The First Word Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus The First Word

Zusammenfassung von The First Word

Name: The First Word
Rating: 3.7 (11 reviews)
Author: Christine Kenneally

Christine Kenneally

The Search for the Origins of Language

3.7 (11 Bewertungen)

18 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Find out where the tool that defines your identity comes from.

Unless you’re a hermit or disabled in some way, chances are high you spend every day speaking, hearing, reading, writing and/or thinking in a language. Language is, quite simply, a fundamental part of the human experience. What’s more, it’s one of the main reasons why humanity has been able to progress and flourish: it enables us to cooperate with one another, resolve disputes and pass on our knowledge to future generations.

But how much do you know about where this magnificent tool came from?

In these blinks, you’ll read about various theories that have been put forth on how language has developed and why it seems unique to humans.

You’ll also find out:

what happens when part of a chicken’s brain is transplanted into the head of a quail,
what George H. W. Bush and a baboon have in common, and
why language isn’t unlike a virus.

Noam Chomsky claimed that human beings inherit the ability to acquire languages.

In 1959, a relatively unknown academic by the name of Noam Chomsky shocked the world of psychology by radically criticizing a book by psychologist B. F. Skinner.

At the time, Skinner had enjoyed almost God-like status for his theory of behaviorism, but Chomsky’s criticism of Skinner’s views on language-learning effectively “dethroned” him.

What made Chomsky’s review so revolutionary?

Well, the key idea in Skinner's behaviorism was the stimulus-response model. According to this idea, learning occurs when learners encounter a stimulus and give a response that then gets positive feedback. For example, a child who hears the sentence “The cat is black” and then uses it correctly later may get an enthusiastic applause from her mother.

But Chomsky pointed out that this model doesn’t explain language acquisition in children. They not only learn a huge number of words extremely quickly but also the rules for how words can be combined and recombined to create new sentences – all without being explicitly told how this should happen.

For example, a child who knows the sentences “The cat is black” and “The cat is small” will also know that these two sentences can be combined as “The cat is black and small” but not “The cat is black is small.”

And that’s where the stimulus-response model runs into trouble due to what Chomsky referred to as poverty of stimulus. In the example above, the child has never heard the combined sentence or the explicit grammatical rules for how sentences can be combined, so there’s not enough stimuli to explain why she can nevertheless produce the correct response.

Chomsky’s explanation was that language can be seen as a perfect, inherited system that pre-exists in the human brain. It’s the reason why children don’t need to learn the structures of language: they have them automatically from this inherited component. What’s more, he argued that only humans have this component, or else other species would also develop languages of their own.

Language is not a uniquely human phenomenon: it can be taught to animals, too.

As stated in the previous blink, Chomsky thought language was based on a component specific to the human brain. Which means that his theory could be rendered implausible if human language could also be taught to apes and dolphins.

And that has, in fact, been done.

Just like the human eye, language is a product of evolution.

Today, most sensible people understand that our species descended from apes through the process of evolution. And because human language acquisition and the language capabilities of apes share certain similarities, it seems to suggest that language itself is the product of evolution.

This idea was made popular in the scientific community by two psychologists – Paul Bloom and Steven Pinker – and it was actually a far bigger innovation than you might assume. Keep in mind that Chomsky and his followers, such as Stephen Jay Gould, had dominated the field for decades with their view that language was a perfect, preconfigured system in our brains. And for this to be plausible, they had to assume that language appeared out of nowhere because such a perfect system could not have evolved over time as a result of natural selection.

There is no specific, independent language organ in the brain: it’s connected to motor control.

In the previous blink, we examined how Pinker and Bloom proposed that language capabilities had evolved. But they were not the first to challenge Chomsky’s view.

In 1984, more than five years before Pinker and Bloom’s suggestion, Philip Lieberman already argued radically against Chomsky’s idealized opinion of language. According to Lieberman, the starting point of understanding language should be through evolution.

What constitutes human language? Talking about a subject and the presence of meaningful words.

Before we dive into examining how language evolved, let’s use the next blinks to try to understand what human language actually is and how it’s different from animal language.

First of all, human language requires the ability to talk about something.

What constitutes human language? Animals also use gestures and speech.

Do you know what a “muzzle wipe” is? It’s when baboons quickly swipe across the bridge of their nose with their hand, a gesture they usually use in situations where they feel conflicted or nervous about something.

Such gestures are a key component in human language, too. And, believe it or not, the muzzle wipe isn’t unique to baboons.

What constitutes human language? Structure is key, but it doesn’t appear to be uniquely human.

As anyone who has ever studied the grammar of a foreign language will tell you, structure is a major component of human language.

Linguists have identified two types of structure in language:

Human language does have a biological basis: the human brain.

For a long time, linguists assumed that language abilities could be attributed to distinct areas of the brain. But this has been disproven by experiences with patients who have suffered brain damage: it turns out that if an area of the brain is damaged, language capacity can move to another area. If language capacity really were restricted to one area, damage to it would be catastrophic.

However, experiments with animals have suggested that some language-related behaviors seem to be completely reliant on how the brain is constructed. For example, in one study, scientists implanted a piece of a Japanese quail’s brain into the brain of a domestic chicken and vice versa.

Language is like a virus that has evolved in symbiosis with humans.

In the sixteenth century, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus put forth a rather revolutionary model of the universe: What if the sun, not the earth, was at its center?

This idea is an example of the kind of remarkable and profound shifts in perspective that have occurred in the history of science and propelled our progress.

We can understand human language by examining how robots are developing theirs.

As you’ve seen in the course of the previous blinks, the academic world is quite divided when it comes to theories about the origins of language. Unfortunately, we can’t know who, if anyone, is right.

But wouldn’t it be enlightening if we could observe a language developing in real time? That’s what Luc Steels, a Belgian scientist, tried to achieve by building robots that develop a language of their own.

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Worum geht es in The First Word?

The First Word examines the different theories and viewpoints that have been put forward in the past half a century on the complex topic of the origin of language.

Wer The First Word lesen sollte

Anyone interested in learning about where language comes from
Anyone interested in how we can observe language in animals

Über den Autor

Christine Kenneally has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Cambridge, and she has written for publications such as Scientific American, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

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