The following are notes, mostly verbatim, taken from my recent reading about language, mixed with my observations and reactions ---some are of decidedly personal nature--about language development and second-language acquisition. The notes were initially intended for my own reference and use, and not for publication, thus references are mostly missing. However, interested readers are encouraged to go to the reference section at the end of the notes for further reading and verification. Such readers are also welcome to write to me.
Have you ever wondered and marveled at a spectacle of a political or religious speaker standing on a platform, addressing tens or even hundreds of thousands of spectators who listened in rapt attention and silence, except for occasional thunderous echoing of certain words or slogans used by the speaker (Nazi gatherings where Hitler kept his audience spell-bound; similarly, Khomeini held the Iranian Shiites in rapture. Given all the talks about individualism in men, humans are herd animals and easily manipulated), a spectacle only occurs among humans, and no where else in the animal kingdom? I do. Such a spectacle takes place only among humans because only humans possess language, which is much more than an animal communication system (ACS) utilized by lesser organisms.
After tackling all kinds of intellectual (not social, unfortunately) problems and issues, humans finally are turning to the area which is near and dear and familiar, and yet far from being understood: language. Language is not the same as linguistics. Philosophers in the Anglo-American world examined language as a philosophical issue in the first half of the 20th century. Then an Austrian engineer turned philosopher Wittgenstein, student of Bertrand Russell, devoted his formidable intellectual powers to it, gaining fame and admiration for his efforts.I tried to read these philosophers (Russell, Ayers, Wittgenstein) and didn't understand a thing. But the subject remains intriguing to me, a student of several languages, a talker, a writer wannabe , a jokester, a punster, a student of the human brain, and a seeker of facts and truths.
Recently psychologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists are trying to speculate on the origin of language. Derek Bickerton's book "Adam's Tongue" was an effort in that direction. The following are notes taken verbatim from the book for my own reference.
Speech and language are not synonymous.
You can have speech without it meaning a thing; lots of parrots do. Speech is just a vehicle for language. So is structured manual sign of the American Sign Language.
Language evolution is part of human evolution. Language origin is considered "the hardest problem in science" because language leaves no fossils.
Niche construction theory:
Evolution is no longer selfish genes mindlessly replicating themselves. By impacting on the environment (goats cause deforestation, worms enrich soil, beavers flood valleys), organisms guide their own evolution. Human culture is niche. It's the way we adapt the environment to suit ourselves, in the same way the complex worlds of ant nests or termite mounds are the way ants and termites adapt the environment to suit them. We do it by learning. They do it be instinct. We can do it by learning only because we have language. And language itself is a prize example of niche construction.
ACS (Animal Communication System):
Almost all animate organism communicate with one another somehow.
Information conveyed by ACS falls into 3 broad categories: for survival, mating and reproduction, and social needs. With humans, language serves varied needs. No ACS can be used to talk about the weather, or the scenery, or a neighbor's latest doings, let alone to plan for the future or to recall the past.
ACS have three basic features:
-they grew from behaviors not originally intended for communication
-they respond only to situations that directly affect fitness
-most importantly, signs of ACS are indexical, not symbolic
Levels of Intelligence:
According to Euan Macphail, there are 3:
-there are organisms that could associate a stimulus with a response.
-there are organisms that could in addition associate a stimulus with another stimulus.
-And there are us, humans, who have language.
Bickerton asserts that language makes us more intelligent. Brains don't grow by their own volition. They grow because animals need more brain cells and connections to more effectively carry out new things they are beginning to do. We didn't get a bigger and better brain that then gave us language; we got language that gave us a bigger and better brain.
Levels of Language:
Phonology: meaningless sounds
Morphology: meaningful sound sequences
Syntax: meaningful utterances
Pidgins and Creoles:
A pidgin is what people produce when they have to talk to other people but don't have a common language.
A creole is a language that has evolved from a pidgin but serves as the native language of a speech community
Informative and Manipulative:
ACS is primarily manipulative and secondarily informative, whereas the reverse is true with language.
Language units are symbolic because they're designed to convey information. Information can be past, present, or future, here, there, or anywhere. But to a very considerable extent, its value lies in its novelty, it had better not be about the here and now.
But the preceding paragraph is no help in explaining how anything could have come to be symbolic in the first place
Kinds of Signals:
-indexical: signals are irredeemably bound to the here and now since they must point directly to whatever they refer to.
-iconic: something that resembles what it refers to: it can be part of the thing referred to, or a picture of it, or part of it, or the noise it makes---anything that somehow evokes an object in the real world (or even an abstract class, as symbols do, it turns put).
-symbolic: most words are symbolic. Without symbolic words, we couldn't have language.
Homology and Analogy:
Whenever a biologist finds a trait that's shared by 2 or more species, his first thought is likely to be, is this a homology or an analogy.
Homology is more common than analogy. Evolution seldom throws stuff away. It works, in Darwin's phrase, through "descent through modification," so any feature of a common ancestor is likely to show up in some form or another in species that descend from that ancestor.
Niche: 3 components:
-Habitat: a particular type of environment that can be both macro (savanna) and/or micro (topsoil)
-Nourishment: a particular kind of food.
-Means: a particular way if obtaining that food.
Genes and Environment:
Except perhaps for the very simplest creatures, genes do not mandate behaviors. They simply make them possible. Circumstances will determine how far, if at all, those possibilities are realized. When genes and environment pull in opposite directions, environment win. It has to. It makes sure that those who don't obey its demands die, and their genes die with them.
Evolution and Speciation:
-"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", said Dobzhansky. And speciation lies at the heart of evolution, be it the evolution of language or evolution of anything else.
-According to Robert Foley and Marta Lahr of Cambridge University, speciation, far from an event, is a process that may span as long as a million years or more. Confirming their conclusion, genetic findings made since their paper at a meeting suggest that human and chimp ancestors went on interbreeding for more than a million years after their original split
Theory of punctuated equilibrium and niche construction theory:
TPE proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972, but lacked explanatory mechanism until niche construction theory came along, which neatly explains the otherwise inexplicable stop-go-stop of evolution. A species goes merrily along its way, happily settled in its old niche. Then something in its environment changes; survival demands that a new niche be constructed, real fast. But once that niche lasts, you stay the way you were, as long as the niche lasts.
The NCT also explains why, since the last common ancestor of humans and apes, there have been so many speciations in our line and so few in ape line.
The Challenge from Chomsky:
-Biology vs culture: Chomsky is in the camp believing that human nature is largely determined by biological factors. The opposing camp believes that human nature is largely determined by human culture, which in turn has broken free of biological constraints.
-In 2002 appeared in the "Science's Compass" section of the prestigious journal Science a paper titled "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did it Evolve?" by Marc Hauser, Norm Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch
* Hauser and Chomsky had been on the opposite sides of two of most crucial issues of language evolution: 1) Hauser believed that language developed out of a prior ACS. 2) Hauser regarded natural selection as the principal driving force in evolution in general and language evolution in particular. Chomsky argued against any role for natural selection in language evolution.
* The paper was a compromise between H and C.
The compromise was possible by the partition of the territory of language. Language was now officially divided into two parts: FLB, the faculty of language (broad sense), and FLN (narrow sense), which formed part of the FLB. FLB was everything in language except the "internal computation system"---whatever drives syntax---and that, at least as a first approximation, was simply recursion (the capacity to embed one linguistic structure within another of the same kind---one phrase, clause, or sentence inside another). FLN was the only part of FLB that was both (a) limited to humans and (b) specifically dedicated to language. The rest of of LB either had antecedents in other species or, if developed by humans, was I Italy developed for purposes other than purely linguistic ones.
*HCF's position is far from the position of Bickerton since it didn't address human evolution. B holds that the evolution of language forms part of the evolution of the human species, and to think of one is to think of another. B thinks that humans started with only a prerequisites of language, and developed the rest as it went along constructing the niche.
* It is a fallacy of thinking to think in terms of human uniqueness when talking about evolution because we then would see evolution the wrong way. We would see how like or unlike other species to humans. We would make the human species the centerpiece of evolution while evolution doesn't have a centerpiece, or even a center. And even if it did, it would look too self-serving to put ourselves there. We should try to find out what happened and how and why it happened in the period between us and the last common ancestor of chimps and humans
-Comparison between C and B's model of language evolution
B C
Time 1: Animals have concepts that Time 1: same
won't merge
Time 2: Protohumans start talking Time2: Typically human concepts,
which will merge, appear
Time3: Talking produces typically Time 3: The brain gets wired.
human concepts
Time 4: Merge appears and starts Time4: same
merging typically human concepts
Time 5: The brain maybe gets rewired Time 5: Capacities for complex
(plausible but not certain) thought, planning, etc. develop
Time 6: Capacities for complex Time 6: People start talking
thought, planning, etc. develop
Brain and Thinking
Online thinking/RAM thinking/Subhuman and Pre-language human thinking
According to Gary Marcus of New York University, the brain does its job in a series of steps, along a one-way trajectory:
* Receive info from senses.
* Send it to be analyzes for identification.
* Choose a course of action based on the analysis.
* Send an order to execute that action.
Offline thinking/CAM/language human thinking:
What happens when we think even the simplest of thought, say, "Roses are red."
* Think of "roses."
* Think of "red."
* Connect the two.
You may, or may not, have a visual image of a red rose. If you do, you will say, "I think in images." If you don't, you will say, "I think in words." In both cases that's like the sun crossing the sky---not what's really happening at all. There are no images in the brain. There are no words in the brain. All that's there are neurons and their connections and differential rates and strengths of electrochemical impulses. These provide a subjective sense of words and images. The metamorphosis may seem magical but it's no more magical than the "changing colors" of mountains at sunset, likewise produced by processes in your brain.
Concepts are not the same as Categories:
A concept is something you can "think about" and "think with," whereas with categories, all you can do is to say whether something belongs in them or not. That's the difference. The similarity is that both terms refer to some kind of class into which things can be stored---leopards, or tables, or grandmothers, anything at all. Because of that similarity, concepts and categories are sometimes treated as different names for the same thing. But if we don't distinguish between them, we'll never understand why humans differ from nonhumans because humans have both concepts and categories while nonhumans have only categories.
Without words we'd never have gotten into having concepts. Words are simply permanent anchors that most concepts have---a means of pulling together all the sights and sounds and smells, all the varied kinds of knowledge we have about what the concept refers to.
Two discontinuities between humans and nonhumans:
We have language and no other species does.
We have seemingly limitless creativity and no other species does.
Language and creativity, for all practical purposes, are infinite. Is this mere coincidence?
For two independent discontinuities of such size to exist in a single species is too bizarre in evolutionary terms. So it's worth exploring the possibility that the two discontinuities spring form the same source.
Language involves the mind and creativity involves the mind---the mind being no more than the brain at work. So the likeliest cause of such a double discontinuity would seem to lie in a difference between the workings of human and nonhuman brains where humans have concepts and nonhumans have only categories. ,
From signal to word:
In the initial, recruitment phase of protolanguage, there were neither concepts nor words. Recruitment signals weren't words. They were iconic and/or indexical signals that, to those who used them, were no different from all other ACS signals that they already had. Signals had to become words and words had to give birth to concepts before anything you could even all a protolanguage could be born.
The signals associated with recruitment were the only signals in the protolanguage ACS that had displacement, and in the beginning they were tied to what had happened or was about to happen.
Words didn't follow but preceded concepts.
Language was originally a combination of mime, signs and sound.
Language, like niche construction, is an autocatalytic process. Once it's started, it drives itself; it creates and fulfills its own demands.
There are huge similarities between ants and humans:
-population: human population ballooned to numbers that hitherto had been achieved only by insects.
-animal domestication for food: just as ants domesticated aphids, pasturing them on plants, and stroking them until they exuded fluids, so did humans domesticate cattle, goats, sheep, yak, water buffalo, llamas, camels, alpacas, and reindeer, pasturing them on grass, and milking them.
-just as ants prepared beds, planted spores, brought in plant food, and harvested the resulting fungi, so did humans prepare fields, plant seeds, fertilize, compost, manure them, and harvest the resulting cereals and other crops.
-just as ants built enormous underground cities, so did humans build enormous aboveground cities.
Are the similarities coincidences? Not at all. Niche construction processes determine the kind of occupation a species will follow and the kind of society it will have to live as a result. Whether the niche is created slowly, by instinct, over millions of years or (in part at least) by cultural learning over mere thousands makes no difference. The niche makes the difference. The only question is, are we through yet, or is it still changing us?
Is our fate going to be like that of ant? There was a time when ants too were free-roving organisms. They are no more. They live in huge colonies now. It happened to them; why can't it happen to us? The degree of social control under which we already labor would have been both incomprehensible and intolerable to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors.
And do think about this: for ten thousand years, ever since cities and governments began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, , revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs---all those opposed to the current norms of society---have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered, or executed throughout the last hundred centuries. Since the vast majority of these nonconformists died young or spent their procreative years in monosexual jails, their contribution to the human gene pool has been negligible. But the passive, the stupid, the compliant, the loyal, the obedient---they prospered like weeds, spreading their seeds far and wide. Has this really had no effect on human nature?
Contrary to popular misconception, evolution in the human species is not effectively over. The advances of last few years in molecular biology have told us this is not the case. Evolution is still proceeding, genes are changing, in ways we still cannot fully understand. By the time we understand them, the damage may have been done. It doesn't take many generations to turn a wolf into a dog.
Already there have been signs and portents. During the past couple of thousand years, caste systems---systems like those of ants, where an individual's occupation and fate are predestined at birth---have come into existence in many parts of the world, most strikingly in India. To most of us, caste systems are just quaint and rather repellent aberrations. This view may be dangerously optimistic. The caste systems should be better seen as trial runs, precursors of which is to come once the last few kicks in our ape nature have been eliminated.
Ask yourself whether you are an ant, a compliant, passive, rule-conscious, law-abiding, chicken-hearted, ignorant human who believes in the nonsense peddled by your religious and political leaders, a lapdog, or you are a solitary wolf, a "strange" human, an ornery ape?
Bickerton's hypothesis lends support to a view that early men had some rudiments of language. Now let's look at the interactions between early men and modern men:
1. Two phases of human expansion: a) movement of Homo erectus out of Africa 1 to 2 million years ago; b) spread of Homo sapiens around the globe, beginning 100,000 years ago and reaching every continent 60,000 years ago (Wade, p. 46). I read several years ago that at one time the Homo sapiens were almost extinct because the population was down to a mere estimated 4,000. But somehow the species hung on and survived and now numbers 7 billion strong. Inbreeding among modern humans at one time must have been strong if at one time Homo sapiens were down to 4,000. Look at the strong facial resemblance of individuals within each ethnicity.
2.. Dr. Cavalli-Sforza's genetic studies using DNA markers have indicated that Europeans are a mixed population that emerged only about 30,000 years ago and appears to have about 65% Asian ancestry and 35% African ancestry (plus or minus 8% error rate). Australian aboriginals, though they appear to look more like Africans, are genetically closer to Chinese. (Wade, p.49). Thus, It appeared that Homo sapiens moved northward and in the northeast direction out of Africa and then later the larger group in Asia moved westward to Europe where they met the other group and produced the Europeans. Recent genetic studies have uncovered that Homo sapiens did mate with the Neanderthals and there are between 1-4 % of Neanderthal traces in the the human gene pool. The Africans have the lowest % while Asians, if my memory does not fail me, have the highest 4%. Genetic traces aside, have you noticed that among modern men, there are some individuals who show some obvious brutish Neanderthal facial features?
Study about interesting modern humans involving second-language acquisition:
Christopher cannot draw simple figures, add 2 and 2 or tie his shoes. His IQ is 76 and has a mental age of nine (Erad, p. 94. For more details, see The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity by Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli) . English is his mother tongue. Christopher can switch among Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Modern Greek, Hindi, Italain, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh and translate to and from English. Going between other languages is harder for him.
He has other problems:
-His biggest limitation is most of his foreign languages, his English grammar influences what he says or translates. when asked to translate, "Who can speak German?" he answered with "Wer kann sprechen Deutsch?" not "Wer kan Deutsch sprechen?" What he does is to employ "calque"---a word-for-word translation from one language to another. (One well-known example is the English calque "long time no see" of the Mandarin "hao jiu bu jian.)
-Smith, Tsimpli, and some colleagues gave Christopher another kind of linguistic workout by teaching British Sign Language (BSL), an experiment they document in their second book about him, the Signs of a Savant: Language against the Odds. His understanding of BSL was good. He had difficulty learning to use grammatical functions that required precise hand control. He developed eye contact with his teacher, but because he doesn't generally look at faces, he misses the facial movements that BSL uses to signal negation or ask questions like "What?" or "Where?"
Carla grew up speaking Italian and English . When she began training to become a simultaneous translator, her language ability was localized on the left side of her brain. But after the training, English shifted to her right brain while her Italian remained on the left.
Study of individuals like Christopher and Carla, together with sophisticated new instruments like PET scanners have led neurophysiologists to suspect that there is not a single center for language. Some findings:
-Like the Cray computer,a person's first language is tightly organized in terms of nerve cell circuits. Second languages are more loosely organized in the brain, which is why it often takes longer to find words in them. But a knock in one part of the brain can knock out a native language and leave later- learned languages intact or vice versa.
-Different aspects of language, like proper nouns, common nouns, and regular or irregular verbs, are processed in different areas of the brain. But these areas do not send their signals to a common destination for integration. Rather, language and perhaps all cognition are governed by some as yet undiscovered mechanism that binds different brain areas together in time, not place.
-Each human appears to have a unique pattern of organization for language ability---as unique as facial features or fingerprints. Broca's and Wernicke's areas are indeed important language-processing regions in most people, but many additional language-areas are found elsewhere in the brain. Two left-brain regions called the temporal and parietal lobes are particularly rich in multiple-language areas. Each essential language area is composed of sharply defined patch of nerve cells, each about the size of a grape. The cells in each patch appear to be connected to many others located in distant parts of the brain. Different patches govern language functions such as reading, identifying the meaning of words, recalling verbs and processing the words and grammars of foreign languages. The essential areas can be thought of as "convergence zones" where the key to the combination of components of words and objects is stored. Thus knowledge of words and concepts is distributed widely throughout the brain but needs a third-party mediator---the convergence zone---to bring the knowledge together, during reactivation. The convergence zone concept explains the odd language disabilities of a stroke patient named Adam. When shown a picture of a dog, Adam can say it is man's
best friend, has four legs and barks, but he cannot summon the name for dog. Nor can he distinguish one animal from another by its name. But Adam can name man-made tools with ease. The explanation: language convergence zones for natural objects are significantly damaged, but zones for man-made objects are intact.
-The process of learning a language shapes the formation of the essential areas. From birth to the age of two, the child's brain undergoes a explosive growth of synaptic connections and is primed to learn the sounds and grammar of any language. After the age of two, language synapses that do not receive inputs from early vocalizations begin to be eliminated or suppressed, a process that continues until about age 15. (Wade, pp 134-140)
-Williams syndrome---an enigmatic birth disorder caused by the loss of one copy of the gene that makes elastin, a protein that is the chief constituent of the body's elastic fibers, and possibly by the loss of another gene or genes of unknown function that lie next to elastin on chromosome 7---characterized by enriched language and sociability skills may help solve the huge debate in cognitive psychology over the nature of language: is language special from the word go, under the control of special genes and located in special parts of the brain or does it piggyback on general mental function and intelligence? Studies involving children having Williams syndrome suggest that language is unique because there is a genetic defect that spares it (Wade, pp. 149-150).
-Brains may have separate units to digest reading and speech (Wade, pp. 155-157)
Comments/Insights/Personal Observations:
My interest in language development and foreign language acquisition has been long and tinged with a mixture of humiliation and pride. As mentioned before, my speech development was slow as a child. I was slow in learning to speak and when I finally did (as told to me by my mother), just before I turned three years of age, I couldn't articulate several speech sounds and I badly stuttered. That of course worried my mother and caused me to suffer from humiliation and anger when I was taunted and laughed at by the neighborhood kids and classmates. By the time I reached high school, the stuttering subsided much and the articulation problems largely disappeared. During high school years, I discovered to my delight I had no problem absorbing English and French. Still, I was painfully aware that my articulation of the speech sounds of these two languages was very poor. Nowadays I still have problems with the final /l/ articulation.
When I found myself dreaming in English I knew then I had become bilingual. Although I could navigate in French and Spanish when I have to, I know at best I am still a bilingual speaker. Knowing a language in depth takes a lifetime of dedicated study. And to be bilingual is to understand what Goethe meant when he observed that one must speak two languages to fully understand one (Kurtz p. 10) Learning English has helped me to be more aware of the intricacies and beauty of my mother tongue.
I always wonder if my interest in language development and second-language acquisition has something to do with, both psychologically and physically, my childhood's speech impediments. Besides having an interest in French and Spanish and about half a dozen (German, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese) more, I notice that I have a flair for striking, unusual humorous one liners which astounds and delights listeners, besides coming up with speedy retorts, repartees and ripostes in arguments on top of being able to express exquisite feelings in verse in English.
Reading Babel No More, a book about super polyglots, has driven me back to second-language learning with renewed vigor. I got inspired by the unusual characters in the book.
Wissai
July 30, 2013
References
Bickerton, Derek, Adam's Tongue (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).
Erard, Michael, Babel No More (New York: Free Pess, 2012).
Kurtz, Paul, The Turbulent Universe (New York: Prometheus, 2013).
Smith, Neil, and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli, The Mind of a Savant: Language and Modularity (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).
Smith, Neil, and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli, Gary Morgan, and Bencie Woll, The Signs of a Savant: Language against the Odds (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Wade, Nicholas, ed. The Science Times Book of Language and Linguistics (New York: New York Times Books, 2000)
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