It suggests rather that language is part of not a specialised module distinct from the rest of cognition, but more part of broad human cognitive skills.The paper is Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. They found that the various grammatical rules governing the proper order of different words in a sentence changed over time, and crucially that there were no fixed associations between them: no correlations such that when one rule changed, another rule had to change at the same time.
This, they say, is inconsistent with the currently dominant linguistic theory of "language universals" fixed by the structure of the human brain/mind. One of the authors has written an excellent explanation here and languagelog has a nice discussion here.
Yet I'm not convinced that "broad human cognitive skills" can explain language. I'm not qualified to comment on the details of this study, but, I do know that the average 7 year old kid has effortlessly learned how to use at least one language, with the appropriate grammar, syntax, and a vocabulary of thousands of words.
On the other hand, take my phone. My phone can't do that. It can, just about, take my voice and convert it into text. It gets it right most of the time. It has absolutely no idea what those words mean. All it can do is send them to Google and search for them.
Speaking of Google, Google Translate is what you get when roomfuls of computers try to "do language". It's useful, it's cool, and it gets it more-or-less right most of the time. But the output it produces is stilted, often ungrammatical, and generally sounds nothing like a native speaker would ever produce.
Let me repeat myself:
On the other hand, take my phone. My phone is that you can not do it. It just converts the text to voice can take me. Most of the time it gets to the right. What is the meaning of the word that has absolutely no idea. That it can, Google, is to send them to find them. Speaking of Google, Google translator you use your computer's roomfuls said, "do language" and attempt to, are obtained. It's cool, then great, but it is more or less right, gets most of the time. However, the output it generates is often exaggerated ungrammatical It sounds more like a native speaker so far generated in general.That's my last paragraph Google Translated to Japanese and right back. Hmm.
On the other hand my phone can perform millions of arithmetical operations per second. The 7 year old probably takes a minute or two of hard effort to multiply two digits together. So who's got more "general cognitive ability"?
To say that language is a manifestation of human "general" or "broad" cognition is to say that human general cognition is better at learning languages than it is at doing arithmetic: which rather begs the question of how "general" it is.
This doesn't mean that language is a special module of the brain, or that there are "language universals" beyond the fact that they're all languages, though that seems like a pretty big one. But it would take very, very strong evidence to make me doubt that the existence of language is somehow built into the human brain.
Dunn M, Greenhill SJ, Levinson SC, & Gray RD (2011). Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature PMID: 21490599
25 comments:
Due to the fact language is universally distributed over different species who don't even have the same habitat as us (whales for example) suggests to me strongly there is a basic language module.
It would be astonishing to learn that all mammals happened to evolve the same 'cloud' independently. The odds against are incalculable.
The language distribution points to an old common module going way back that just evolved in different ways. To my mind it not just suggests it, it actually proves it.
It could be a module. I suspect it is. But it could also be that what we call "language" is just the way that a large collection of brain cells works - an aspect of thought itself. In the same way that for a computer, mathematics (broadly) is what they do. I think that's an open question but my feeling is that language is a module and thought is seperate. I've no idea what thought is.
What your phone can and cannot do is not AT ALL evidence for how the brain or the brains of other animals deals with language.
IF one accepts that language is a consequence of sentience........ Whale language is the most complex language known sofar including ours.
IF more sentience causes higher language skills then whales are more sentient then we are.
Whilst i'll accept that all mammals are sentient in some for or another accepting that whales are of superior sentience then us means actually we aren't that sentient and all our hubris is misplaced.
I read in this paper the symptoms of overspecialization. Creating a whole logical cardhouse which whilst in itself seems coherent ceases to be when put against reality.
Other fields suffer from the same problems such as climatology, astrophysics and TOE's.
I have some idea what thought is, it's the sideeffect of the flow of information across the various networks.
Quote from me:
"There was once a mammal. It needed a lot of little bits of operating systems in order to let all components of its body function properly. Over time they became so numerous that it needed a system to coordinate the other bits . That system became so complex that it was capable to reprogram itself in order to be able to assimilate the ever increasing flow of information. It called itself: conscience.
Objectively impossible to determine if it exists, since conscience itself determines what are the criteria defining conscience.
That conscience, in an attempt to preprogram future acts of the body, starts tell a tale to itself.
A continuous flowchart enabling it by correlating previous events and by means of extrapolation to arrive at a predefined future action.
The conscience calls that tale: reality. Again objectively impossible to determine if it exists, the conscience stipulates what is reality. The one conscience determines the tale in which a supernatural being must exist a reality, the other determines it to be unreal."
http://petrossa.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/the-brain-believes-do-you/
neuromusic: Oh you may be right; I may be on completely the wrong track here. I ws hoping to provoke discussion with this post.
I'm just a bit confused as to what "general cognition" is. Because it's a term that gets used in debates like this, but I don't know if it's meaningful.
When one says "language is general" I think one is getting at a couple of points:
1. Linguistic content (even at the very generalized level of universal grammatical rules, or agglutinative v. isolating word/phrase structure) is not hard wired.
Certain elements of language may tend to usually end up in the same part of the brain, but this may simply be a matter of typical evolution of brain development from more basic rules, as opposed to hard wired specialization. In the same way, while there are gillions of rule permitted permutations of chess moves, reasonably skilled players starting from one of the half dozen typically opening plays are going to produce a highly restricted set of piece positions on the board fifteen moves out that follow "soft rules" and would have looked different had some of the "soft rules" been broken early on with a non-traditional opening gambit or unusual early game choice by a player.
This is in contrast to structures like the amygdala, which seem to have a fair amount on content specific stuff to be afraid of built in as instinctual fears that need only slight triggering to be activated. People are pre-loaded with the fears that make up the horror movie cliches, even if the pre-loaded software of instinct can be modified by later experience.
Similarly, almost all of the content in the most basal part of the brain seems to be hardwired, or at least, strongly protected from admiinstrator modification.
2. The brain is sufficiently plastic at certain developmental points that much of the brainpower devoted to language can be relocated; the brain components that are used to process language don't differ much from the brain components that are used to process a wide variety of other cerebral tasks.
Neurons are like legos. There aren't that many different kinds of them in the cortox. You can assemble them in different ways to produce different thing from a small number of fundamental part types, and people tend to produce similar things with them in the same context, but most of the brain anatomy that goes into language is analogous to ordinary legos, not the specialized ones that serve only one purpose.
To me cognition is something homo sapiens defines, therefore cognition is only meaningful to our species. As such it's whatever you want it to be.
To my mind if indeed one succeeds in the neural copying of the brain into software it'll acquire our cognition when raised as one would a child. Obviously this process can be speeded up.
Problem is that present efforts are fixated on copying th entire brain which is pretty useless since there' no need for a lifesupport control system, nor a limbic system. A neo-cortex with a memory suffices.
And a language module :)
"1. Linguistic content (even at the very generalized level of universal grammatical rules, or agglutinative v. isolating word/phrase structure) is not hard wired."
That implies that language evolved separately in all species having grammatical language but ended up doing the same.
Possible, but likely?
You people are uninformed. This debate was fought by Piaget and Vigotsky many moons ago. Vigotsky held that LANGUAGE = THOUGHT. Piaget revealed that intelligence had pre-verbal, sensory-motor (or pre-symbolic or pre-conceptual) roots. Therefore, language is only an expression of cognition at a certain age. You people need to go back to Cognitive/Developmental Psychology 101. Oh and Noam Chomsky was the first to suggest an innate "deep structure" for language.
Or, transversely, Chomsky and Paiget had it wrong and only found what they expected to find. Appeal to authority is a bad argument.
If language=thought then many mammals have thoughts making our selfdefined position as uniquely gifted creatures untenable.
When those two came with their theories the existence of true language amongst other mammals was unknown.
Had they have known, it's quite possible they'd have come to a different conclusion.
What hinders most of the researchers is a cultural imprint that homo sapiens is superior, so all research starts from that point and works onward.
If the basic assumption is wrong, all logic build on it is null and void.
I find it untenable that language is cognitive, created on the go during development.
There must be a basic layout of language to account for the widespread use of it amongst mammals.
It is only a small irony to me that you laugh at the ungrammatical nature of Google's translation, but didn't notice your own:
"But the output it produces is stilted, often ungrammatical, and generally sounds nothing like a native speaker would ever produce."
It sounds nothing like a native speaker would ever produce? You mean it sounds nothing like what a native speaker would ever produce?
Had me a chuckle over that one.
"Whale language is the most complex language known sofar including ours."
Do whales have a grammar or syntax? There are birds whose calls are complex, varied, and full of imitations; but they do not use a grammar to convey logical relationships like subject, verb, object.
I have not seen any evidence that whales have grammar.
Word order is a convention and varies locally. What might be built in is not word order but logical structure.
DC
"When those two came with their theories the existence of true language amongst other mammals was unknown."
What do you mean by "true language"? Other animals have words, but I know no evidence that they have any kind of logical grammar (using strings of words to convey the logical relationship between specific objects and events).
I know chimps and parrots can be taught to use very simple grammar, but this doesn't happen in the wild.
DC
It is always odd to me that people think they can talk about language without putting language on a continuum with other behavioral complexes that we are interested in. I suspect that issues such as those discussed here (and those discussed in the initiating article) would become quickly clarified if we naturalized the behaviors we call "language".
I always choke on that “effortlessly”. Our 2yo spends at least half his time jabbering. He's already put in far more than the 2200 hours the MLA estimates is needed for a category 3 language. A “math module” that required that much work would mean college students would take five years to master calculus. Fortunate that our general cognition enables us to learn it so much faster.
The problem is that here you're only describing a caricature of both cognition and language (as does Chomsky). Saying that a child "knows" the grammar of a language at 6 is greatly simplified. I suggest reading the work of Ewa Dabrowska on the real competence of children.
Chomsky and his brood see a language module because their very view of language is challenged by a non-modular view. Take away Chomskean linguistic prejudice and the need for modularity disappears. The same goes for cognition. The ability to perform algorithmic operations like your phone is only a tiny subset of what cognition is for. Try have your phone recognize a face or pick out the turn taking in a conversation.
Dominik: But both of those human functions are modules. Face recognition almost certainly is, selective lesions to the "fusiform face area" and others cause loss of that function.
Turn taking in conversation, less clear "where" in the brain that resides, but people with autism struggle with that, even if their general cognition (and language) are above-normal, so it's clearly separable from other faculties.
I think a phone with the right app actually could do face recognition fairly well. Not well enough to be much practical use, maybe, but certainly better than someone with damage to their FFA (they are really lost in the dark, by all accounts, it's all a blur.)
Since I'm a Spanish speaker I'm afraid to not write properly in English.
The study focus on word order differences. Concluding there is not such a module or it is a general cognitive skill is clearly improper.
In all languages there are subject, verb and object.
In Spanish and English there are adverbs, nouns, adjetives and so on.
So languages are basically the same and there is a languege module responsible for these similarities and the capabality for human comunication. In adition the cerebral areas as Broca and Wernike probes that.
Not only that. The efability principle says "that anything which can be expressed in one language can also be expressed in another"
Although languages are so different that one can't understand wht it is said in a different one, in essence all languages are the same
To me sea mammal and primate language studies conclusively show that since interspecies communication using new phrases created by the animal itself there is a 'language module'.
I just can't wrap my head around a happenstance were totally different species stumble on the same way to communicate in random exemplars of a species. It's not just merely an animal being trained to connect symbols with actions, but an animal capable of expressing a desire using symbols in an order picked by itself.
That's beyond any kind of chance.
It also doesn't sit well with me because the idea that 'congnition' (an abstract construct created by OUR consciousness) could be recreated in other species without an underlying directive.
No matter how you look at it, neural networks in the order of complexity needed just don't 'happen'. They must have a buildingplan. And if there is a buildingplan it's hubris exemplified to imagine that we are the only ones having such a plan and all the other species just 'happen'.
One needs to throw overboard old assumptions and start fresh. Evolution adds to existing viable features, it doesn't rebuild.
Since as a matter of fact modules exist in the brain, it's absurd to think that just in our case they suddenly don't anymore.
Bantu? That's as diverse and definitive as the colonialists make of it. Swahili is a language still being studied. What do they make of Korean? That language was invented by one man, syntax and everything still pretty much the same, what cultural evolution? What does that even mean? I need to know. From what I recall, module specific processing streams in terms of language acquisition like Broca/Wernicke has already been widely debunked in cognition. I could be wrong because I'm not a cognitive scientist. I agree with Anon #1.. this has been debated.. may want to brush up on Chomsky and the current nativists views on language acquisition. There are also competing theories, theories come and gone. '...Chomsky has gradually abandoned the LAD in favour of a parameter-setting model of language acquisition (principles and parameters).' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition_device Cognition goes psycho detailed about it. From what I recall, you need to be specific and differentiate between reading from speaking, semantics from spelling, pa pa ma pa meme/phoneme utterances, bottom-up, top-down, language 'black box', not to mention network/computational models like AI, PP and so on when discussing these things. It's not a cup of tea kind of conversation.
This article sounds like from Neo's summary because I can't afford to subscribe to Nature – [knowledge should be free for the sake of the next generation who could be discussing word utterances as opposed to American Idol if only the likes of Nature took the effort to make open access work by perhaps stop being so elitist and adopt marketing strategies like Google and Jude Law as spokesperson], studied linguist parameters (word-order universals) in terms of evolutionary (not developmental?) disparities (phylogeny).. I'm assuming not so much on differentiating modules in the brain relative to processing traits which looks to be the tangent the chat in this blog is going? Given kids living in the forests devoid of human contact to how people can't acquire a language fluently after a certain age and so on is still pretty convincing enough evidence for me there might be a universal innate set of switches that aren't necessarily module specific. If they ethnographed? the phylogeny chain like to Neanderthals or on a hierarchy and at least include the Asiatic region like the Mongols, and figure out a way to strip culture and political influence.. migration trends? separated twins? specific case studies? there may emerge a convincing case as to lineage-specificities in terms of word-order universals over concurrence to explain for language acquisition parameters. But I haven't read the article yet and this is supposed to be a sophisticated field. Sounds like a fascinating study though.
Bantu? That's as diverse and definitive as the colonialists make of it. Swahili is a language still being studied. What do they make of Korean? That language was invented by one man, syntax and everything still pretty much the same, what cultural evolution? What does that even mean? I need to know. From what I recall, module specific processing streams in terms of language acquisition like Broca/Wernicke has already been widely debunked in cognition. I could be wrong because I'm not a cognitive scientist. I agree with Anon #1.. this has been debated.. may want to brush up on Chomsky and the current nativists views on language acquisition. There are also competing theories, theories come and gone. '...Chomsky has gradually abandoned the LAD in favour of a parameter-setting model of language acquisition (principles and parameters).' [Wiki quote] Cognition goes psycho detailed about it. From what I recall, you need to be specific and differentiate between reading from speaking, semantics from spelling, pa pa ma pa meme/phoneme utterances, bottom-up, top-down, language 'black box', not to mention network/computational models like AI, PP and so on when discussing these things. It's not a cup of tea kind of conversation.
This article sounds like from Neo's summary because I can't afford to subscribe to Nature – [knowledge should be free for the sake of the next generation who could be discussing word utterances as opposed to American Idol if only the likes of Nature took the effort to make open access work by perhaps stop being so elitist and adopt marketing strategies like Google and Jude Law as spokesperson], studied linguist parameters (word-order universals) in terms of evolutionary (not developmental?) disparities (phylogeny).. I'm assuming not so much on differentiating modules in the brain relative to processing traits which looks to be the tangent the chat in this blog is going? Given kids living in the forests devoid of human contact to how people can't acquire a language fluently after a certain age and so on is still pretty convincing enough evidence for me there might be a universal innate set of switches that aren't necessarily module specific. If they ethnographed? the phylogeny chain like to Neanderthals or on a hierarchy and at least include the Asiatic region like the Mongols, and figure out a way to strip culture and political influence.. migration trends? separated twins? specific case studies? there may emerge a convincing case as to lineage-specificities in terms of word-order universals over concurrence to explain for language acquisition parameters. But I haven't read the article yet and this is supposed to be a sophisticated field. Sounds like a fascinating study though.
Petrossa, I think you have a point in so far as what evolutionary biologists would argue for. I think cognitive linguists probably take a more analytic philosophy or hermeneutics approach to studying language. For example, the project of the enlightenment from Hegel to the current philosophy giants attribute language discourse via platforms and consensus as the pinnacle of enlightening humanity. From that, one could delve into dualist debates and to the extent the soul or thought or geist or consciousness drives language or communicate language in specific ways; shaping the mind, humanity, or vice versa or not, to the bare bones of language acquisition - so cognition.
Maybe it's not so much about acquiring and modulating the language itself, because languages can diversify and change over time, but recognizing and differentiating these mediums.. like.. as I type this I'm not consciously thinking about the language of my keyboard or the language of the music I'm listening to at the moment - In cognition they might call this parallel, lower/higher order processing, and attention. Not necessarily binded by modules in the brain but through parameters governed by switches and detectable by output perhaps. We're not always conscious of all languages. So I'm assuming it's a case of how we detect and refine these discrepancies through word-orders or what not to try and define these parameters. Of course there's a lot of criticism to this approach as well.
@veri
Maybe it's rather more a question of definition that lies at the root.
In my simplistic view language is a means of sentient communication in a structured way.
That definition treats all forms of sentient communication equally.
Using this definition it's beyond a shadow of a doubt an interspecies language is possible, as has been proven over and over again with animals studies. Even parrots seem to be able to rearrange sound/words to create a new one indicating sentient language capabilities.
If however you define language as that what WE do then obviously THAT language is limited to us and indeed a result of our cognitive processes.
In my mind the latter definition is a sophism. It's plainly impossible for non humans to have the exact same language derivative. They are not human.
What is a play here is imo millenia of (religious) social imprint that humans are superior beings.
This preconception automatically eliminates every other animal as candidate for language skills. Assuming that our language derivative is the golden standard leads to circular reasoning and the incapability to recognize that language is just a means of sentient communication with different applications adapted to the animals needs.
Language in my definition MUST be a module. No way nohow can it happen that all animals with sentient language skills just happen to create that on the go.
PS
"The Alex Foundation Research Publications
Dr. Irene Pepperberg has been studying the intelligence and reasoning abilities of the African Grey parrot for almost 30 years. She has published consistently and extensively in some of the most highly respected scientific journals in her field."
google for: The Alex Foundation
"What do they make of Korean? That language was invented by one man, syntax and everything still pretty much the same, what cultural evolution?"
Korean writing was pretty much invented by one man, as were some fine details of grammatical rules, but that one man was systematizing a language that was a natural one evolving for thousands of years already. That man didn't invent Korean any more than Blackstone invented the English common law.
Post a Comment