11/7/2015

The roots of language | Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello | Science | The Guardian

The roots of language: what makes us

different from other animals?
At the heart of our unique language ability lie other forms of cognition and cooperation, argue Paul
Ibbotson and MichaelTomasello
Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello
Thursday 5 November 2015 14.29GMT

The natural world is full of wondrous adaptations such as camouflage, migration and
echolocation. In one sense, the quintessentially human ability to use language is no
more remarkable than these other talents. However, unlike these other adaptations,
language seems to have evolved just once, in one out of 8.7 million species on earth
today. The hunt is on to explain the foundations of this ability and what makes us
different from other animals.

Grammar1.0
The intellectual most closely associated with trying to pin down that capacity is Noam
Chomsky. He proposed a universal grammatical blueprint that was unique to humans.
This blueprint operated like a computer program. Instead of running Windows or Excel,
this program performed operations on language any language. Regardless of which
of the 6000+ human languages that this code could be exposed to, it would guide the
learner to the correct adult grammar.
It was a bold claim: despite the surface variations we hear between Swahili, Japanese
and Latin, they are all run on the same piece of underlying software. As ever, remarkable
claims require remarkable evidence, and in the 50 years since some of these ideas were
laid out, history has not been kind.
First, it turned out that it is really difficult to state what is in universal grammar in a
way that does justice to the sheer diversity of human languages. Second, it looks as if
kids dont learn language in the way predicted by a universal grammar; rather, they start
with small pockets of reliable patterns in the language they hear, such as Wheres the X?,
I wanna X, More X, Its a X, Im X-ing it, Put X here, Mommys X-ing it, Lets X it, Throw X,
X gone, I X-ed it, Sit on the X, Open X, X here, Theres a X, X broken and gradually build
their grammar on these patterns, from the bottom up.

Universalcognition
If not universal grammar, then what? We know language uses a lot of mental processes
that are not unique to language, such as memory, categorisation and forming analogies.
For example, when a child says, We holded it, they have made an analogy to past
tense verbs with the regular -ed ending. These kinds of mistakes give us vital clues to the
mechanisms children are using to build their language.
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The roots of language | Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello | Science | The Guardian

Acknowledging that much of language uses the same process as the rest of cognition, a
new branch of linguistics has developed from those principles. This cant be the whole
story, however. The limitation of this approach is that although these processes are not
unique to language, they are not unique to our species either. For example, chinchillas
can form categories based on speech, yet clearly lack anything like human language. So
what is going on?

Puttingourheadstogether
It might be that general cognitive processes such as memory and categorisation are
necessary, but not sufficient, for language. For a string of sounds to be understood as
language, something else is needed Chomsky knew this, and his proposal was universal
grammar. There is exciting new evidence showing that this something else is a broader
adaptation for culture and cooperation. This brings us right back to the original question
of our place in the natural world. We share similar but different histories from our
evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees. Why is that we can understand language and
acts of communication, such as pointing, and they cannot?
Understanding communication requires a deeper understanding of how humans work
their intentions and, specifically, their communicative intentions. Chimpanzees just
dont share this level of understanding. Chimpanzees and other great apes can discern
what someone is intending to do when she pursues a concrete goal, like obtaining a
banana, but they cannot discern what someone intends them to pay attention to or to
think, which is the purpose of communicative intentions.
Importantly, these same basic processes of intention-reading are necessary not only for
language, but also for discerning what someone is communicating when they simply
poke their index finger out in a particular direction for the purpose of communication.
To understand why someone is pointing to, for example, a bicycle leaning against a tree,
one must share some background experience and knowledge with that person to
determine why on earth they would be directing ones attention to this particular
situation at this particular moment.
The idea is that something (we dont precisely know what) in our evolutionary history
placed pressure on us (but not chimpanzees) to evolve the kind of mental machinery
that allows us to read communicative intentions. One of the consequences of this was
that it provided a key mental capacity for language. But it also put in place the potential
for us to take part in ever more complex and large-scale cooperative ventures that form
the fabric of our different cultures.

Theplaceoflanguage
So in some ways, saying language is unique is stating things the wrong way around.
Language is not the unique thing in itself it is an expression of what is unique: the
ability to put our heads together and collaborate. Language is our species party trick,
akin to the octopus rolling up like a coconut. Unlike the octopus, humans unique
adaptation caused a profound cascade of consequences for our species, the full breadth
of which we are still grappling to understand.
Paul Ibbotson is a lecturer in developmental psychology at the Open University. Michael
Tomasello is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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The roots of language | Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello | Science | The Guardian

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