The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (87 page)

Masaaki Yamanashi’s comment on Bill Clinton proved to be prophetic.

Chapter 7: Talking Heads
. Anyone who has tried to search the Web using one of the engines that claims to understand English can verify that comprehending natural language is still an unsolved engineering problem. Ditto for the programs that claim to translate from one language to another. The Loebner Prize competition (erroneously described as a “Turing test”) continues to be won by uncomprehending programs using canned responses.

The subfield of linguistics known as “pragmatics,” which deals with the use of language in a social context and WITH phenomena such as politeness, innuendo, and reading between the lines, was covered in a scant three pages in this chapter. A deeper discussion, which links these phenomena to social and evolutionary psychology, can be found in a chapter called “Games People Play” in
The Stuff of Thought
.

Chapter 8: The Tower of Babel
Daniel Everett, the linguist who documented the Amazonian language Pirahã, claimed that the language violates Hockett’s universals by providing no means to discuss events remote from experience, and by lacking the mechanism of recursive embedding, in which a word or phrase can be inserted inside a word or phrase of the same type. But the first claim, as I mentioned, is contradicted by numerous observations of the Pirahã way of life, and the second is questionable as well. Pirahã allows for a degree of semantic embedding using verb suffixes and conversions of nouns to verbs (so one can express the thought “I said that Kó’oí intends to leave,” with two levels of semantic embedding), and one can conjoin propositions within a sentence, as in “We ate a lot of the fish, but there was some fish we did not eat.” The linguists Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues have taken a dose look at Pirahã, and have disputed his claim that recursive syntactic embedding is absent from the language.

The notion of Universal Grammar continues to be debated, though in a half-full/half-empty way; the proverbial Martian scientist would still consider human languages to be extraordinarily similar compared with the countless ways one could imagine a system for vocal communication. In
The Atoms of Language
, the linguist Mark Baker presents an explicit empirical case for a Universal Grammar with a smallish set of parameters differentiating all human languages.

My suggestion that controversies about language families might be resolved by “a good statistician with a free afternoon” has been taken up by a number of biostatisticians, though of course it is taking them more than an afternoon. In several cases, computer programs in biology that look at genes from a number of species and construct phyiogenetic family trees have been applied to words from a number of languages in order to construct linguistic family trees. The programs are first tested on uncontroversial families (like Indo-European) to verify that they can replicate well-established trees, then they are set to work on the murkier families, yielding both trees and the approximate dates at which protolanguages may have split off from their ancestors. Recent analyses of the Indo-European languages have suggested that the speakers of the proto-language lived 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, a date consistent with the upstart “Out of Anatolia” theory in which they were Europe’s first formers. Most linguists remain skeptical, because this dating contradicts the results of “linguistic paleontology” (for example, Proto-Indo-European had a word for the wheel, which was invented only 5,500 years ago). The debate over whether the Proto-Indo-Europeans were early farmers or later horsemen rages on, though both theories might be right, and may be true of different historical periods.

The really ancient superfamilies, like Nostratic, Amerind, and Eurasiatic (to say nothing of Proto-World), are still dismissed by most linguists. So is the idea associated with the human geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza that genetic families and language families should coincide. This is sometimes true for very large racial and ethnic groupings, like the speakers of Semitic, Bantu, San, and European languages in Africa, but is for from true in the general case. The reason is that languages, unlike genes, are not always transmitted vertically from parents to children but often are transmitted horizontally from conquerors to the conquered, from majorities to immigrants, and from prestigious speakers to déclassé ones.

In 2004, two geneticists, Alec Knight and Joanna Mountain, came up with a startling claim about Proto-World, the ultimate mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans, namely that it was a click language. Their hypothesis, though certainly not accepted by most linguists, is not crazy speculation but was based on four observations. First, the two main families of click languages spoken in Africa (by the Hadza in Tanzania and the San in the Kalahari Desert) are linguistically unrelated, in the sense of having no common ancestor within the past 10,000 years. Second, the San and Hadza peoples are genetically unrelated to each other. Third, each group has levels of genetic diversity suggesting that the two are descendants of the ancestors of all living humans. Fourth, linguists have documented that languages with clicks often lose them, but languages without clicks never originate them. A simple explanation is that the first modern humans, who lived around 100,000 years ago, had a language with clicks, which survived in these two African peoples but were lost in all the other descendant groups.

Language death is, of course, still a major concern of linguistics. Two organizations that support and document endangered languages are the Foundation for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org/home.htm) and the Endangered Language Fund (www.endangeredlanguagefund.org).

Chapter 9: Baby Born Talking—Describes Heaven
. A nice introduction to how babies talk is a book called
How Babies Talk
by the psychologists Roberta Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek.

The evidence that young brains are better than older brains at learning and creating language has been piling up in the last dozen years, and there is evidence for a gradual decline in the ability to master an accent beginning as young as two. Neuroimaging studies suggest that a second language acquired in childhood is processed in the brain in a different way than a second language acquired in adulthood: in the former case, the two languages completely overlap; in the latter, they stake out distinct adjacent regions.

At the same time it’s been hard to prove that there is a discrete “critical period” for language acquisition. The linguist David Birdsong has suggested that people simply get worse as they get older: children are better than adolescents, who are better than twenty-somethings, who are better than thirty-somethings, and so on. Birdsong endorses the hypothesis in this chapter that age effects on language are part of the general process of senescence. The issue is not so easy to resolve, because people learn a second language under a wide variety of circumstances and motivations, which could blur any blips or elbows in an age curve.

Another complication is that age may play a clearer role in acquiring a first language than a second. Psychologists have long suspected that adults might do a pretty good job at learning a second language by falling back on their first language as a crutch, learning the second in terms of how it differs from the first. A nifty study by Rachel Mayberry, reported just a bit too late for me to have included it in
The Language Instinct
, bears this out. She found that congenitally deaf people who learned American Sign Language as a first language in adulthood did far
worse
than people who lost their hearing from an accident or disease and learned it as a second language in adulthood. (Congenitally deaf adults who learned ASL as children were, as one would expect, best of all.) This confirms that adults are much worse than children at acquiring a language, but that the difference is masked by the fact that most adults are learning a
second
language, not a first one.

Age effects in language acquisition have figured in a controversy in American educational policy that might be even more contentious than the reading wars. Until recently, many American states had an eccentric version of bilingual education in which children of immigrants were taught in their native language (usually Spanish), and English was introduced only gradually, with immersion often delayed until they were on the verge of adolescence. Many academics support these programs (partly because they had a vague aura of being pro-minority and pro-immigrant), despite the opposition of many immigrant parents, the lack of good data showing that the programs helped children, and their underlying assumption that older children are better at acquiring a language than younger children. Ron Unz, the activist who spearheaded plebiscites curtailing the programs, pointed out that this is like assuming that rocks fall upward.

Chapter 10: Language Organs and Grammar Genes
. Aside from the fallout of the genomic revolution, the biggest scientific advance connected with language has been the analysis of the brain through neuroimaging, particularly fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and MEG (magnetoencephalography). The classic language areas generally come through in these studies, though the overall picture is now far more complicated. An example close to home is this image of your brain on language, which my former student Ned Sahin and I obtained when we scanned people as they read words on a screen and repeated them silently or silently converted them to the plural or the past tense:

The computer has “inflated” this rendering of the left hemisphere, so that the sulci (grooves) are visible as the darker gray blobs. The hot spots represent increased blood flow, and you can see that many of the areas are similar to the ones I depicted in Chapter 10 based on the data available at the time (autopsies and CAT scans). At the bottom rear (lower right in the picture) you can see the primary visual cortex. To the immediate left of it is a newly discovered region called the “visual word area,” where word shapes are detected. Above that is a region in the vicinity of Wernicke’s area, which is involved in recognizing the word. The huge forest fire at the center of the frontal lobe (on the left side of the picture) includes Broca’s area (which is involved in grammatical computation) and areas involved in controlling the mouth. A part of this inferno extends downward into the large groove beneath the frontal lobe (the insula) and may reflect the programming of articulation (even though our subjects did not actually speak, because the head movements would have blurred the image). The activity seen in the long horizontal groove high in the parietal lobe at the back of the brain (at the top right of the picture) reflects people’s attention to the visual display.

Unfortunately, beyond this coarse geography, the bounty of neuroimaging data on language of the last decade has not led to a neat picture of what parts of the brain do what kinds of work in language. But there have been a few attempts to organize the mess. Peter Hagoort has argued that the left inferior frontal lobe (the large region on fire at the left of the picture, which includes Broca’s area) is charged with “unifying” bits of linguistic knowledge (words, rules, sounds, constructions) into a coherent and meaningful sentence. Within this region, Hagoort suggests, there is more processing of meaning at the lower front end, more processing of sound and articulation at the upper hindmost end, and more processing of grammar in the middle. Another scheme, by David Poeppel and Greg Hickok, focuses on the comprehension side. They suggest that word understanding begins in the general vicinity of Wernicke’s area and then splits into two streams. One heads down and forward in the temporal lobe (the elongated lobe at the bottom of the picture) and connects to meaning; the other extends up and then forward to the frontal lobes and connects to articulation.

The development of neural circuitry of the brain in utero, which I described in purely hypothetical terms, is another area of biology that has mushroomed in the past dozen years. In his highly readable book
The Birth of the Mind
, my former student Gary Marcus explains the basic science behind embryonic brain development, and speculates on how the circuits underlying language and cognition might be laid down by genes and early neural activity.

Chapter 11: The Big Bang
. The evolution of language, which didn’t exist as a field when I wrote
The Language Instinct
, is now the subject of many books, conferences, and research programs. A recent volume called
Language Evolution: States of the Art
contains position statements by the major players; I have an essay in it arguing (as I did in this chapter) that language is an adaptation to the “cognitive niche,” in which humans use language to negotiate cooperative relationships and to share technical know-how. The burgeoning field is even the subject of a new popular science book by the journalist Christine Kenneally.