known as infant-directed speech, or motherese (aka
"baby talk"). If you've ever heard someone speak to a baby, you'll
probably immediately recognize this style of speech. It is characterized by
a higher-pitched intonation, shortened or simplified vocabulary, shortened
sentences and exaggerated vocalizations or expressions. Instead of saying
"Let's go home," a parent might instead say "Go bye-bye."
Infant-directed speech has been shown to be more effective in getting an
infant's attention as well as aiding in language development. Researchers
believe that the use of motherese helps babies learn words faster and
easier. As children continue to grow, parents naturally adapt their speaking
patterns to suit their child's growing linguistic skills.
"The principles and rules of grammar are the means by which the forms of
language are made to correspond with the universal froms of
thought....The structures of every sentence is a lesson in logic." John
Stuart Mill

BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE
"[H]uman knowledge is organized de facto by linguistic competence
through language performance, and our exploration of reality is always
mediated by language". Most higher vertebrates possess ?intuitive
knowledge? which occurs as the result of slow evolution of species.
However, the ability to create knowledge through language is unique to
humans. According to Benjamin Whorf, "language?. is not merely a
reproducing instrument from voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of
ideas?. We dissect nature along lines laid down by language" (Joseph
249). In addition, the development and acquisition of language seems to be
related to "complex sequential processing, and the ability to form concepts
and to classify a single stimulus in a multiple manner" (Joseph 178).
Antione Danchin suggests that the knowledge we create through language
allows us distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world to produce
models of reality, which become more and more adequate due to the "self-
referent loop" which enables us to understand ourselves as objects under
study. This "path from subject to object," which is common to all humans,
Danchin claims, suggests the existence of a universal feature of language

Biological foundation of language may contribute significantly to such
universality. The issue here is not whether language is innate, for, clearly,
language must be learned. Nor is the issue whether the aptitude for
learning a language is inborn: it takes a human being, with a functional
brain to learn a tongue. The question to explore is whether there is
biological foundation at the root of organization and internal structure of
language.

The scholars considering spoken language acquisition have divided over
internal and external causation dichotomy. Two prototypical models of
language acquisition are "selectivist" and "constructivist" models,
respectively. The selectivist model, which depends on internal causation
argument, can be associated with Noam Chomsky. The selectivist model
assumes that "language template is pre-organized in the neuronal structure
of the brain, so that the fact of being an integral part of a given
environment selects the borders of each individual neuronal structure,
without affecting its fine organization, which pre-exists" (Danchin 30).
The constructivist model, which assumes external causation of language
acquisition, follows lines drawn by behaviorists such as Piaget and
Skinner. This model assumes that "language is built up constantly from a
continuous interaction with a well-structured environment"
NOAM CHOMSKY'S VIEW ON LANGUAGE
Noam Chomsky basic argument is that there exists an innate language
acquisition device, a neural program that prepares them to learn language
(Kandel 638). Chomsky assumes the existence of a genetically determined
system of rules, which he refers to as universal grammar, underlying all
tongues. According to Chomsky, a language template is set up by the
special "language organ" of the brain. Chomsky does not deny that the
importance of environmental factors in language acquisition. His claim is
that there exist strict biological invariants governing the function of
language. In explanation of his theory on the ontogenesis of spoken
language, Chomsky holds there pre-exists in humans, a language structure
that is
One of the faculties of the mind, common to the species,? a faculty of
language that serves the two basic functions of rationalist theory: it
provides a sensory system for the preliminary analysis of linguistic data,
and a schematism that determines, quite narrowly, a certain class of
grammars. Each grammar is a theory of a particular language, specifying
oral and semantic properties of an infinite array of sentences. These
sentences, each with its particular structure, constitute the language
generated by the grammar. The languages so generated are those that can
be "learned" in the normal way?. This knowledge can then be used to
understand what is heard and to produce discourse as an expression of
thought within the constraints of the internalized principles, in a manner
appropriate to situations as these are conceived by other mental faculties,
free of stimulus control

B.F. SKINNER'S VIEW ON LANGUAGE
Behaviorists view the process of language acquisition as a building
process that results from interaction with the environment. In outlining his
assertion that humans acquire spoken language as a result of behavioural
conditioning. B.F. Skinner writes:
A child acquires verbal behavior when relatively unpattterned
vocalizations, selectively reinforced, gradually assume forms which
produce appropriate consequences in a given verbal community. In
formulating this process we do not feed to mention stimuli occurring prior
to the behavior to be reinforced. It is difficult, if not impossible, to
discover stimuli which evoke specific vocal responses in the young child.
There is no stimulus which makes a child say b or a or e, as one may make
him salivate by placing a lemon drop in his mouth or make his pupils
contract by shining a light into his eyes. The raw responses from which
verbal behavior is constructed are not "elicited." In order to reinforce a
given response we simply wait until it occurs.

Skinner views the child as the "passive subject of operant conditioning in
whom randomly occurring behavior is selectively reinforced"

Skinner's seminal work, Verbal Behaviour (1957), begins with a chapter
called, "A functional analysis of verbal behaviour". However, you should
be aware that his theory is very far from the functional, or sociocultural,
approach to language, which is followed in this subject. You will also
become aware that the antecedents of the sociocultural approach to
language which underpin this subject, preceded the work of B. F. Skinner
by several decades. Nevertheless, this section begins with an introduction
to B. F. Skinner's theory of language as 'verbal behaviour' (1957). This is
partly because his learning theory was transposed into language teaching
methodologies prior to that transposition of the work of linguistic
anthropologists and linguists to language pedagogies; and partly because
Skinner's theory has had such definite, and enduring, influences on
language teaching. The residual echoes of his theory can be heard every
time one of us mentions 'positive reinforcement' (or 'negative
reinforcement', for that matter) and his theory is operational every time
one of us includes a teaching practice which begins with drills and
grammar study decontextualised from meaning. Skinner rejected the very
idea of 'meaning'. Skinner's view of 'meaning' can be seen in his comment
which follows:

As Jespersen [a significant linguist and grammarian whose major work,
Language, was published in 1922] said many years ago, "The only
unimpeachable definition of a word is that it is a human habit."
Unfortunately, he felt it necessary to add, "an habitual act on the part of
one human individual which has, or may have, the effect of evoking some
idea in the mind of another individual." Similarly, Betrand Russell asserts
that "just as jumping is one class of movement...so the word 'dog' is
[another] class," but he adds that words differ from other classes of bodily
movements because they have "meaning". In both cases something has
been added to an objective description (Skinner 1957: 13).
Chomsky VS Skinner
There are two basic theories for language acquisition. Noam Chomskys
theory, which is believed people have a basic pattern of learning language
inside of their brain since they were born. On the other hand, B. F.
Skinners theory which is believed people have to be taught how to speak
by someone for language acquisition. I mostly agree with Chomsky theory
and partly Skinner theory. People usually dont remember how they
learned to speak, but everybody speaks their first language without any
problems. Some Children even speak more than two languages naturally.
Language is a unique system which only humans have. However, if its
correct rules or grammars of language people might have to study. There
also seems to be critical period for learning language.
People speak their language without studying. It means people already
have an ability of language pattern in their brain. When I was in
elementary school there were Japanese classes. I studied writing and
reading but not speaking. I could already speak Japanese. I have a two year
old niece. She has already started speaking. Of course she has never
studied. So, people must have some kind of language ability innately.
According to an article I saw in kccesl.tripod.com, Chomsky says human
brain contains a language acquisition device (LAD) which automatically
analyzes the components of speech a child hears. I support this theory.
The human brain has special function, unlikely other animals. Thats why
only humans speak languages. Learning language for a human is very easy
because the human brain already contains ability of language, so even
children start to speak language naturally in their early age.
People in young age are very easy to acquire more than two languages at
same time. Even if those languages are very different, and their parents
dont speak those languages. It also proves people must have an ability to
function in any language innately.
In contrast theory, there is a very famous case. A girl, Genie, was language
got deprived during her critical period, which is considered to be between
4 and 12, of learning first language, and she couldnt acquire her language
skill normally even though she studied. This fact supports B. F. Skinners
theory. However, this is a very unusual case. She might not have only
language problem, but even mental problem since she was locked in a
room for 13 years. There is also a proof that Genie was about speak
without studying right after she was locked up. since her mother reported
that she heard Genie saying words right after she was locked up from
THE CIVILIZING OF GENIE by MAYA PINES.
Since Genies case was discovered, Chomsky added to his theory that the
innate mechanisms that underlie this competence must be activated by
exposure to language at the proper time from THE CIVILIZING OF
GENIE by MAYA PINES. This theory got little closer to B. F Skinners
theory. Even young children speak language without learning, but they
often make mistakes in their speech. While they are growing, their number
of mistakes in their speech decreases. They are learning how to speak, so
in this case some part of Skinners theory is also correct.
Similarly, learning second language for people in older age supports
Skinners theory. People have to keep learning language to improve their
second language. It hardly ever gets perfect because people have to learn
all rules and structures from beginning which dont apply to their first
language. If we have learning language system innately, why cant we
easily adjust to speak another language? We cant apply Chomskys theory
at all in this case.
In conclusion, until people reach critical period of learning language,
people learn their language automatically without being taught because of
their innate ability of language. Furthermore, if there are more than two
languages which children hear, children will be able to acquire both of
them at the same time. Nevertheless, the ability of language has to be
activated in the first place by something. Otherwise, people never begin to
acquire their language. Once people past the critical period, it is hard to
learn any language. Thereby, people in older age usually have problem
learning second language. Both Chomskys and Skinners theories are
correct in different cases and language acquisition system works with both
of them together.

What's in a sound?
We define speech sounds in terms of their descriptive features and use
these features to classify the sound according to the source of the sound in
the vocal tract and the shape of the vocal tract.

Speech sounds can be classified as either vowels or consonants.
Consonants: The air does not flow freely
Vowels: Lets air flow freely, shape of vocal tract is altered to create
different sounds.

Consonants are classified by:
1) Voicing
2) Manner of production
3) Place of articulation

1) Voiced vs. Unvoiced
Voiced: A voiced sound is when the vocal folds vibrate which feels like a
buzzing sensation in the throat. Such sounds could be 'v' and 'z'. These
sounds can be either hummed or sung.
Example: Put your fingers on the front of your throat and say 'v'.
Unvoiced: Unvoiced sounds do not cause the vocal folds to vibrate,
instead, the unvoiced sounds are produced typically by turbulence also
know as airstream friction. This friction produces a hissing sound and is
produced when air is forced through a small gap such as between the teeth
and tongue. Such sounds include 'f' and 's'.
Example: Put your fingers on the front of your throat and say 'F' and then
compare it to 'V'.
Feel the difference??

Here are some pairs of voiced/unvoiced sounds:
b/p, v/f, d/t, g/k, z/s.

2) Manner of production
stops- air flow stopped completely ex: p, k, d
fricatives: flow restricted but not stopped ex: f, v, s
affricates: stop then fricative ex: ch, dj
glides: w, j
liquids: r, l
nasals: n, m

3) Place of articulation

Bilabial: lips together: b, p, m
Labiodental: lip to teeth: f, v
Interdental: tongue between teeth: 'th' in that and 'th' in thin
Alveolar: tip of tongue on alveolar ridge: z, t, d
Palatal: tongue on palate: r, dj, gh
Velar: roll tongue to back of throat: k, ng (sing), g
Glottal: back bottom of throat: h
For a more detailed description of phonology and sounds click the link
below. You can click on the tables and click the symbols to hear how each
sounds. It is neat!
IPA Chart
Something very interesting is how children all share common
phonological processes and errors. Ex: stopping, voicing, consonant
cluster reduction, etc. To learn more about the errors and processes
children go through, I highly encourage you to click the link below and
take a look at a site by Caroline Bowen.
Caroline Bowen's site
What are the main aspects we are dealing with here?
Phonology
Phonology is the study of sounds in a language.
Phoneme: the basic unit of sound.
Semantics
Semantics is the study of the meaning of language
Morpheme: The smallest unit of sound to carry meaning.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of the use of language. Deals with the intentions
behind the utterances.
Syntax
Syntax is the study of the structure of language and how words can be
formed to create grammatically correct sentences.

Theories of language and mind
Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition,
his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his
criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In The
Language Instinct (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on
language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty
evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication,
although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the
idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties
that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in
many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in
Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial
symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in
many connectionist models.
Language Instinct? Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough
explanation
[now see also:Ascent of Intelligence and How Children acquire Language]
Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct was a comprehensive and
ambitious attempts to account for the origin of language. It approached the
topic from within the Chomskyan framework (Chomskyan linguists have
generally remained silent about language evolution). Language, he said,
was not a cultural artifact but a distinct piece of the biological make up of
the brain. We would all agree that a biological and essentially evolutionary
approach is desirable, though 'language instinct' already begs many
questions. Chomsky's concept of Universal Grammar is well known: the
brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited number
of sentences from a finite list of words; the program may be called a
mental grammar; children - 'grammatical geniuses' - must innately be
equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages that tells
them how to extract the syntactic patterns from the speech of their parents.
However Pinker did not share Chomsky's scepticism about whether
Darwinian natural selection can explain the origins of the language organ.
This paper seeks to identify where, at a number of important points,
Pinker's account seems unsatisfactory, for example: the idea that language
could have developed, like the eye, by minute steps, under the pressure of
natural selection, the idea that eventually neuroscientists will be able to
locate a 'language organ', or behavioural geneticists discover a grammar
gene, the postulation of a uniform distinct language of thought, mentalese,
to be translated into any particular spoken language, his discussion of the
arbitrariness of the sign, his account of the acquisition of language by
children.________________________________________
Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct was published in 1994 and was
received as one of the most complete and carefully argued accounts of the
evolution of language. In speaking about language as an 'instinct' he
recognised that the term is no longer thought appropriate in modern
biology but said that he was following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin
who had described language as half-art and half-instinct; Darwin's account
of the gradual evolution of instincts generally by natural selection could be
applied also to the human acquisition of the capacity for language. Darwin
was writing at a time when the modern science of language did not exist;
he claimed no particular expertise in the discussion of language generally
or of particular languages. By contrast Pinker accepts Chomsky's current
theoretical account of language and particularly Chomsky's concept of
Universal Grammar. The essential feature of this in its present form is
termed by Chomsky the Principles and Parameters approach, that is, the
underlying structures of language, the grammar, are innate and the same
for all humans; different languages are the result of ascribing binary values
to a small set of parameters. The simplest illustration of a parameter is the
choice of Head first or Head last; depending on which choice is made, a
language is either SOV or SVO with many associated orderings in other
aspects of syntax. For Pinker, following Chomsky, syntax is the key
productive aspect of language and lexicon is subordinate. If, as Pinker
intends, one seeks to present a persuasive account of the evolution of
language, it is of the first importance to settle how best language should be
characterized.
In a critique of The Language Instinct (1994), there are several complexly
interlocking issues. The first is whether the account of language given
currently by Chomsky, and accepted by Pinker, is adequate or plausible.
The second is whether a gradualistic account of the evolution of the
Chomskyan language system is conceivable. The third is Pinker's
treatment of related questions such as the acquisition of grammar by
children, the acquisition of lexicon. The fourth is the plausibility in terms
of brain evolution, brain structure and function of Pinker's approach. The
fifth is, as Pinker puts it, if Chomsky rejects the idea of the evolution of
language by natural selection, what alternative is there?
On the first issue, the adequacy and plausibility of Chomsky's account,
books have been written and controversy rages. So a contemporary
linguist, Givon (1984), speaks about Chomsky's utter disregard for the
nature and significance of cross-language typological variability which
allowed him, on the basis only of English syntax, to make sweeping
assumptions about typological-syntactic universals; Givon accordingly
rejects all the tenets of the transformational-generative tradition. Here I
will only attempt to note the main features of the Chomskyan theory, as far
as possible using Pinker and Chomsky's own words so that one can get a
clearer idea of what system it is that Pinker believes has evolved gradually
by natural selection. A preliminary observation is that for Chomsky, and
for Pinker, the issues of the biological basis of language and the
acquisition of language by children are closely linked; Chomsky's ideas of
Universal Grammar are very much framed to account for the rapid
acquisition of language by children.
3. Pinker's Ideas
There are some problems in presenting his ideas concisely and clearly.
Comments on different topics, instinct, syntax, lexicon, language
acquisition are scattered across the chapters; the first rather pedestrian task
is to bring the related ideas together. All page references unless otherwise
indicated are to The Language Instinct (Pinker 1994); I include them
where the wording is Pinker's own or a very close paraphrase of it.

3.1 Chomsky's Universal Grammar
Pinker's presentation is largely contained in Chapter 4 'How Language
Works' and the following points are mainly taken from that. For Pinker,
Chomsky's writings are classics. Chomsky's claim that, from a Martian's-
eye-view, all humans speak a single language is based on the discovery
that the same symbol- manipulating machinery, underlies the world's
languages. Universal Grammar is like an archetypal body plan found
across vast numbers of animals in a phylum (238-9), a common plan of
syntactic, morphological, and phonological rules and principles, with a
small set of varying parameters. Once set, a parameter can produce far-
reaching changes in the superficial appearance of the language. One of the
most intriguing discoveries is that there appears to be a common anatomy
in all phrases in all the world's languages. Phrase structure is the kind of
stuff language is made of; traces, cases, X-bars, and the other
paraphernalia of syntax are colourless, odourless, and tasteless, but they,
or something like them, must be a part of our unconscious mental life
(124). The universal plan underlying languages, with auxiliaries and
inversion rules, nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, phrases and clauses,
cases and agreement, and so on, seem to suggest a commonality in the
brains of speakers, because many other plans would have been just as
useful (43).
3.2 Chomsky and the acquisition of language by children
Children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars
of all language, a Universal Grammar, that tells them how to distil the
syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents. The unordered super-
rules (principles) are universal and innate; when children learn a particular
language, they do not have to learn a long list of rules, because they are
born knowing the super-rules (112). All they have to learn is whether their
particular language has the parameter head-first, as in English, or head-
last, as in Japanese. If the verb comes before the object, the child
concludes that the language is head-first as if the child were merely
flipping a switch to one of two possible positions. The way language
works is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the
concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that
combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental
grammar) (85).

3.3 Chomsky as the starting point
3.3.1 A general comment
There are risks in taking Chomsky's current theories as the basis for an
attempt to present a plausible account of the evolution of language. The
most striking aspect of the history of Chomsky's linguistic theories is how
rapidly and frequently they have changed over the years since his first
work Syntactic Structures appeared in 1957 and the transformational-
generative approach was born. Most of the key features of that approach
have now been abandoned; deep structure from being the foundation of
theory has shrunk and virtually disappeared, the idea of transformation has
been abandoned; whilst language is still regarded, in a broad sense, as a
generative process (new sentences created from a limited set of words and
syntactic processes), the technicalities of generation have also disappeared;
Chomsky has moved from a system which placed exclusive emphasis on
syntax to one which begins to recognize the importance also of lexicon,
moving from the transformational- generative approach to government and
binding to principles and parameters. Specifically, Pinker explains that
Chomsky wants to eliminate the idea that there is a special phrase structure
underlying a sentence called d-structure, a single framework for the entire
sentence into which the verbs are then plugged. The suggested
replacement is to have each verb come with a chunk of phrase structure
preinstalled; the sentence is assembled by snapping together the various
chunks. Pinker comments that 'deep structure' is a prosaic technical gadget
in grammatical theory, not what is universal across all human languages;
many linguists - including, in his most recent writings, Chomsky himself -
think one can do without deep structure per se. In a recent interview
(Grewendorf 1993), Chomsky was asked whether generative grammar had
gone astray at some point; he admitted that in retrospect there had been
some wrong turnings and that a really significant change took place about
1980; this, unlike earlier work in generative grammar, constituted a major
break and dispensed entirely with both rules and constructions which he
described as 'taxonomic artifacts' of early generative grammar; there have
been a lot of changes in the theory since 1980.


3.3.2 Pinker's own problem with Chomsky
Whilst accepting Chomsky's current principles and parameters approach
Pinker makes some effort to distance himself from Chomsky, no doubt
partly because he does not wish to be committed to deriving Chomsky's
concepts in detail from evolutionary natural selection (he makes no
attempt to do this) but also because there is the major difficulty that
Chomsky himself has consistently rejected the idea that language could
have evolved by natural selection. Pinker says that Chomsky's arguments
about the nature of the language faculty are based on technical analyses of
word and sentence structure, often couched in abstruse formulations; his
discussions of flesh-and-blood speakers are perfunctory and highly
idealized; "Chomsky's theory need not be treated ... as a set of cabalistic
incantations that only the initiated can mutter" (104). Pinker admits to
being deeply influenced by Chomsky. "But it is not his story exactly...
Chomsky has puzzled many readers with his skepticism about whether
Darwinian natural selection ... can explain the origins of the language
organ he argues for" (24). Chomsky and some of his fiercest opponents
agree on one thing, that a uniquely human language instinct seems to be
incompatible with the modern Darwinian theory of evolution, in which
complex biological systems arise by the gradual accumulation over
generations of random genetic mutations that enhance reproductive
success." (333) Chomsky thinks that "to attribute this development to
'natural selection' .. amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is
some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena... it is not easy even to
imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them" (354).
3.4 Language organ and/or language instinct?
3.4.1 The analogy with the evolution of the eye
Rejecting Chomsky's scepticism, Pinker suggests that language should be
considered as an evolutionary adaptation like the eye, its major parts
designed to carry out important functions. Chomsky speaks about the
'language organ' and language is assumed to be a distinct brain module.
The evolution of the eye was a central debating point between proponents
and opponents of Darwinian natural selection; Darwin himself offered a
gradualistic account which has been taken up and refined many times,
most notably recently by Richard Dawkins (1986). A plausible account has
been given of how even a rudimentary eye could be selected and increase
the fitness of the individual in whom the advance took place; each small
improvement in the functioning of the eye would promote survival of the
individual and the individual's offspring carrying the gene for the
improved eye. Maynard Smith and Szathmary in their recent The Major
Transitions in Evolution (1995) also pick up the analogy between
development of the eye and the development of language. This is perhaps
not surprising since admittedly they relied heavily on two sources,
Bickerton's (1990) book and Pinker and Bloom's 1990 article which
foreshadowed The Language Instinct.
3.4.2 The analogy with the evolution of instincts
Language is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of the brain (18).
The universality of complex language is the first reason to suspect that
language is the product of a special human instinct. If language is an
instinct, it should have an identifiable seat in the brain, and perhaps even a
special set of genes that help wire it into place (45-46). If language is like
other instincts, presumably it evolved by natural selection, the only
successful scientific explanation of complex biological traits (354), the
only alternative (Pinker's emphasis) that can explain the evolution of a
complex organ like the eye or like language. Each step in the evolution of
a language instinct, up to and including the most recent ones, must
enhance fitness (366- 367), the gradual accumulation over generations of
random genetic mutations that increase reproductive success (333). The
language instinct is composed of many parts: syntax, with its discrete
combinatorial system building phrase structures; morphology, a second
combinatorial system building words, a capacious lexicon; a revamped
vocal tract; phonological rules and structures; speech perception; parsing
algorithms, learning algorithms (362).
3.4.2.1 Pinker on the evolution of language by natural selection
Chapter 11 is entitled The Big Bang. Pinker admits that there are genuine
problems in reconstructing how the language faculty might have evolved
by natural selection (365), problems particularly with any gradualistic
account. The problems relate both to finding a plausible account for the
transitional stages between the first human articulations and the
complexities of language as it exists, in all its varieties, today and also to
accounting, in biological and genetic terms, for the acquisition of language
by children.
To attribute the basic design of the language instinct to natural selection is
not to indulge in just-so storytelling (364). Possibly there was the first
grammar mutant, that is the first individual undergoing a genetic change
which produced some capacity, however limited, for syntax; the
neighbours could have partly understood what the mutant was saying just
using overall intelligence. If a grammar mutant is making important
distinctions that can be decoded by others only with uncertainty and great
mental effort, it could set up a pressure for them to evolve the matching
system that allows those distinctions to be recovered reliably by an
automatic, unconscious, parsing process (365). Selection could have
ratcheted up language abilities by favouring the speakers in each
generation that the hearers could best decode, and the hearers who could
best decode the speakers. Intermediate grammars are easy to imagine
(366). Pinker suggests, following Bickerton, that the languages of children,
pidgin speakers, immigrants, tourists, aphasics, telegrams, and headlines
show that there is a vast continuum of viable language systems varying in
efficiency and expressive power, exactly what the theory of natural
selection requires (366). However " Bickerton makes the jaw-dropping
additional suggestion that a single mutation in a single woman, African
Eve, simultaneously wired-in syntax, resized and reshaped the skull, and
reworked the vocal tract" (366). Syntax is a Darwinian 'organ of extreme
perfection and complication' (124).
For the origin of language, in all its complexity, Bickerton's suggestion is
as improbable as the idea (advanced by Hoyle as a criticism of
evolutionary theory and discussed by Richard Dawkins) that hurricanes
might by chance assemble a jetliner from a scrapyard containing the
aircraft parts. Stone Age people have been found with high-tech grammars
(409). If the first trace of a protolanguage ability appeared in the ancestor
at the split between chimps and human branches there could have been on
the order of 350,000 generations between then and now for the ability to
have been elaborated and fine-tuned to the Universal Grammar we see
today. Language could have had a gradual fade- in. There were plenty of
organisms with intermediate language abilities but they are all dead (345-
346). The utility of language development is obvious; people everywhere
depend on cooperative efforts for survival, forming alliances by
exchanging information and commitments; this puts complex grammar to
good use (368). "But could these exchanges really have produced the
rococo complexity of human grammar?" (368) A cognitive arms race
could easily propel a linguistic one. In all cultures, social interactions are
mediated by persuasion and argument (368). Anthropologists have noted
that tribal chiefs are often both gifted orators and highly polygynous; this
is how linguistic skills could make a Darwinian difference in a world in
which language in relationships played a key roles in individual
reproductive success (369).
3.4.2.2 Children's acquisition of language
Grammar: Pinker comments on "the mystery of how children's grammar
explodes into adultlike complexity in so short a time" (112). "Do grammar
genes really exist or is the whole idea just loopy?" (322). Children's rapid
acquisition of syntax is possible because they are born with the super-rules
hard-wired into their brains; all the child has to do is to attach the right
values to the parameters which determine what the structure of the local
language is by listening to the speech of their parents (22).
Lexicon: The other startling aspect of children's acquisition of language is
the acquisition of the words of the local language. One extraordinary
feature of the lexicon is the sheer capacity for memorization that goes into
building it (typically more than 60,000 words) (149). Preliterate children
must be lexical vacuum cleaners, inhaling a new word every two hours,
day in, day out (151-152). A name is rapidly acquired because of the
harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the
texture of reality (157). Somehow a baby must intuit the correct meaning
of a word; humans are innately constrained to make only certain kinds of
guesses about how the world and its occupants work. The word-learning
baby has a brain that carves the world up into discrete, bounded, cohesive
objects and into the actions that they undergo; the baby forms mental
categories that lump together objects that are of the same kind; babies are
designed to expect a language to contain words for kinds of objects and
kinds of actions - nouns and verbs (153). There really are things and kinds
of things and actions out there in the world, and our mind is designed to
find them and label them with words (153). Since word boundaries do not
physically exist, it is remarkable that children are so good at finding them
(267).
Each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they
stand for (a mental dictionary); the mental dictionary seems like nothing
more than a humdrum list of words, each transcribed into the head by a
dull-witted rote memorization (126). A word is a pure symbol; the relation
between its sound and meaning is utterly arbitrary (151-2) , a wholly
conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. 'Dog' means dog only
because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote
learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning (83-84).
4. Critical Issues
The above conflation of extracts from The Language Instinct show some
of the difficulties that any theory of the gradual evolution of language has
to face. I would pick out as the key issues, both for the evolution of
language and for the directly related question of the biological basis for
children's acquisition of language:
1. The genetic basis of the language capacity. He posits language evolution
by minimal steps with, in some sense, the existence of grammar genes and
grammar gene mutations.
2. The relation of inclusive fitness and language evolution. How if the total
system of language, and of languages, evolved by minimal changes,
minimal additions to the system, could these minimal changes have
increased the fitness (reproductive success) of the individuals who first
manifested them?
3. Language as a property of the social framework, of the individual only
as a member of the group. A minimal change in language by an individual
is of no value unless it is a change which is shared in comprehension and
production by other members of the group.
4. 'Gradual' evolution of grammar (syntax). Pinker and Chomsky
concentrate on syntax in the narrow sense of phrase structure. They
underrate the complexities of grammar in a more traditional sense, the
complicated tense, declension and classification systems of many
languages. In these languages refinements of use and meaning are
achieved through lexical variation, complex modifications of root-words
or through individual function words.
5. The source of the lexicon. Pinker and Chomsky treat the remarkable
evolution of the lexicons of many different languages as a relatively trivial
matter but it is not.
6. Acceptance of the lexicon within the group. Evolution of the lexicon
means both the addition of new words to refer to new aspects of the
natural or social environment and the modification of words to express
different relationships between one word and another. If, as Pinker
(following Saussure) suggests, all this lexical evolution is arbitrary, with
no relation between the sound-structure of a word and its meaning, then by
what process can the lexical evolution have taken place since it must
depend on the adoption of the arbitrary word or word-form by members of
the speech-group?
7. Children's rapid acquisition of the lexicon. Acquisition of lexicon by
children is described as a simple matter of rote-learning, or alternatively as
a pre-ordained matching of labels to pre-existing neurally-based concepts
in the infant.
8. The relation between language evolution and brain evolution, whether
the neural basis of the language capacity is a single module (language as a
brain organ).
4.1 Language as instinct or organ?
Instinct: Pinker comments that to use the term 'instinct' in relation to
language is 'quaint'(18) but it is worse than quaint. It immediately
establishes a misleading picture of the nature of the language capacity. No
doubt Darwin spoke about language as being half-art and half-instinct, that
is, language was not an instinct like those observed in bees, rabbits or
birds. To call any aspect of human behaviour instinct can mean no more
than that it has a biological basis, a genetic basis. The confusion is made
worse when language is also treated as an organ like the eye. An organ is
not an instinct but a structure. Both 'organ' and 'instinct' are misleading
when applied to language. Language is both physiologically and
neurologically based; it depends on the articulatory structures for
producing speech-sound, on the brain for the muscular control of those
structures and for the relation between the speech-sound and the percept or
action to which the speech-sound relates. The idea that language is an
instinct and thus must have a specific seat in the brain suggests that the
language capacity must be localised in some area of the brain; evidence
from recent research using PET and MRI brain- imaging (see, for example,
the PET images in chapter 5 'Interpreting Words' in Images of the Mind
Posner and Raichle 1994) that many parts of the brain are involved in the
production of a spoken utterance; different areas of the brain are activated
for different aspects of speech. Whether or not 'instincts' in general can be
traced to a special set of genes, and this appears questionable even if one
accepts the loose use of the term instinct, the idea that the whole of what is
required for language could ever be traced to a limited number of genes
seems totally implausible.
Organ: Pinker treats language as a complex organ like the eye. Language
is not an organ and is not like the eye. The eye is a diversified physical
structure which is of no use without the neural connections within the
brain which interpret the patterns of light falling on the retina. If Pinker
had said that language is like the visual system as a whole, or like the
perceptual capacity as a whole, including the brain connections which
integrate these systems, this would have been more plausible. What is
more like the eye is the whole articulatory system with the auditory
structures but these are structures which evolved to serve functions
completely distinct from language; the new aspect of language is the use
the brain makes of these pre-existing structures.
4.2 Language complexifying by natural selection?
When Pinker says flatly that natural selection is the only successful
explanation and that natural selection is gradualistic, this is too sweeping.
In the Darwinian system, natural selection is seen as the operative force
which has quite recently been given a more precise application by the
introduction of the concept of inclusive fitness, the genetic interpretation
of Darwin's original concept. However, in the case of humans there can
also be cultural selection, behavioural selection at the group level, where
the patterns of behaviour adopted are not tied to individual genetic
differences. Even in terms of genetic evolution, natural selection does not
simply mean that every system, every aspect of behaviour and use of any
structures, must be the result of gradual change, genetic change, directed
solely to that use or behaviour. Darwin himself recognised that complex
structures which evolved by gradualistic natural selection, could in
different environments be put to new uses quite different from those which
gradual natural selection had first produced. The example Darwin gave
was the transformation of the swim-bladder into the lung; whether the lung
or the swim-bladder came first and was in some fish converted into the
other, the point remains the same: that a complex structure developed to
serve one function was transferred to serve a quite different function.
Other examples can be found in the development of limbs for locomotion
into wings for flying or fins for swimming, of muscles into electric organs
in some fish, of gills into the structures of the ear, of the tracheae into
wings in insects. The essential point is that complexity developed for one
function could come to serve as complexity for a quite different function.
More significantly, in thinking about language and indeed other functions,
the neural organization for supporting one function, e.g. respiration,
swallowing, mastication, locomotion, became adapted to serving the new
function, e.g. speech-sound production, flying, swimming.
4.3 Language complexity driving inclusive fitness?
Pinker says that each step in the evolutionary development of language
must have enhanced fitness; he has to say this to attribute the evolution of
language to gradualistic natural selection of language as a distinct organ,
instinct or function. That the advance of language from the most primitive
articulation to the perfection of the systems of fully developed languages
was due to its contribution to fitness seems unlikely. Fitness as a concept
applies to the individual and not to the group or society; fitness depends on
genetic change in the individual. Pinker makes no more than a rhetorical
attempt to justify the idea that even the limited aspects of language on
which he and Chomsky concentrate could have brought added fitness to
any individual. If one confines attention to the evolution of grammar
alone, it is hard to believe that the complexities of the Greek, Russian or
German grammatical systems, the development of the subjunctive, the
middle and passive voices, perfective and imperfective aspects of the verb,
case systems, could be the product of minute changes resulting from
genetic mutation, could be linked to genetic change in an individual which
increased that individual's reproductive success, that individual's inclusive
fitness.
Pinker recognises that his approach may be criticised as Just-So story
telling and denies that this is so. However at many points this is exactly
what it is. He antedates the first rudiments of language as far back as the
split between the human and chimpanzee lines, making available he says
genetic change over some 350,000 generations for the refinement of the
language capacity. He speaks about the first 'grammar mutant'. What
conceivably would the first grammar mutant be, what genetic mutation on
Pinker's scheme would account for this? This seems a phrase for which
Pinker provides no content. Whatever 'grammar mutant' may mean, a
mutation in an isolated individual could have no more effect on the social
development of language than mutation producing any other abnormality.
He suggests that neighbours of grammar mutants would come to
understand through using their overall intelligence, but they could not
decode the behaviour of the grammar mutant unless they already had
brains adapted to appreciate the refinement the grammar mutant was
producing. This is a quite superficial attempt to tackle what over the
centuries had been seen as the great problem about any suggestion that
language, or any aspects of language, could have been invented by an
individual; language and languages are social constructs, not the special
capacity of any individual. Neighbours (without language capacity) could
no more by general intelligence decode the grammar mutant than we could
by general intelligence decode the meaning of bird-song. Pinker goes
further and makes the extraordinary suggestion that the grammar mutation
in the individual would create pressure on the neighbours to evolve a
matching system, a parsing system which would enable them to
comprehend, and use, the genetic language change in the first individual.
This offers the bizarre picture of the individual in whom the capacity for
the subjunctive developed, using this capacity, transmitting it over
generations to his offspring, whilst others, at the incredibly slow pace of
genetic change over generations, evolved to the point where they in their
turn were able to use the subjunctive; it is equally implausible to think that
a similar process could apply to other grammatical aspects, the refinements
of the case system, the development of modal forms and so on.
Neighbours could not by general intelligence bring about genetic change
in themselves as a basis for an improved language capacity. Pinker
suggests that speakers that others could best decode would be favoured
but, ex hypothesi, others would not have undergone the genetic changes
required to make use of the advances in language made by the best
speakers. He makes the point that language would be socially useful,
social interactions are mediated by persuasion and argument, more
specifically that complex grammar would be put to good use in
exchanging information and commitments. Obviously language is useful
for humans in social interaction but whether the complex grammatical
structures are required or give any particular added evolutionary benefit to
the individual or the group seems quite uncertain. Language, he says,
could have advanced as a result of a cognitive arms race propelling a
linguistic arms race; a cognitive arms race presumably means that more
intelligent, more perceptive, more creative individuals survived and
achieved greater inclusive fitness, that is, their more intelligent, perceptive
and creative children also survived and they competed among themselves
in generating beneficial changes in language. What exactly is meant by 'a
linguistic arms race'? An Oxford or Cambridge debating society? A
parliament? An election campaign? Applied to communities of hunter-
gatherers, or warring tribes (depending on which view one takes of the
early social states of human beings) the idea seems improbable. Pinker
then produces his crowning suggestion, that tribal chiefs are judged by
anthropologists to be both polygynous and gifted orators and accordingly
one might suppose they achieved the reproductive success through their
superior linguistic skills. The instruments of tribal chiefs in achieving
reproductive success, or success in other ways, are not their language skills
but others such as size, physical strength, rapidity and ruthlessness of
action, kinship.
4.4 Intermediate grammars?
In saying that grammars of intermediate complexity are easy to imagine,
Pinker adopts Bickerton's suggestion (also taken up by Maynard Smith and
Szathmary) that grades of protolanguage might resemble pidgin, the
speech of tourists, immigrants, aphasics, wolf-children. Pinker makes no
attempt to give any specific illustration of this. The deviant forms result
from the degeneration of already existing fully developed languages; to
suppose that in the total absence of structured language these forms could
come into existence is highly unlikely. The fact that, as Pinker says, Stone
Age people may have 'high-tech grammars' (presumably meaning
elaborately-structured forms) speaks against rather than for the idea that
language may have evolved as a distinct function (instinct, organ) by
gradualistic natural selection. How could these 'primitive' peoples by
genetic change evolve their high-tech languages, when in many cases they
did not succeed in evolving a number system going beyond One, Two,
Three? Were their chiefs busy developing case and tense systems, phrase
structures, word-order, nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions? Pinker
suggests that the gradual evolution of language may have taken place over
an extremely long period allowing for 350,000 generations of random
genetic change producing minor changes in language. To produce complex
and refined languages over this period by a succession of random genetic
changes seems quite as implausible as the suggestion by Bickerton that the
language capacity might have been the result of one massive super-
mutation in a single individual (African Eve). Because no plausible
account can be given of the step-by-step growth of language by random
genetic change, Pinker proposes that there must have been thousands of
organisms, and presumably thousands of speech-communities, with
intermediate capacities between animal grunts and the Greek, Chinese, or
German languages, but sadly all these organisms and communities
disappeared without trace. There is no evidence for this and it remains the
sheerest speculation.
4.5 Evolution of language acquisition by children?
Pinker is more specific about the capacities the gradual evolution of
language by natural selection should have provided to enable children to
acquire the local language as rapidly as they do. He suggests that
children's brains must be structured from birth in particular ways, first by
having grammatical super-rules hard-wired, with provision for a few
parameters to be given specific values derived from the child's exposure to
the local language, and secondly by having the ability to attach the locally-
correct labels to the objects and actions of the local environment. Pinker
does not discuss exactly what super-rules are hard-wired and how this
hard-wiring might be produced in neural organisation. As regards
parameter setting, the suggestion by Pinker (and Chomsky) is that children
decide whether the local language is SOV or SVO by observing whether
the verb comes first or last in the sentence - but how do children know
what word is a verb and what word is not? The treatment of the acquisition
of lexicon by the child is no more satisfactory than the discussion of the
growth of lexicon as part of the evolutionary process. Children's
acquisition of lexicon, of the names for things and actions, can, he says,
only be the result of rote-learning of the arbitrary relation between a
unitary pattern of speech-sounds (the word) and a discriminable object or
action. But children do not learn new words by rote memory; rote memory
would mean that their mothers tell them ten times that 'that creature is a
dog'; learning words by children is not like learning the multiplication
table, learning telephone numbers, learning the Kings and Queens of
England or learning the catechism (for none of which children show any
special ability). Children learn new words incredibly rapidly in a way
which adults cannot match. Some other explanation than rote learning is
required to account for the acquisition of lexicon by children (and there are
similar problems about the acquisition of an ever-growing lexicon by
primitive adults in the gradualistic evolutionary scenario). Pinker notes
that word boundaries do not physically exist (in the instrumental record of
utterances) but are found by children; he rightly regards this as remarkable
but attempts no explanation how it is possible. There is parallel problem of
the absence of sharp concept boundaries to which words are to be related,
the gavagai problem discussed by Quine (Quine 1960) which Pinker
attempts to deal with. Pinker sees no real alternative to explain the rapid
acquisition of words by children to the idea the human mind is designed to
find objects and label them; there is a pre- established harmony between
the mind of the child and the texture of reality (157); the child somehow
has the concepts available before experience with language and is
basically learning labels for them. What exactly does this mean? How can
the pre-existing harmony exist between concepts which vary between
physical and cultural environments and words which vary between the
many different languages? Some explanation is needed but pre-existing
harmony, pre-existing conceptual structure, is not a clear or persuasive or
testable suggestion.
5. Summing up
Pinker's The Language Instinct does not offer a satisfactory account of
language evolution. Piattelli-Palmarini (1994: 339) says that Pinker's
account (developed with Paul Bloom) is the best, yet still unconvincing,
adaptationist reconstruction. It aspires to give an account of the evolution
of language but is marred by its concentration on the Chomskyan account
of the nature of language, an account constructed largely on the basis of
the English language which ignores or downplays the lexical and syntactic
complexities of other languages. There is much little-examined
speculation, about the time when the first rudiments of language might
have emerged, about the manner in which children can acquire lexicon,
about the anthropological basis for improved language capacity, about the
role of genetic mutation in bringing about changes in language structures,
about the possibility of survival benefit for the individual flowing from
mutations affecting language competence and performance. The principal
error is the failure to treat adequately the social character of language, as a
possession of the group, of the speech community, and not simply of the
individual. Language development and change as increasing the inclusive
fitness, that is serving the long-term reproductive success of the individual,
is simply not a plausible proposition, prehistorically or historically. The
other major error is concentration on the evolution of syntax, grammar (in
a narrow Chomskyan sense or in a broader more traditional sense) and
treating superficially the vital role of the development of lexicon, both as a
representation of the perceived world and as an instrument for syntactic
manipulation of utterances through function words, inflections etc. The
final and perhaps most important error is a mistaken view of natural
selection as limited to gradualistic change in a complex structure serving a
specified function; natural selection also operates through serendipitous
transfer of complexity developed for one function to a new function,
typically the move from swim-bladder to lung, from webbed foot to wing,
from gill to structures of the ear and so on. The root problem with Pinker's
presentation is the imprecise, metaphorical or rhetorical use of terms:
organ, instinct, natural selection.
6. Another direction?
In this paper I have presented a summary account of Chomsky's approach
to language which is the foundation for Pinker's treatment of language
evolution in The Language Instinct . Next I have brought together, in his
own words, the main points from Pinker's exposition and proposed
criticisms both of the general approach and of a number of specific points.
I have mentioned only very briefly the identification of language as the
fifth major transition in evolution in the recent book of Maynard Smith
and Szathmary. I have also referred to Givon's dismissal of the entire
Chomskyan position and to the characterisation by Piattelli-Palmarini (a
convinced Chomskyan) of Pinker and Bloom's adaptationist account as the
best so far but still unacceptable. If both the Chomskyan approach to
language and the gradualistic account of language evolution are rejected,
what alternatives are there? Any theoretical approach to language has to go
wider than phrase structure and cope with the elaborated systems of
grammar and lexicon found in many world languages.
Is there then nothing of value to be extracted from The Language Instinct
or from the largely derivative account of language evolution given by
Maynard Smith and Szathmary? There may be something of value when
they consider how language might be represented in the brain. Here some
of Pinker's incidental remarks, and suggestions by Chomsky and his other
followers, may offer clues to a more plausible approach to the evolution of
language:
Chomsky: It has also been suggested that the properties of language derive
in some fundamental way from properties of the visual system
(Grewendorf 1994: 391) These skills may well have arisen as a
concomitant of structural properties of the brain developed for other
reasons (quoted by Pinker 1994: 362). Organs develop to serve one
purpose and, when they have reached a certain form in the evolutionary
process, became available for different purposes, at which point the
processes of natural selection may refine them further for those purposes.
(Chomsky 1988: 167)
Pinker: Language could have arisen, and probably did arise, from a
revamping of primate brain circuits that originally had no role in vocal
communication); it is the precise wiring of the brain's microcircuitry that
makes language happen; brains can be rewired only if the genes that
control their wiring have changed. The ancestral brain could have been
rewired only if the new circuits had some effect on perception and
behavior (350, 364).
Maynard Smith and Szathmary : there is not only a formal similarity
between the construction of sentences and the performance of manual
tasks, but there may be a common physiological basis for the two abilities;
one could suppose that language is a spandrel, that is, an unselected by-
product of design for some other purpose; there is a formal similarity
between 'action grammar' and protolanguage. (Maynard Smith and
Szathmary 1995: Chapter 17)
Bickerton: True language had to wait on a change in neural organisation
that caused us to slot meaningful symbols into formal structures and to do
so quite automatically; the capacity to construct sentences could in
principle have derived from some previously established function,
unlikely, however, unless there already existed some structure and/or
function preadapted for syntax, so that syntax simply utilised existing
neural structures. (Bickerton 1990: 130-131)
The idea that language may have been modelled on or directly derived
from pre-existing brain systems has been explored by a number of writers.
The possibilities include modelling on tool use (Greenfield and others),
modelling on the visual system (Givon), modelling on throwing action
(Calvin), modelling on motor control (Studdert-Kennedy, Lieberman,
Allott). The earliest suggestion on these lines was by Karl Lashley (1951)
who discussed the generality of the problem of syntax and drew attention
to the parallels between the syntax of language and the syntax of action;
there has since been considerable discussion of the grammar of action and
of the grammar of vision Richard Gregory (1976). It is not possible in this
paper to present these alternatives at any length but the following
paragraphs briefly describe them.
Greenfield's 1991 paper "Language, tools and brain: The ontogeny and
phylogeny of hierarchically organized sequential behavior" postulated an
evolutionary homologue of the neural substrate for language production
and manual action which provided a foundation for the evolution of
language before the divergence of the hominids and the great apes. The
role of toolmaking as a precursor for or as coevolving with language has
been extensively discussed. Perhaps it should be treated as the first
approach to investigating the relation between language and the cerebral
motor control system.
Studdert-Kennedy suggested that linguistic structure may emerge from,
and may even be viewed as, a special case of motoric structure, the
structure of action. For language, the goal is to derive its properties from
other, presumably prior, properties of the human organism and its natural
environment; we should try to specify the perceptual and motor capacities
out of which language has evolved; evidence from brain stimulation
(notably the work of Kimura, Ojemann and Mateer) almost forced the
hypothesis that the primary specialisation of the left hemisphere is motoric
rather than perceptual; language would be drawn to the left hemisphere
because the left hemisphere already possessed the neural circuitry for
control of the fingers, wrists and arms, precisely the type of circuitry
needed for control of the larynx, tongue, velum, lips and of the bilaterally
innervated vocal apparatus (1983: 5, 329).
Ojemann and Mateer (1979, 1991) identified common cortical sites for
sequencing motor activity and speech; language arises at least in part in
brain areas that originally had a predominantly motor function; the
development of language seems to have incorporated brain mechanisms
originally developed for motor learning.
Givon in his 1994 paper for the Berkeley meeting of the Language Origins
Society took the system of visual perception as the basis on which
language emerged in a process of coevolution; in this the evolution of
language was linked directly to the development of the visual system. He
discussed the correspondences between visual and linguistic information
and suggested that language processing piggybacked on visual processing;
in evolution there had been an early co-existence of auditory-vocal and
visual-gestural codes; the rise of visual-gestural coding provided a neuro-
cognitive preadaptation for a shift to audio-oral coding because of the
adaptive advantages it offered, freeing the hand and body for other
activities, transcending the immediate visual field. He developed these
ideas in the light of recent evidence from PET scans and otherwise of brain
localisation of particular aspects of language processing in relation to
visual and auditory brain organization.
Lieberman (1984, 1991) has presented a motor theory of the origin of
syntax. According to this, the evolution of speech and language follows
from Darwinian processes; organs that were originally designed to
facilitate breathing air and swallowing food and water were adapted to
produce human speech. The development of language was an instance of
the mechanisms of preadaptation which besides examples such as swim-
bladders and lungs, produced the sometimes surprising preadaptive bases
of various specialized organs, for example, milk glands from sweat glands,
the bones of the mammalian middle ear from the joint of the lower jaw.
The initial stage in the evolution of the neural bases of human language
appears to have involved lateralized mechanisms for manual motor
control, facilitating precise one-handed manual tasks. Brain mechanisms
that allow the production of the extremely precise complex muscular
manoeuvres of speech, the most difficult motor control task that humans
perform, may have provided the preadaptive basis for rule-governed
syntax which may reflect a generalisation of the automatic schema first
evolved in animals for motor control in tasks like respiration and walking.
A change in brain organization that allowed voluntary control of
vocalization is the minimum condition for vocal communication.
Calvin (1989) has argued the case for an even more specific preadaptation
for the neural machinery underlying language in the neural circuitry
required for planning sequential hand-movements such as hammering and
throwing. Since hand-arm sequencing circuitry in the brain has a strong
spatial overlap with where language circuitry is located in the left brain,
perhaps the same massively-serial architecture can do double-duty for
language and planning ahead. The well-formed sentence and the reliable
plan of action have some strong analogies to more familiar darwinian
successes, a matter of what Charles Darwin called 'conversion of one
function to another' or metamorphosis of function. To describe the original
function from which the conversion of function was made, the better word
is exaptation because of the 'preconceived' connotations of preadaptation.
A given piece of anatomy can have more than one function. The
conversion of function, Calvin argues, is an excellent candidate for how
beyond-the-apes language abilities originated. Hominid-to-human
language is a 'free' secondary use of neural sequencing machinery that was
primarily shaped by the food-acquisition uses of ballistic movement skills.
The motor theory of language evolution and function proposes as a
universal principle that the structures of language (phonological, lexical
and syntactic)were derived from and modelled on the pre-existing complex
neural systems which had evolved for motor control, the control of bodily
activity. Motor control at the neural level requires pre-set elementary units
of action which can be integrated into more extended patterns of action -
neural motor programs. These in turn have to be linked to and integrated
with one another by 'syntactic' neural processes and structures. On this
theory, given that speech is also essentially a motor activity, language
made use of the elementary pre-set units of motor action to produce the
equivalent phonological units (phonemic categories); the neural programs
for individual words were constructed from the elementary units in the
same way as motor programs for bodily action are formed from them (in
both cases a neural program is formed in direct relation to the perceived
structure of the external world); the syntactic processes and structures of
language proper were modelled on the 'syntactic' rules of motor control.
Chomsky, Pinker and Bloom, Piattelli-Palmarini argue against
preadaptation on the basis of the visual or motor systems on grounds
which are directly related to their perhaps idiosyncratic formal analysis of
language, with its emphasis on syntax. So Piattelli-Palmarini (in his 1994
paper which rejected Piaget's view that language was derived from or
related to motor schemata) said that the form of linguistic principles is
very specific e.g. c-command, X-bar, PRO, projection of a lexical head,
trace of a noun-phrase etc. and went on to say that there is no hope, not
even the dimmest one, of translating these entities, these principles, and
these constructs into generic notions that apply to language as a 'particular
case'; nothing in motor control even remotely resembles these kinds of
notions; concrete linguistic examples (drawn from Chomskyan theory)
make it vastly implausible that syntactic rules could be accounted for in
terms of sensorimotor schemata (Piattelli-Palmarini 1994: 324). Chomsky
in Language and Problems of Knowledge said the visual system is unlike
the language faculty in many crucial ways; though there are some
similarities in the way that the problems can be addressed, in relation to
vision and language, the visual faculty does not include the principles of
binding theory, case theory, structure dependence, and so on. The two
systems operate in quite different ways (Chomsky 1988: 159, 161).
7. Conclusion
Pinker, Chomsky and Piattelli-Palmarini, in rejecting a preadaptive or
exaptational basis for the evolution of language in the visual or motor
systems of the brain because it is impossible to see how such as a basis
could accommodate the formalisms of transformational-generative
grammar, government and binding, or principles and parameters, ignore
the unwelcome possibility that there is something fundamentally wrong
with the linguistic theories, not with the Darwinian process by which there
can be conversion of function from an already existing complex neural
system for perception or action to serve as the basis for speech and
language function. Chomsky is left in the awkward position of being
unable to conceive of a Darwinian origin for language even though he
asserts that it must have a biological basis; this leads Pinker to propose a
gradualistic account of language evolution as the product of a series of
minimal genetic and language changes, which is implausible in accounting
for the step-by-step accretion of the elements required for Chomskyan
phrase-structure theory, and even less plausible to account for the
development of other complex grammatical and lexical features of world
languages. The way out of the impasse is to see the evolution of language
as a system founded on, reflecting and expressing the pre-existing
complexities of the perceptual and motor systems of the brain.
The Language Instinct
The Language Instinct is a 1994 book by Steven Pinker. Written for a
general audience, it argues that humans are born with an innate capacity
for language. It deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim that all
human language shows evidence of a universal grammar, but dissents from
Chomsky's skepticism that evolutionary theory can explain the human
language instinct.
Thesis
Pinker sets out to disabuse the reader of a number of common ideas about
language, e.g. that children must be taught to use it, that most people's
grammar is poor, that the quality of language is steadily declining, that
language has a heavy influence on a person's possible range of thoughts
(the SapirWhorf hypothesis), and that nonhuman animals have been
taught language (see Great Ape language). Each of these claims, he
argues, is false. Instead, Pinker sees language as an ability unique to
humans, produced byevolution to solve the specific problem of
communication among social hunter-gatherers. He compares language to
other species' specialized adaptations such as spiders' web-weaving or
beavers' dam-building behavior, calling all three "instincts".
By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human
invention in the sense that metalworking and even writing are. While only
some human cultures possess these technologies, all cultures possess
language. As further evidence for the universality of language, Pinker
notes that children spontaneously invent a consistent grammatical speech
(a creole) even if they grow up among a mixed-culture population
speaking an informal trade pidgin with no consistent rules. Deaf babies
"babble" with their hands as others normally do with voice, and
spontaneously invent sign languages with true grammar rather than a crude
"me Tarzan, you Jane" pointing system. Language (speech) also develops
in the absence of formal instruction or active attempts by parents to correct
children's grammar. These signs suggest that rather than being a human
invention, language is an innate human ability. Pinker also distinguishes
language from humans' general reasoning ability, emphasizing that it is not
simply a mark of advanced intelligence but rather a specialized "mental
module". He distinguishes the linguist's notion of grammar, such as the
placement of adjectives, from formal rules such as those in the American
English writing style guide. He argues that because rules like "a
preposition is not a proper word to end a sentence with" must be explicitly
taught, they are irrelevant to actual communication and should be ignored.
Pinker attempts to trace the outlines of the language instinct by citing his
own studies of language acquisition in children, and the works of many
other linguists and psychologists in multiple fields, as well as numerous
examples from popular culture. He notes, for instance, that specific types
of brain damage cause specific impairments of language such as Broca's
aphasia or Wernicke's aphasia, that specific types of grammatical
construction are especially hard to understand, and that there seems to be a
critical period in childhood for language development just as there is a
critical period for vision development in cats. Much of the book refers to
Chomsky's concept of a universal grammar, a meta-grammar into which
all human languages fit. Pinker explains that a universal grammar
represents specific structures in the human brain that recognize the general
rules of other humans' speech, such as whether the local language places
adjectives before or after nouns, and begin a specialized and very rapid
learning process not explainable as reasoning from first principles or pure
logic. This learning machinery exists only during a specific critical period
of childhood and is then disassembled for thrift, freeing resources in an
energy-hungry brain.
[edit]Criticism
Pinker's assumptions about the innateness of language have been
challenged; opponents claim that "either the logic is fallacious, or the
factual data are incorrect (or, sometimes, both)".[1]
The statement that deaf babies "spontaneously invent sign languages with
complex grammar" is actually only true in groups of deaf children (deaf
communities) while a lone deaf child in a village where everyone else can
hear never invents more than simple gestures.[2][3] This actually supports
a view of language as a social adaptation evolutionary kludge.
Richard Webster writes that The Language Instinct argues cogently that
the human capacity for language is part of our genetic endowment
associated with the evolution through natural selection of specialised
neural networks within the brain, and that its attack on the 'Standard Social
Science Model' of human nature is effective: "All but the most sceptical
readers of his book are likely to be persuaded that the capacity for
language has, at least in some respects, been genetically programmed into
the human brain throughout the many millennia of the evolution of our
species. All but the most recalcitrant will concede that Pinker's broadside
against the 'Standard Social Science Model' has some justification. For it
would seem almost beyond question that twentieth-century social
scientists have, for ideological or rationalistic motives, tended to
underestimate grossly the extent to which human nature is shaped and
constrained by genetic factors." However, Webster finds Pinker's
speculation about other specialized neural networks that may have evolved
within the human brain, such as "intuitive mechanics" and "intuitive
biology", to be questionable, and believes that there is a danger that they
will be treated by others as science. Webster believes that such
speculations "play into the hands of those who advocate the kind of
extreme genetic determinism whose excesses Pinker himself generally
manages to avoid."[4]
Chomsky
"...People would like to think that there's somebody up there who knows
what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't
even think about questions of vital importance. We hope somebody is
paying attention who has some competence. Let's hope the ship has a
captain, in other words, since we're not taking part in what's going on...
It is an important feature of the igeological system to impose on people the
feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and
important issues: they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to
develop a star system, an array of figures who are media creations or
creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights
we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently
assign the right to control our lives and to control international affairs...."
- Noam Chomsky
Chomsky on Language Acquisition
According to Noam Chomsky, the mechanism of language acquisition
formulates from innate processes. This theory is evidenced by children
who live in the same linguistic community without a plethora of different
experiences who arrive at comparable grammars. Chomsky thus proposes
that "all children share the same internal contraints which characterize
narrowly the grammar they are going to construct." (Chomsky, 1977, p.98)
Since we live in a biological world, "there is no reason for supposing the
mental world to be an exception." (Chomsky, 1977, p.94) And he believes
that there is a critical age for learningn a language as is true for the overall
development of the human body.
Chomsky's mechanism of language acquisition also links structural
linguistics to empiricist thought: "These principles [of structuralism and
empiricism] determine the type of grammars that are available in
principles. They are associated with an evaluation procedure which, given
possible grammars, selects the best one. The evaluation procedure is also
part of the biological given. The acquisition of language thus is a process
of selection of the best grammar compatible with the available data. If the
principles can be made sufficiently restrictive, there will also be a kind of
'discovery procedure.' " (Chomsky, 1977, p.117)
Chomsky on Generative Grammar
Chomsky's beliefs about generative grammar are the factors which help
differentiate his views from the structuralist theory; he believes that
generative grammar must "render explicit the implicit knowledge of the
speaker." (Chomsky, 1977, p.103) His model of generative grammar
begins with an axiom and a set of well-defined rules to generate the
desired word sequences. The following is an example of how Chomsky
proposes individuals spontaneously comprehend that certain combinations
of three words make sense whilst others do not:

One goal of Chomsky's work with linguistics is to create an explanatory
theory of generative grammar. When we are able to provide a deductive
chain of reasoning that does not uphold the general principles of thought,
facts termed "boundary conditions" arise and serve as a potential
explanation for the phenomena associated with an explanatory theory. The
rules of the English auxiliary system serve as a good example to
demonstrate this principle
chomsky on Semantics
"[T]he study of meaning and reference and of the use of language should
be excluded from the field of linguistics. . . . [G]iven a lingustic theory, the
concepts of grammer are constructed (so it seems) on the basis of primitive
notions that are not semantic (where the grammar contains the phonology
and syntax), but that the linguistic theory itself must be chosen so as to
provide the best possible explanation of semantic phenomena, as well as
others." (Chomsky, 1977, p.139)
"It seems that other cognitive systems -- in particular, our system of beliefs
concerning things in the world and their behavior -- playan essential part
in our judments of meaning and reference, in an extremely intricate
manner, and it is not at all clear that much will remain if we try to separate
the purely linguistic components of what in informal usage or even in
technical discussion we call 'the meaning of lingustic expression.' "
(Chomsky, 1977, p.142)
"He showed that surface structure played a much more important role in
semantic interpretation that had been supposed; if so, then the Standard
hypothesis, according to which it was the deep structure that completely
determined this interpretation, is false." (Chomsky, 1977, p.151)
Chomsky on Behaviorism
"Whatever 'behaviorism' may have served in the past, it has become
nothing more than a set of arbitrary restrictions on 'legitimate' theory
construction . . . the kind of intellectual shackles that physical scientists
would surely not tolerate and that condemns any intellectual pursuit to
insignificance." (Bjork, 1993, p.204) Noam Chomsky is known as one of
the leading authorities pertaining to language and language
chomsky
Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to
learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures
which children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the childs
mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a language acquisition
device or LAD which encodes the major principles of a language and its
grammatical structures into the childs brain. Children have then only to
learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to
form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn a
language through imitation alone because the language spoken around
them is highly irregular adults speech is often broken up and even
sometimes ungrammatical. Chomskys theory applies to all languages as
they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appear
to be hard-wired to acquire the grammar. Every language is extremely
complex, often with subtle distinctions which even native speakers are
unaware of. However, all children, regardless of their intellectual ability,
become fluent in their native language within five or six years.
Evidence to support Chomskys theory
Children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as
getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order.
If an adult deliberately said a grammatically incorrect sentence, the
child would notice.
Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as mama
ball, which they cannot have learnt passively.
Mistakes such as I drawed instead of I drew show they are not
learning through imitation alone.
Chomsky used the sentence colourless green ideas sleep furiously,
which is grammatical although it doesnt make sense, to prove his theory:
he said it shows that sentences can be grammatical without having any
meaning, that we can tell the difference between a grammatical and an
ungrammatical sentence without ever having heard the sentence before,
and that we can produce and understand brand new sentences that no one
has ever said before.
Evidence against Chomskys theory
Critics of Chomskys theory say that although it is clear that children
dont learn language through imitation alone, this does not prove that they
must have an LAD language learning could merely be through general
learning and understanding abilities and interactions with other people