Language, Thought, and Space (I)

I know I still haven't written my third post on Lewontin's paper in which he criticises inquiries into the evolution of language and cognition and it will be some time until I'll be able to post it as I'm going back home on Saturday and won't haven internet access for more than a month.

But in the next couple of days I want to write something about different: How different cultures speak about and conceptualize space.
In my opinion, this is a very fascinating avenue of linguistic research that gives much insight into the nature of language and cognition as well as their relationship. In addition, it also presents us with new facts and considerations when we try to study the evolution of these traits.
By studying language and cognition cross-culturally we come to the problem of language evolution from the other way so to speak.

I will focus on the work of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands and especially on the introductory part of Stephen Levinson's (2003) book "Space in Language and Cognition." I've started reading it because I wanted to improve my knowledge of some aspects of the cognition-oriented strands of linguistics and anthropology I unfortunately know way too little about.

I’ve written about the idea of frames of references and cognitive coordinate systems before , I haven’t said much about linguistic data that bears on this question. More generally, I, following other researchers, have argued that cognition and cognitive representations of communicative interactions are to a large part spatial in nature or at least analogous to spatial thinking. But research done by the people at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands and others has shown that there is a surprising diversity in linguistic frame of references across cultures.

What exactly does this mean for any account of cognition? What we have here is of course related to the contentious issue of the relation of language and thought. Generally there people who tend too emphasize the importance of a Language of Thought over language itself (e.g. cognitivism), with others tending toward the view that language and culture shape your cognitive style to a significant amount (e.g. linguistic relativism, linguistic determinism). These theorists can be called “lumpers” who do not see it necessary to distinguish between the semantic content of a language and underlying conceptual representations, and “splitters” who insist on this distinction. (Levinson 1997: 13f.)

The issue is often seen as a black and white matter, with Benjamin Lee Whorf being portrayed as the bad guy who had a way too extreme view. This, however, is misguided, as Whorf’s main interest was not to advocate any idea of linguistic determinism per se but instead to stress the importance of how perspectives embodied in a language influence what we pay attention to in a situation and also how we conceptualise it: “‘users of different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world’” (Whorf 1956: 221).

This is not to say that language is a prison we can’t get out of. But, as language and social practices can be said to embody certain perspectives on the world, it is reasonable to argue that a child growing up in a certain community will also learn to adopt and construe these perspectives during her cognitive development. As language is a primary source that introduces children to new ways of organizing the world around them it stands to reason that the concepts and viewpoints expressed in a language have a significant impact on cognitive representations.

Of course research on the non-linguistic cognition of infants and non-human primates has shown that their mental representations are already surprisingly sophisticated and complex. Some of these cognitive capacities are certainly specified innately or at least helped by innate biases. Others may emerge due to the nature and early imprint of cultural interaction. But some concepts, namely abstract, relational ones, seem to be absent from non-human cognition completely, and in humans seem to be provided and picked up primarily by and through language during cognitive development. In fact, research on infant and childhood cognition supports the fact that the acquisition of relational concepts with the help of language may be one of the key factors that made us “so smart” (Gentner 2003, Penn et al. 2008).

If we bear this in mind, the question then is not whether language influences or determines thought, but to clarify the interactions and relationship between innate biological propensities, the environment, language and other cultural practices. If for example, we allow for multiple modes of representation in cognitive processing we may get a much clearer view on the issue. If, as mentioned above, we see semantic representations and conceptual representations as different levels of representation we can accommodate the variety of semantic distinctions in different levels with maintaining some form of ‘psychic unity of mankind’ with shared atomic concepts across our species. (Levinson 1997)

In my next post I’ll write about how the research done by the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguists on the relationship between cross-linguistic differences in descriptions of space sheds light on this topic. I will draw on the 2003 book Space in language and cognition: explorations in cognitive diversity by Stephen C. Levinson, the director of the language and cognition group at the institute, in which he sums up much of the research that was done there over the years.

References:
Gentner, D. (2003). Why we’re so smart. In D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp.195-235). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. (1997) From outer to inner space: Linguistic categories and non-linguistic thinking. In E. Pederson & J. Nuyts, eds., With Language in Mind: the Relationship Between Linguistic and Conceptual Representation, 13-45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. (2003) Space in Language and Cognition : Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Penn, Derek C, Keith J. Holyoak. and Daniel J. Povinelli (2008): Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (31:2): 109-130.

Whorf, B.L. (1956,) Language, thought and reality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Review of 'The Origins of Human Communication' in Science Magazine

The April 3rd issue of Science Magazine features a review of Michael Tomasello's "The Origin of Human Communication" (see my ongoing summary of the book here, here, and here) by Nick Enfield, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguists in the Netherlands and is co-editor of "The Roots of Human Sociality" (part of which I discussed briefly here. See also Enfield's Reviews of James Hurford's The Origins of Meaning and Peter Macneilage's The Origin of Speech here).

Here's how Enfield neatly sums up Tomasello's position on the evolution of language

Requests form one of three classes of social action on which Tomasello builds his account of human communication. The others are informing-helping (e.g., when one person points to keys that another just dropped) and sharing (e.g., when two people's attitudes toward a third person align in the course of a gossip session). He summarizes research showing that all three social motives are fully evident in the communicative behavior of prelinguistic infants and all but absent among our closest relatives, the great apes. Humans have a special combination of cooperative instincts, prosocial motives, high-level intention attribution, and moral propensities (3). Tomasello contends that without this unique psychological wherewithal in the domain

Although he applauds Tomasello's general solution for evolution of complex language, Enfield rightly points out that one of Tomasello's shortcomings is that he doesn't follow through with his idea how we got from a gesture-based shared intentionality inrastructure to full blown syntactic language. In accordance with Paul Bloom's assertion that

"Every species gets the syntax it deserves" (Bloom 2000)

Tomasello links the social functions of requesting, informing and sharing to rising levels of linguistic complexity.

"He dubs these "simple syntax" (strongly dependent on immediate context), "serious syntax" (for making unambiguous reference across contexts), and "fancy syntax" (for organizing long and complex narratives). But this is essentially as far as his links to grammar go, promissory notes notwithstanding."

In this regard, I'm looking forward to the forhtcoming second volume of James Hurford's Language in The Light of Evolution series which focuses on the origins of linguistic form.

What should also be mentioned is that Tomasello has an aversion to telling "fairy-tales," that is, tentative evolutionary scenarios of how exactly language could have evolved during our evolutionary history. This position is directly opposed to that of Derek Bickerton, who in his new book "Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans" argues that the only way to get even a faint idea of how language could have evolved is to look at the environment and changing niches our pre-human ancestors lived in.
After having read the book, I have very mixed feelings about Bickerton's proposal and will come back to it in a later post.

Hat tip: Deric Bownds' Mindblog

Michael Tomasello - The Origins of Human Communication (summary pt. 3)

I wanted to finish this summary on the weekend but just didn't get round to it because I've got a lot to do right now. Here it is anyway:

Like I said in my last post, the rest of Chapter 2 focuses on what in the chimpanzee/human lineage provided a basis for modern language.

Pointing

One crucial factor is chimpanzees' ability to use and comprehend pointing.

In the wild, chimpanzee pointing is very rare. But approximately 60 to 70 percent of all captive chimps spontaneously use pointing in an imperative manner in their interactions with humans, e.g. by pointing to food that is out of reach as a request for the human to get it. But pointing gestures that aren't imperative are virtually absent. This even applies to language-trained apes such as Kanzi. In the few studies that have been done on this, 96-98 percent of all their pointing were imperative. The other 2-4 had no clear function.

Thus there is nothing in chimpanzees' pointing behavior that would suggest that they are capable of or interested in sharing attention within a joint attentional frame.

On the other hand, in a Brain Science Podcast interview, Stuart Shankar, co-author of The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans , reports of a an encounter he had with the bonobo Panbanisha in which she showed him various plants and classified them, for example, as poisonous. Shankar interprets this as truly sharing attention and informing for the the sake of informing, but Tomasello argues that these kinds of gestures are not to be seen as as truly declarative or informative, as they are more

„recognitory or classificatory, as the ape simply recognizes something and produces the associated sign in recognition“ (Tomasello 2008: 38).

Comprehending Pointing

Interestingly, chimpanzees are much worse comprehending other people's pointing than they are producing it themselves.

In a cool experiment, Tomasello and his colleagues have shown that in a cooperative situation, chimpanzees are unable to grasp the fact that the hidden food is in the bucket that the experimenter is pointing to. Human infants, on the other hand, are able to understand this task by 14 months of age. (Behne et al. 2005) In a competitive version of this task, however, chimpanzees fare much better (Hare & Tomasello 2005). These results suggest that chimpanzees have problems with "shared intentionality," i.e. recognizing situations where you have shared cooperative goals with others and have the same shared attentional frame.

Intentionality & Perception

According to Tomasello, apes and young human children both attribute simple forms of intentionality to other actors. For example, when a human repeatedly tries to give food to a chimpanzee but fails because he is clumsy, the chimp reacts patiently, whereas he gets frustrated when the human is failing to pass him the food for no good reason or because of unwillingness.

Most of the time enculturated chimpanzees also imitate

“demonstrator’s action more often when he freely chose his action than when he was forced to use it by some constraint” (Buttelman et al. 2007: F37, see here).

Crucially, chimpanzees also understand that others have perceptions and see things. In a competitive task with a dominant chimpanzee, for example, subordinate chimps, secretly take a food reward when the other one is unable to see him, but not when the food can be seen by the dominant chimp.

According to Tomasello then,

"The overall conclusion is thus that apes understand others in terms of their goals and perceptions and how these work to determine behavioral decisions, that is, they understand others as intentional, perhaps even rational, agents (Tomasello 2008: 4)

Intentionality + gestural fexibility = evolutionary foundations of language ?

This seems to be the conclusion Tomasello draws at the end of the second chapter. Clearly, when a chimpanzee produces a gesture, he does this in a very flexible manner that even shows sensitivity to the attention of the other. Ape vocalizations on the other hand are mostly inflexible and do not take into account the presence or absence of attention to the displays. Thus there is strong evidence that the capacities apes display in the gestural modality

"are the original font from wich the richness and complexities of human communication and language have flowed. " (Tomasello 2008: 55).

References:

Behne, T., Carpenter, M., and Tomasello, M. (2005). One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions behind gestures in a hiding game. Developmental Science, 8, 492–499.

Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., Call, J., and Tomasello, M. (2007). Enculturated apes imitate rationally. Developmental Science, 10, F31– 38.

Hare, B., and Tomasello, M. (2004). Chimpanzees are more skillful in competitive than in co-operative cognitive tasks. Animal Behaviour, 68, 571–581.

Tomasello, Michael (2008): The Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press.

Michael Tomasello - The Origins of Human Communication (summary pt. 2)

Wow. It has been quite some time since I've posted, and I'm sorry for that. I blame my essays and Boston Legal for it.

Anyway, here's the second part of my summary.

In the second chapter of his (2008) book, Michael Tomasello takes a look at the intentional communicative acts of non-human primates such as chimpanzees.

The question Tomasello asks is this: what are the psychological motives underlying these acts and in how much do they differ from those produced by infants?

Tomasello first differentiates between communicative displays and communicative signals.

Communicative displays are inflexible and involuntary, like a deer's horns or and or a peacock's tail, that deter competitors or attract mates, respectively. The important thing is that these displays are controlled by evolutionary processes over a long period tof time and not by the individual.

Communicative signals on the other hand, are produced, voluntarily and intentionally. The main characteristic of a communicative signal is that the communicator use it to influence the behavior of a single or multiple recipient(s). The communicator is thus actively directing his communicative signal at someone.

An interesting question now regards the famous alarm calls of some monkey species, e.g. the different alarm calls vervet monkeys make when they see a leopard, an eagle, or a snake.

Here's a video of vervet alarm calls, if you're interested:

As Tomasello points out, these calls are mostly involuntary and not very flexible.

The only flexibility regards the so called Audience Effect. This means that

“ individuals may not give certain calls when they are alone or without kin, as opposed to in the presence of others or with kin, but other animal species also refrain from alarm calling in these situations as well (including prairie dogs and domestic chickens; see Owings and Morton 1998), and so one may easily imagine that this is part of the genetically fixed adaptive specialization.“

In addition, there is evidence that cross-fostered macaque species are able to comprehend the signals of the other species, but not to produce it themselves.

Another important difference between human communicative signals and that of other primates is illustrated by the following example: when macaque mothers see (fake) „predators“ approach their offspring, they do not give an alarm calls when they themselves are not at risk (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990).

Vervet Monkeys too, mostly ignore the audience and continue giving alarm calls even when all other monkeys are in a safe position.

For Tomasello and other researchers this clearly shows that the vocalizations of non-human primates are not recipient-directed. Thus, they are to be judged as communicative displays.

Gestural signals, on the other hand, are much more flexible:

„individuals typically produce a gesture only when the recipient is appropriately attentive, and afterward they often monitor the recipient’s reaction and wait for a response;“ (Tomasello 2008: 21)

Also, ape gestures can be put into two broad categories: intention-movements and attention-getters.

In their social interactions, for example, chimpanzees raise their arms toward another chimp and start hitting her to initiate play or place their hand under her mouth and begin to take food to request food.

They also use gestures to get the others attention, for example by slapping the ground and looking at another chimp or by poking him or throwing stuff at him

Although we may find this behavior quite funny and daring to look at, it is still a remarkable fact that primates do this, as these kinds of gestures

„are not widespread in the animal kingdom; they may even be unique to primates or even great apes“ (Tomasello 2008: 27)

What is even more interesting that apes also string sequences of gestures together and combine both

attention-getters and intention-movements.

Although there is no evidence for a kind of „grammar“ for these sequence s (Liebal et al. 2004) it is still a very interesting phenomenon, especially as evidence for any combinatorial structure in primate vocalizations is confined to only two species (Zuberbühler 2002).

In summary, ape gestural communication is quite sophisticated and even has some kind of structure, even if its not something resembling the grammar of human language:

“check the attention of other > walk around as necessary > gesture > monitor the reaction of other > repeat or use another gesture.“

They are thus definitely to be judged as communicative signals.

Things such as attention and reaction monitoring seem to be an important part of the answer to the question

„What in the chimpanzee/human lineage provided a foundation for speech?“

And I will write a bit more about that in my next post.

References:

Cheney, D. L., and Seyfarth, R. M. (1990). Attending to behaviour versus attending to knowledge: Examining monkeys’ attribution of mental states. Animal Behaviour, 40, 742–753.

Liebal, K., Call, J., and Tomasello, M. (2004). The use of gesture sequences by chimpanzees. American Journal of Primatology, 64, 377–396.

Owings, D. H., and Morton, E. S. (1998). Animal Vocal Communication: A New Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tomasello, Michael (2008): The Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press.

Zuberbühler, Klaus (2002): A syntactic rule in forest monkey communication. In: Animal Behaviour 63, 293–299.

Michael Tomasello - The Origins of Human Communication (summary pt. 1)

A pretty long time ago – before I went to Nottingham for my year abroad – I announced that I would write some more about Michael Tomasello's new (2008) book The Origins of Human Communication.

Although I haven't finished the book yet, and I don't know if I can really contribute something not already covered in Edmund Blair Bolles' interesting multi-part book review over at Babel's Dawn (see here, here, here, and here), I thought I'd still give it a go and see how it turns out.

I hope the next few posts will at some point intersect with a post about Tomasello's arguments against linguistic innateness and his view of language acquisition (e.g. Tomasello 2003), which I have been meaning to write for ages.

Tomasello's main interest in this book is to flesh out “the social-cognitive and social-motivational infrastructure” (2) that enables modern human communication. He also tries to present a plausible evolutionary scenario of how we arrived at this point.

His hypothesis is that “the first uniquely human forms of communication were pointing and pantomiming.” (2)

Social Cognition




In a close analysis of pointing and pantomiming in infancy Tomasello arrives at the conclusion that they already embody

“most of the uniquely human forms of social cognition and motivation required” (2) for full-blown linguistic communication. They are thus perfect candidates for “the critical transition points in the evolution of human communication” (2)

The reason why Tomasello sees pointing as the primordial form of human communication is the following:

Imagine we are walking to the library and I point out some bicycles leaned against the wall to you. Without “context” this would be entirely meaningless. However, if we share some kind of “common ground”, some kind of previous knowledge or past experience the otherwise empty gesture suddenly can be 'filled' with a variety of meanings. “By itself, pointing means nothing," but if we both have knowledge of the fact that one of the bikes is your ex-boyfriend's, with whom you just had a nasty break-up, or if one of the bikes was the one stolen to you some days ago, you are suddenly able to interpret my gesture in a meaningful way. You are thus able to answer to the question.

“what is his intention in directing my attention in this way?” (4)

This example leads Tomasello to the conclusion that

“The ability to create common conceptual ground— joint attention, shared experience, common cultural knowledge—is an absolutely critical dimension of all human communication.” (5).

This enables a richness of meaning and reference all other forms of primate communication lack.

Social Motivation

As Tomasello remarks the second important and unique aspect is the prosocial motivation of the pointing example. In this example and in dozens of other examples from early infancy on, there is no ulterior motive to somebody pointing other than to simply being helpful and cooperative. Apes on the other hand, usually don't point in natural contexts, and they never point cooperatively just to inform somebody of something.

In contrast, there is evidence of infants as young as 12 months pointing for others just to share attention or inform them of something.
Here's one of the examples Tomasello (2008: 114f.) mentions, which is taken from a study by Carptenter et al. (in prep.)

"At age 13.5 months, while Mom is looking for a missing refrigerator magnet, L points to a basket of fruit where it is (hidden under the fruit). Gloss: Attend to the basket of fruit; it’s there."

Another example particularly fitting for this season is reported by Tomasello (2008: 114):

“At age 13 months, J watches as Dad arranges the Christmas tree; when Grandpa enters the room J points to tree for him and vocalizes. Gloss: Attend to the Christmas tree; isn’t it great?”

These cooperative capacities form the ability often called “shared intentionality.”

In general,

"shared intentionality is what is necessary for engaging in uniquely human forms of collaborative activity in which a plural subject “we” is involved: joint goals, joint intentions, mutual knowledge, shared beliefs—all in the context of various cooperative motives” (6f.)

The key aspect of human communication is thus that it is

“a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, operating most naturally and smoothly within the context of (1) mutually assumed common conceptual ground, and (2) mutually assumed cooperative communicative motives.” (6)

Following these assumptions, Tomasello then sets out to identify “the species-unique features of human communication and their ontogenetic and phylogenetic roots.” (11)

I'll write more about this in my next post.

References:

Tomasello, Michael (2003): Constructing A Language. A Usage-Based Approach. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, Michael (2008): The Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press.

Another Theory of the Evolution of Language: Peter F. MacNeilage on the Origin of Speech

There is a new book in the Oxford „Studies in the Evolution of Language“ Series by Peter F. MacNeilage, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, called quite simply, “The Origin of Speech.”

MacNeilage advances something he calls the Frame/Content Theory of vocal communication: It poses that

“segmental ‘‘content’’ elements are placed into syllable-structure ‘‘frames.’’“ (MacNeilage 2008: 57).

Taking evidence form speech errors, MacNeilage assumes that frame, “the continual rhythmic alternation between an open and closed mouth” (MacNeilage 1998), and content (the actual vowels and consonants) are two fundamentally different mechanisms included in speech.

He proposes

“that in both evolution and in development, frames come first and content later.” (MacNeilage 2008: 58)

So here’s his account of how the evolution of language took place:

"As I reconstruct the process, motor frames for speech evolved from mandibular cyclicities [i.e. the movements made when ingesting food, such as chewing] via an intermediate stage of visuofacial communicative smacks [i.e. the kind of communicative lipsmacks found in non-human primates], which eventually became paired with phonation to form protosyllables. These protosyllables initially filled a vocal-grooming role. They proved effective because they made for the omnidirectional transmission of a standard communicative signal, readily extended across time, and with sharp acoustic alternations between closed and open states of suffcient complexity to sustain a listener’s interest. At some point, one of the limited sets of protosyllabic forms – a nasalized variant –became paired with a female parental concept, resulting in the form [mama]. This was a social invention—and a momentous one. It paved the way for a series of similar single events linking, one by one, additional items at two hitherto unrelated levels of function – concepts and sound patterns. Once this invention got from the infant – parent matrix into broader society, subsequent concept – sound pairings for new words got established by cultural agreement, and the history of these agreements got passed along to successive generations of language users. This led to the one-word stage of true language, which is as far as the F/C theory goes (MacNeilage 2008: 293)"

To me this sounds like another of these „just so“ stories, which I though we’d been over by now. However, the framework surely doesn’t rise or fall with the fairytale part, and I don’t know enough about the book and about phonology in general to judge its validity. The parts that I’ve read, for example his discussion of the genetic underpinnings of language, including the FOXP2 gene, are really interesting. People interested in the motoric, neural and phonological/phonetics aspects of language should check out the book, there’s a lot of cool stuff in there.

For instance, I didn’t know that there is a “phonological loop” in short-time memory”/ “working memory” – which is "some kind of temporary storage of information [...] necessary for performing a wide range of cognitive skills including comprehension, learning and reasoning" (Baddeley 1995: 755) – which organizes linguistic input and output and controls articulation. MacNeilage follows the proposal of Alan Baddely, a leading researcher in the area of short-time memor, who proposes that the “phonological loop”:

"has evolved, probably from more basic auditory and verbal production mechanisms, as a device for language acquisition’’ (Baddeley, 1995: 762)

Both see it as a central system in language evolution, because it allows

1. for the comparison of the production attempt and target representation, which for example, may be important in world learning.
2. to put together and hold in memory incoming information during comprehension.
3. for “the holding of output information in various stages of completion during the assembly of a spoken sentence“ (MacNeilage 2008: 191).

MacNeilage also places his approach into the “emerging intellectual context” of Embodiment, because he shares its desire to explain higher mental functions in terms of the integral interaction of mind and body. He is also opposed to nativism and nativistic brands of evolutionary psychology. Instead, he sets his hopes on Dynamical systems theory and self-organization,

"the emergence of new states from the interaction of variables in a complex system, in the absence of an external controller.“

Thus his approach blends in well with the stance taken by people like Simon Kirby and others, which I briefly described here.

Almost needless to say, he also discusses mirror neurons, which are in the news about any other day and are often seen as the explanation for about everything ranging from empathy (see for example this blog post over at Complex Adaptive Systems), to understanding the beliefs of others, to the evolution of language. For an interesting discussion, see this interdiciplinary discussion forum on the question: What do mirror neurons mean?

MacNeilage also holds that

"these neurons […] presumably played a crucial role in our evolving the capacity to relate observation and action as required in mimesis,” (MacNeilage 2008: 171)

which in turn, is crucial for learning speech and language, as well as for about every kind of social interaction in general. MacNeilage relates this to Merlin Donald’s (1991) notion of a general-purpose mimetic capacity being the underpinning and necessary precursors to language as well as to all cultural behaviors.

Furthermore, there are also mirror neurons implicated both in call production and call comprehension of monkeys, which might be seen as the neural basis of our capacity for vocal learning and speech. MacNeilage’s theory that speech evolved from ingestive rythms via smacks is also supported by the fact that there are neurons in the monkey mirror neuron system that are implicated both in chewing and communicative behaviors such as lipsmacks (Ferrari et al 2003, MacNeilage 2008: 175ff.).

In general, the research on mirror neurons thus seem to confirm MacNeilage’s proposals.

In sum: for me the book is a bit too technical, but MacNeilage’s approach seems to be pretty interesting., especially for people with a footing or interest in the neurobiological aspects of language.

On a related note, Edmund Blair Bolles of Babel’s Dawn has published a short piece on the evolang conference in the journal BioScience, titled "Case for Biological Origins of Language Grows Stronger", in which he reports on the new evidence for the evolution of language presented at the conference.

Also have a look at this post over at the Language Evolution blog, where Chris discusses the evolang talks of famous archaeologist Franceso d'Errico, who speculated on the possibility of Neanderthals having language, and the talk of infamous linguist Derek Bickerton, who proposed the major factor in language evolution was the emergence of a mental lexicon and not the evolution of syntax.

References:

Baddeley, Alan D. (1995). ‘Working memory.’ In M. S. Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 755–764.

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ferrari, P. F., Gallese, P., Rizzolatti, G., and Fogassi, L. (2003). ‘Mirror neurons responding to the observation of ingestive and communicative mouth movements in the monkey ventral premotor cortex.’ European Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 1703–1714.

MacNeilage, Peter F. (2008): The Origin of Speech: Oxford: Oxford University Press (Studies in the Evolution of Language 10).

Baboon Metaphysics III: Links with other Fields of Cognitive Science

In my last post I argued that “Baboon Metaphysics” only mentioned half of the story of what makes the human conceptual system unique. What Cheney and Seyfarth did not address in their still absolutely excellent and insightful book, is the way our conceptual system has been extended in respect to that of other animals, and the way language may interact with conceptualization and other cognitive processes, instead of simply being the expression of cognitive processes absolutely independent from it. (Although I don’t want to attribute such a view to Cheney and Seyfarth just because they haven’t said anything about it, this theory still seems to be quite prominent. See, for example, Edmund Blair Bolles' review of Steven Pinker’s new book “The Stuff of thought (2007) ).
In the words of Robbins Burlings (2005): “What has language done to us?” Work by Gary Lupyan and others shows that there is evidence that language, thinking, and concepts interact and that language helps us organize and categorize the world and sometimes alters how we process information (Kenneally 2007: 106-111). This is certainly not a return to strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf thesis, considering that Cheney and Seyfarth clearly showed that there are concepts and conceptualization without language, and evidence that language itself is partly grounded in embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff and Johnson 1999). But these interactive processes, and the way our own extended conceptual abilities rely on enhanced cognitive supplements to our basic neural architecture, are definitely part of the whole picture.

In my last post, I mentioned that Barsalou (2005) argued that frontal lobe control is a critical factor enhancing the displacement- and computation-abilities of conceptual simulation, and therefore a crucial factor of defining what makes the human extended conceptual system different from animal mental representations, which evolutionary are the basic architecture for our cognitive abilities, and which Cheney and Seyfarth described marvelously. Terrence Deacon has a similar proposal what makes us human. According to him

“The prominent enlargement of the prefrontal cortex and the correlated shifts in connection patterns that occurred during human brain evolution introduced strong biases into the learning process and gave human prefrontal circuits a greater role in many neural processes unrelated to language. Though intense selection was directed toward this one aspect of mind and brain, its secondary effects have also ramified to influence the whole of human cognition. (Deacon 1998: 417)

Because the prefrontal cortex is the most important structure that supports symbolic reference (Deacon 1998: 266) and in human beings, prefrontal circuits play a greater role in all neural processes of the brain than in any other species (Deacon 1998: 265), we are “The Symbolic Species” inhabiting mental worlds mediated by thousands of hierarchical structured symbol-symbol relationships (see also Kenneally’s (2007) prelude for a quite poetic description of the semiotic universes we create and communicate about) intertwined with our physical lives, our embodied experience of the outside world. As I mentioned in my last post Barsalou (2005), too, sees our symbolic capacities mediated by greater frontal control as crucial:

“What results is control of the distributed property architecture to represent components of situations and to combine them in novel ways.“

These combination of representations into an ‘integrated simulation’, can be found in another field of inquiry, namely mental images:

“Mental images need not result simply from the recall of previously perceived objects or events; they can also be created by combining and modifying stored perceptual information in novel ways.” (Kosslyn et al. 2001).

Interestingly “most of the neural processes that underlie like-modality perception are also used in imagery; and imagery, in many ways, can ‘stand in’ for (re-present, if you will) a perceptual stimulus or situation“ (Kosslyn et al. 2001). This supports Barsalou’s view that conceptualization consists of integrated “reenactments of perceptual, motor, and introspective states acquired during experience with the world, body, and mind “ (Barsalou in press). Also interesting in this regard is Mark Turner’s stance at what makes us uniquely human: conceptual blending - the integration of two mental spaces/conceptual structures to form a new one, enabling mental time travel and escape, as well as what-if relations. Turners describes it as “a basic human mental operation, with constitutive and governing principles. It played a crucial role, probable the crucial role, in the descent of our species over the last fifty or one hundred thousand years” (Turner 2003).

By the way, Edmund Blair Bolles has posted a great discussion of a paper by Don Ross which deals with the evolution of human culture and joint attention. Go check it out!

References:
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005a. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.”
Trends. Cog. Sc. 9.7: 309-311.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. In press. “Grounded Cognition.” In: Annual Review of Psychology 59

Burling, Robbins. 2005. The Talking Ape. Oxford: OUP.

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Deacon, Terrence William 1998. The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of
Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Pinker, Steven 2007. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking.

Kenneally, Christine. 2007. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. New York: Viking.

Kosslyn, Stephen M., Giorgio Ganis and William L. Thompson. 2001.“Neural Foundations of Imagery.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2: 635-642.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Book

Turner, Mark. 2003. “Double-Scope Stories.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman

Baboon Metaphysics II

In my last post, I wrote about Dorothy Cheney’s and Robert Seyfarth’s new book “Baboon Metaphysics” and their claim that

“Baboons teach us that it is possible to have a complex society based on cognitive processes that are both computational and representational without either language or a theory of mind. Concepts (of a sort) can exist without words; computation can occur without grammar, Along with many other species of animals, baboons provide us with a natural experiment that allows us to ask “What it thought – what can it possibly be – without language and a theory of mind.?” (p. 276)

In their book, the authors refer to a wealth of other literature about animal communication, cognition and human evolution, and I will write about some of these papers from then to then.

One important implication of Cheney and Seyfarth’s argument is the “Continuity of the conceptual system across species“ (Barsalou 2005a), which outright contradicts the strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf-thesis, radical constructivism and cultural relativism. The Conceptual system is a “system distributed throughout the brain that represents knowledge about the world“(Barsalou 2005b: 621). Primates and monkeys have rich conceptual systems, they therefore can think without language. Conceptual representation in humans and monkeys has common neural substrates, suggesting how human cognition build upon these evolutionary precursors (Gil-da-Costa 2004).
Additional systems seem to have extended the conceptual abilities of humans significantly (Barsalou 2005a). And this is where, Cheney and Seyfarth’s “First thought, then language” ceases to tell the whole story. I don’t think this can really be called a shortcoming of the book, but I’m a bit disappointed that the authors didn’t at least hint at what makes our conceptual system different from that of other animals, and in which ways it could be influence by language. Though they stress that the human ability to have a theory of mind “favored an ability to speak, expand one’s vocabulary, and combine words in sentences to convey novel meanings” (p.281) and they concur with Tomasello et al. (2005) that “shared intentionality”, the motivation to cooperate with others and to share intentions and mental states with them, is a crucial principle of humanness, culture, and language, they still don’t go further than “Thought came first; speech and language appeared later, as its expression”(p.281).
But for me, the story doesn’t end here. Cheney and Seyfarth stress the fact that the “same basic architecture for representing knowledge is present in humans” (Barsalou 2005a), and rightly so. As Barsalou (2005b) puts it, conceptualization processes work

"via integrated simulations of agents, objects, settings, actions, and introspections. On recognizing a familiar type of category instance, an entrenched situated conceptualization associated with it becomes active to provide relevant inferences via pattern completion". (Barsalou 2005b: 645)

This pattern completion seems to be an essential feature of all cognitive systems, because it allows an organism to prepare for and predict actions and events, thus aiding survival. (Barsalou 2005). Many neuroscientists are convinced that the brain’s main task is prediction in order to survive in dangerous environments (Ryder/Favorov 2001), and, we can add with Cheney and Seyfarth, to be able to function in large social groups. With a theory of mind, humans have much better predictive strategies at hand, and thus are even better equipped to cooperate and function in large societies. This is one of the key themes in “Baboon Metaphysics.” But what else makes our conceptual system different, and how so? Besides having a ToM, Barsalou (2005a) argues that another uniquely human complement of the conceptual system is that they “represent situations that are completely unrelated to the current situation,” enhancing learning and future performance by mentally simulating past events, an maximizing the achievement of goals by simulation of planned events in the future.

Barsalou stresses the importance of the frontal lobe for such activations. He adds language as another possibility for the extensions of the human conceptual system. Barsalou speculates that “the linguistic system provides exquisite control over the simulation system as it represents non-present situations.” Thus, what could make humans essentially different, along with higher social ToM-competence, may be their “control of the distributed property architecture to represent components of situations and to combine them in novel ways.“ This ability again is hugely reliant on frontal activation. These observations resonate with Terrence Deacon’s (1998) depiction of our ‘front-heavy” cognitive style, which makes us “The Symbolic Species”, Mark Turner’s theory of Conceptual Blending, as well as with work by Stephen Kosslyn, which I will address in my next post on the book.
In sum, this combinations of Cheney and Seyfarth’s work with Barsalou’s and others considerations about the human conceptual system is, I think, extremely interesting, and makes “Baboon Metaphysics” – coming from one side and looking to meet with research such as Barsalou’s, Deacon’s, and Turner’s – an important milestone in our quest of unravelling the human mind.

References:
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005a. “Continuity of the conceptual system across species.” Trends. Cog. Sc. 9.7: 309-311.

Barsalou, Lawrence W. 2005b “Situated Conceptualization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 619-650.

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Deacon, Terrence William. 1998. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Gil-da-Costa, Ricardo, Allen Braun, Marco Lopes, Marc D. Hauser, Richard E. Carson, Peter Herscovitch and Alex Martin. 2004. “Toward an evolutionary perspective on conceptual representation: Species-specific calls activate visual and affective processing systems in the macaque.” PNAS 101.50: 17516–17521.

Ryder, Dan and Oleg V. Favorov. 2001. "The New Associationism: A Neural Explanation for the Predictive Powers of Cerebral Cortex.” Brain and Mind 2.2. : 161-194.

Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll. 2004. “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28.5

Baboon Metaphysics I

In their new Book, „Baboon Metaphysics“, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have some interesting things to say about language evolution. The book's title refers to a statement Charles Darwin scribbled in one of his notebooks:

"Origin of man now proved. – Metaphysics must flourish. – He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

As Dan Dennett (1995) puts it, the idea of evolution is universal acid, transforming every world-view, yielding new perspectives on every aspect of life, impacting on our view of what it is to be human, and what makes us human.
Through their research on baboons in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, Cheney and Seyfarth have gained new insights into how

"evolution acts on the communication and cognition of animals that live in large social groups.” (p. 251)

Baboons show remarkable skills in keeping track not only of the relationships between themselves and other group members, but also in recognizing the “close bonds that exist among other members of their groups.” To test this, Cheney, Seyfarth and their team did some ingenious experiments by playing simulated vocal communications of existing group members that violated the linear transitive dominance hierarchy of the group, for example, fear barks of higher female which were directed at a female of a lower rank. The baboons looked towards the speaker for a longer period of time if the recording violated the actual hierarchy, suggesting that baboons have a mental representation and therefore expectations of the interactions and hierarchy systems within their group. Other experiments also showed that baboons are indeed quite sophisticated when it comes to understanding the complexities of their social group.
Two implications for language evolution, are I think, especially interesting. First, one crucial component of our ability to use language is having a Theory of Mind, that is the ability to attribute mental states to others. And

“although baboons and other monkeys probably do not recognize when someone is attempting to manipulate their beliefs, they may recognize when someone is attempting to manipulate their intent. They integrate social cues, gaze direction, and call type when making these assessments and when announcing their intentions to others. A rudimentary understanding of intentions and motives represents a crucial first step toward a communication system like language, in which speakers and listeners routinely assess each other’s motives, beliefs, and knowledge.” (p. 183)

Baboons certainly do not have a full-fledged Theory of Mind like humans, and in some aspects fail rather poorly at recognizing other’s mental states, for example the anxiety and fear their children endure during water-crossing, where they seem to assume that, when they can make the water crossing, everyone can, or when trying to hide from an aggressive male. But they hint at how a social mind evolves, and what the cognitive precursors for our own ToMs probably looked like.
The other implication regards the baboons' ability to form mental representations, concepts of the outside world. This suggests an evolutionary scenario in which thought came first, then language. as Cheney and Seyfarth put it: “3. In primate groups, natural selection has favored individuals who can form mental representations of other individuals, their relationships, and their motives” (p. 251). But they even go further:

“4. This social knowledge constitutes a discrete, combinatorial system of representations - a language of thought – that shares several features with human language. 5. The language of thought that has evolved in baboons and other primates is a general primate characteristic whose appearance predates the evolution of spoken language in our hominid ancestors. 6. The prior evolution of social cognition created individuals who were preadapted to develop language. 7. Several features thought to be unique to language – for example, discrete combinatorics and the encoding of propositional information – were not introduced by language. They arose, instead, because understanding social life and predicting others’ behavior requires a particular style of thinking.” (p. 251f.)

The last part is especially interesting. The idea of the ‘language-ready brain’ is of course not new, and is embraced by many scholars interested in the evolution of language, but the claim that a “social syntax” with a recursive structure is the evolutionary foundation of modern language, is, I think, quite compelling, although it contradicts Derek Bickerton’s (1990) notion of a “protolanguage” without syntax. This, too, refutes Alison Wray’s (2002) hypothesis that technology and culture stagnated between 1,4 and 0,5 million years because there were no names for actions or things, since primates clearly can conceptualize actions, and therefore a proto-language should be able to express them.
(A better explanation for this stagnation is given by Ray Kurzweil in his TED-Talk, namely the inherent exponential nature of technological progress, which allows for ever faster periods of rapid acceleration.)
It is however, in accordance with the claim made by Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch in 2002 that recursion and its mappings to the interfaces as they form the uniquely human part of the human language faculty “may have evolved for reasons other than language” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1571) and that recursion could be an exaptation that originally “evolved to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships” (Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002: 1578), although Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch insisted that recursion in general was uniquely human.
In my next post, I will come back to what it means for our conceptual system to be build upon evolutionary older foundations.

References:
Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Dennet, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth. 2007. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2002. “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” In: Science 298, 1569-1579.

Wray, Alison.“Dual Processing in Protolanguage: Performance without Competence.” In: Wray, Alison. (Ed.) The Transition to Language. Studies on the Evolution of Langauge 2. Oxford, OUP.