4th Birthday!

Today marks the 4th Birthday of this Blog, and although I haven't managed to post anything in quite a while, I thought I'd use this happy occasion to point out some interesting links:

First, James Hurford's sequel to his 2007 "The Origins of Meaning" has finally been published:

With, 808 pages "The Origins of Grammar"is twice as long as his 2007 volume and consists of three parts. To quote from the book description:

"The book is divided into three parts. In the first the author surveys the syntactic structures evident in the communicative behaviour of animals, such as birds and whales, and discusses how vocabularies of learned symbols could have evolved and the effects this had on human thought. In the second he considers how far the evolution of grammar depended on biological or cultural factors. In the third and final part he describes the probable route by which the human language faculty and languages evolved from simple beginnings to their present complex state."

An almost 100-page-long sample chapter, dealing with the question whether non-human animals have syntax, can be found here. In this chapter, Hurford analyses the structure of whale song, bird song, and primate calls, and comes to the conclusion that:

"No non-human has any semantically compositional syntax, where the form of the syntactic combination determines how the meanings of the parts combine to make the meaning of the whole."

Second, in the first part of a 5-part documentary series on language, Stephen Fry explores the evolution of language. Although there are some minor quibbles (e.g. Stephen Fry stating that language arose from primates grunts about 50,000 years ago, and him speculating that "it really is" language that makes us different from other primates without anyone to back him up), it's a thoroughly enjoyable documentary featuring interviews with people like Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello and Wolfgang Enard (of FOXP2-fame) at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Hat tip: */ˈdɪːkæf/

Update: Sean of Replicated Typo points to a pretty detailed (and pretty harsh) critique over at badlinguistics

Communication in Bonobos, Chimpanzees, and the Evolution of Language

The current issue of First Language features some interesting articles on the evolution of language:

It includes a book review of Michael Tomasello's "Origins of Human Communication" by Evan Kidd as well as a review of an edited volume titled "The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives" by Thomas Scott-Phillips, who rightly argues that the term Biolinguistics - which is mainly used by people from the Generative Grammar camp - is "not a theory-neutral term for the study of language origins."

Last but not least, there's also an interesting article by Heidi Lyn, Patricia Greenfield and E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh about "Semiotic combinations in Pan: A comparison of communication in a chimpanzee and two bonobos."

Here's the abstract:

Communicative combinations of two bonobos (Pan paniscus) and a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) are compared. All three apes utilized ordering strategies for combining symbols (lexigrams) or a lexigram with a gesture to express semantic relations such as agent of action or object of action. Combinatorial strategies used by all three apes revealed commonalities with child language, spoken and signed, at the two-year-old level. However, many differences were also observed: e.g., combinations made up a much smaller proportion and single symbols a much larger proportion of ape production compared with child production at a similar age; and ape combinations rarely exceeded three semiotic elements. The commonalties and differences among three sibling species highlight candidate combinatorial capacities that may underlie the evolution of human language.

Power and Perspective Taking

From Perlman & Miller (2009):

Powerful people are not very good at comprehending other people's point of view and taking their perspective: "If you ask powerful people to quickly drawn an "E" on their foreheads, they are much more likely than people of low power to draw the letter as if they were reading it, which makes it backward and illegible for anyone else - like this:"∃ " (Galinsky et al. 2006)"

On The Human: Terrence Deacon - Rethinking The Natural Selection Of Human Language

I just stumbled across this interesting website called "On The Human." Its

"an online community of humanists and scientists dedicated to improving our understanding of persons and the quasi-persons who surround us. As persons are biological, psychological, historical, moral, and autobiographical beings, we employ modes of inquiry from the sciences and humanities. Contributors explore issues in metaphysics and biology, ethics and neuroscience, experimental philosophy and evolutionary psychology."

Anyway, there are some interesting articles at the interface of Cognitive Science, Evolution, and Language on the site, written by quite well-known researchers, and what's even more interesting is that there are often comments by other researchers. For example, there's an article by Terrence Deacon called Rethinking The Natural Selection Of Human Language which features a lively discussion including, among others, Mark Turner, Talmy Givón, Derek Bickerton, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Salikoko Mufwene.

There's also an article by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh called "Human Language - Human Consciousness", which focuses on her work with enculturated bonobos like Kanzi, Panzi and Panbanisha and also includes a very heated discussion of her claims.

Review of FOXP2 and its role in brain development, speech, and the evolution of language

Edmund Blair Bolles over at Babel's Dawn discusses a very interesting review of "FOXP2 and the role of cortico-basal ganglia circuits in speech and language evolution" by Wolfgang Enard. Be sure to check it out!

Below you can find the abstract of the review:

"Purpose of the review

A reduced dosage of the transcription factor FOXP2 leads to speech and language impairments probably owing to deficits in cortical and subcortical neural circuits. Based on evolutionary sequence analysis it has been proposed that the two amino acid substitutions that occurred on the human lineage have been positively selected. Here I review recent studies investigating the functional consequences of these two substitutions and discuss how these first endeavors to study human brain evolution can be interpreted in the context of speech and language evolution.

Recent findings

Mice carrying the two substitutions in their endogenous Foxp2 gene show specific alterations in dopamine levels, striatal synaptic plasticity and neuronal morphology. Mice carrying only one functional Foxp2, show additional and partly opposite effects suggesting that FOXP2 has contributed to tuning cortico-basal ganglia circuits during human evolution. Evidence from human and songbird studies suggest that this could have been relevant during language acquisition or vocal learning, respectively.

Summary

FOXP2 could have contributed to the evolution of human speech and language by adapting cortico-basal ganglia circuits. More generally the recent studies allow careful optimism that aspects of human brain evolution can be investigated in model systems such as the mouse.

Highlights

► First functional studies investigate human FOXP2 evolution in a mouse. ► Human-specific properties of FOXP2 are specific to cortico-basal ganglia circuits. ► These properties might be relevant for language acquisition and/or vocal learning."

Terrence Deacon - Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

It looks like Terrence Deacon, famed author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997), the second most cited text in the Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography has a new book out in November this year called "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter". I don't know to what extent this book will have anything interesting to say about the evolution of language per se, but as it seems to focus on the evolution of cognition, it certainly looks like its well worth a read.

Here's the book description:

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.

Leading biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon, whose acclaimed book The Symbolic Species explained how the human brain evolved its capacity for language, now offers a radical new approach to the riddle of consciousness. The fact that minds emerged from life and life emerged from inanimate matter leads Deacon to reexamine this mystery from the bottom up. While the same kinds of atoms make up rivers, bacteria, and human brains, Deacon shows how their dynamical relationships produce their different properties. In Incomplete Nature he reveals a missing link: emergent processes that are neither fully mental nor merely material, which provide a bridge connecting the two. He demonstrates how functions, intentions, representations, and values-despite their apparent nonmaterial character-can nevertheless produce physical consequences. Origins of life, information, sentience, meaning, and free will all fall into place in a fully integrated scientific account of the relationship between mind and matter.

Does Language Shape Thought? Different Manifestations of the Idea of Linguistic Relativity (I)

Does the language we speak influence or even shape the way we think? Last December, there was an interesting debate over at The Economist website with Lera Boroditsky defending the motion, and Language Log’s Mark Liberman against the motion (who IMO, both did a very good job).

The result of the online poll was very clear: 78% agreed with the motion, while 22% disagreed.

There are, however, three main problems with this way of framing the question: First, it’s not really clear what ‘language’ really is, second, the same goes for “thought”, and third, there are many many ways of “influencing” and “shaping” something an bee conceptualized.

In this post I want to focus on the third problem and present a very useful classification system for hypotheses about linguistic relativity outlined in an article by Phillip Wolff and Kevin J. Holmes, which was published in the current issue Wiley Interdisciplinary Review: Cognitive Science.

Different manifestations of the idea of linguistic relativity

Language as Language-of-Thought

In its most extreme form, thought is simply equated with language. But this view, in which the units of thought are simply words from natural language, clearly can’t be right. For example, we can have thoughts that are difficult to express, we can understand ambiguous expressions (like “Kids make nutritious snacks”), and we are able to coin new words that express new meanings. All this would not be possible if we didn’t have a more fine-grained mental representation that that is encoded in words. In addition, research on non-human primates and human infants suggests that they are capable of some sophisticated forms of thought even in the absence of language.

This line of reasoning points to a representational format for concepts, categorization, memory, and reasoning that is separate from language.

On a very general level, then, we can all agree that thought is separate from language. But what about the many different ways language can affect thought?

Here, we can first make a distinction between views that hold that language determines thought (linguistic determinism), and those that hold that there are structural differences between language and thought, but that, nevertheless, language influences the way we think.

Linguistic Determinism

Linguistic determinism, a position most often connected to the name of Benjamin Lee Whorf, separates language from the conceptual system, but holds that the language we speak determines the basic categories of thought. This influence is seen as so strong that it can even overwrite pre-existing perceptual and categories in a way analogous to the way infants lose the ability to notice phonetic distinctions that do not exist in their native language. For example, at 6 months, infants growing up in English-speaking households are able to discriminate sounds that in Hindi are seen as different but in English are not, but at 12 months they have lost this ability and only pay attention to sound distinctions relevant to English (e.g. Dirven et al. 2007).

The linguistic determinism-hypothesis poses that this process also holds for many other areas of perception and, critically, cognition. To quote Whorf:

“The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which have to be organized largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.”

“We cut up nature—organize it into concepts—and ascribe significances as we do, largely because of absolutely obligatory patterns of our own language.”

(Please note that in most of his writings, Whorf actually argues for a position that is much more sophisticated and subtle than the one expressed in these popular quotes)

If language is given the role of organizing “the kaleidoscopic flux of impressions” presented to us by the world, this means that on this view, there is a very tight connection between what we can call the conceptual system/thought, and language, one the one hand, and a very loose connection between the conceptual system/thought and the world on the other.

A lot of research in the cognitive sciences, however, indicates that the relationship between thought and the world is much tighter than is assumed in linguistic determinism. For example, languages differ in the way they talk about motion events, especially in the way they encode the direction or path of a motion, on the one hand, and the manner of motion on the other:

"Manner languages (e.g.,English, German, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese) typically code manner in the verb(cf. English skip, run, hop, jog), and path in a variety of other devices such as particles (out), adpositions (into the room), verb prefixes (e.g.,German raus- ‘out’; cf. raus-rennen ‘run out’), etc. Path languages(e.g.,Modern Greek, Romance, Turkish, Japanese, and Hebrew) typically code path in the verb (cf. Greek vjeno ‘exit’, beno ‘enter’, ftano ‘arrive/reach’,aneveno ‘ascend’, diashizo ‘cross’), and manner in adverbials(trehontas‘running’, me ta podia ‘on foot’, grigora ‘quickly’)." (Papafragou & Selimis 2010: 227)

However, studies by Anna Papafragou and others suggest that although, say, English and Spanish speakers talk differently about the same motion event, the still remember it similarly:

"both manner and path seem to be available to an equal extent to speakers of different languages for purposes of (non-linguistic) categorisation and memory, regardless of whether these components are prominently and systematically encoded in the language." (Papafragou & Selimis 2010: 229)

These results and other experiments suggesting that in some respects 'thought and language' are less well aligned than 'thought and world' of course pose a serious problem for linguistic determinism.

Other Ways Language Might Have an Effect on Thought

In sum, this means that two versions of the Sapir-Whorf-Thesis – the Language-as-Thought and Linguistic Determinism hypotheses – can be rejected. But this still leaves us with the many ways language can have an effect on thought.

As Wolff & Holmes note it is precisely because" language and the conceptual system differ that we might expect a tension between them, driving each system to exert an influence on the other."

Wolff & Holmes use 5 different metaphors to classify the ways this can happen.

1. Thinking for speaking: Language influences thinking when we think about how to express something in language immediately prior to speaking
2. Language as meddler: linguistic representations/language and non-linguistic representations/thought can conflict and compete with each other
3. Language as augmenter: Language enables or extends certain kinds of thought
4. Language as spotlight: Language directs attention to /makes certain aspects very salient in thinking
5. Language as inducer: Language can be seen as a primining mechanisms that induces certain ways of thinking about something

In my next post, I’ll elaborate on these 5 subclasses of how language might affect thought.

[Cross posted at Replicated Typo]

References:

Dirven, René, Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen (2007): "Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Studies." In: Dirk Geeraerts und Hubert Cuyckens (Hrsg.): The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1203-1221.

Papafragou, Anna and Stathis Selimis (2010): "Event categorisation and language: A cross-linguistic study of motion." In: Language and Cognitive Processes 25: 224-260.

Wolff, P., & Holmes, K. (2011). Linguistic relativity Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2 (3), 253-265