LANGUAGE AND COGNITION

„G. Yule - The study of Languange”

Chapter 1 - the origins of language

In Charles Darwin’s vision of the origins of language, early humans had already developed musical ability prior to
language and were using it “to charm each other.”

 We simply don’t know how language originated.

The divine source

In most religions, there appears to be a divine source who provides humans with languange.

 Experiments --> hypothesis: if human infants were allowed to grow up without hearing any language around them,
then they would spontaneously begin using the original God-given language.

Experiment of Egyptian pharaoh - PSAMMENTICHUS (or PSAMTIK)

 Over 2 500 years ago

Children were isolated for two years exept the company of goats and a mute shepherd. Children said spontaneously
something which was identified as the Phrygian word “bekos”, which means “bread”. (nothing from Egyptian
languange).

The pharaoh concluded that Phrygian, an older language spoken in part of what is modern Turkey, must be the original
language.
 That seems very unlikely.

The children may not have picked up this “word” from any human source, but as several commentators have pointed
out, they must have heard what the goats were saying.

First remove the -kos ending, which was added in the Greek version of the story, then pronounce beas --> the English
word bed without - d ---> sounds like goat.

Experiment of King James

 A similar experiment like pharaoh

The children started speaking Hebrew confirming the King’s belief that Hebrew had indeed been the language of the
Garden of Eden.all other cases of children who have been discovered living in isolation, without contact with human
speech, tend not to confirm the results of these types of divine-source experiments.
 Very young children living without access to human language in their early years grow up with no language at all.
 If human language did emanate from a divine source, we have no way of reconstructing that original language,
especially given the events in a place called Babel, “because the Lord did there confound the language of all the
earth,” as described in the book of Genesis in the Bible.
 The natural sound source

Basic idea -> primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which early men and women heard
around them.

When an object flew by, making a CAW-CAW sound, the early human tried to imitate the sound and used it to refer to
the thing associated with the sound.

COO-COO sound ---> was adopted to refer to that kind of object.

The leads to the“bow-wow theory” of language origi:

In English: cuckoo, we have splash, bang, boom, rattle, buzz, hiss, screech,---> ONOMATOPEIA

The original sounds of language may have come from natural cries of emotion such as pain, anger and joy.

 Ouch! - come to have its s painful connotations. BUT

We normally produce spoken language on exhaled breath.

The expressive noises people make in emotional reactions contain sounds that are not otherwise used in speech
production and consequently would seem to be rather unlikely candidates as source sounds for language.

The social interaction source

The “yo-he-ho” theory:

The sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that physical
effort involved several people and the interaction had to be coordinated.

A group of early humans might develop a set of hums, grunts, groans and curses that were used when they were lifting
and carrying large bits of trees or lifeless hairy mammoths.

The appeal of this proposal is that it places the development of human language in a social context. Early people must
have lived in groups, if only because larger groups offered better protection from attack.

So, human sounds, however they were produced, must have had some principled use within the life and social
interaction of early human groups.
 This relates to the uses of humanly produced sounds.

The physical adaptation source

At same early stage, our ancestors made a very significant transition to an upright posture, with bipedal (on two feet)
locomotion, and a revised role for the front limbs.

 The skull of a gorilla ---> (physical differences between) ---> Neanderthal man.

In the study of evolutionary development, there are certain physical features, best thought of as partial adaptations,
which appear to be relevant for speech.
They are streamlined versions of features found in other primates.

Such features would not necessarily lead to speech production, but they are good clues that a creature possessing such
features probably has the capacity for speech.
 Teeth, lips, mouth, larynx and pharynx

Human teeth - grinding and chewing food, very helpful in making sounds such as f or v.

Human lips - have much more intricate muscle interlacing than is found in other primates and their resulting flexibility
certainly helps in making sounds like p or b.

Human mouth - is relatively small compared to other primates, can be opened and closed rapidly, and contains a
smaller, thicker and more muscular tongue which can be used to shape a wide variety of sounds inside the oral cavity.

 unlike other primates, humans can close off the airway through the nose to create more air pressure in the mouth.

 The human larynx or “voice box” (containing the vocal folds or vocal cords) differs significantly in position from the
larynx of other primates such as monkeys.

In the course of human physical development, the assumption of an upright posture moved the head more directly
above the spinal column and the larynx dropped to a lower position.

This created a longer cavity called the pharynx, above the vocal folds, which acts as a resonator for increased range and
clarity of the sounds produced via the larynx and the vocal tract.

One unfortunate consequence of this development is that the lower position of the human larynx makes it much more
possible for the human to choke on pieces of food.

Monkeys may not be able to use their larynx to produce speech sounds, but they do not suffer from the problem of
getting food stuck in their windpipe.

In evolutionary terms, there must have been a big advantage in getting this extra vocal power to outweigh the potential
disadvantage from an increased risk of choking to death.

The tool-making source

In the physical adaptation view, one function (producing speech sounds) must have been superimposed on existing
anatomical features (teeth, lips) previously used for other purposes (chewing, sucking). A similar development is
believed to have taken place with human hands and some believe that manual gestures may have been a precursor of
language.

There is evidence that humans had developed preferential right-handedness and had become capable of making stone
tools. Wood tools and composite tools eventually followed. Tool-making, or the outcome of manipulating objects and
changing them using both hands, is evidence of a brain at work.

The human brain is not only large relative to human body size, it is also lateralized that is, it has specialized functions in
each of the two hemispheres. (zlateralizowany, to znaczy, ma wyspecjalizowane funkcje w każdej z dwóch półkul).

 Those functions that control the motor movements involved in complex vocalization (speaking) and object
manipulation (making or using tools) are very close to each other in the left hemisphere of the brain.

It may be that there was an evolutionary connection between the language-using and tool-using abilities of humans
and that both were involved in the development of the speaking brain.

Most of the other speculative proposals concerning the origins of speech seem to be based on a picture of humans
producing single noises to indicate objects in their environment.

This activity may indeed have been a crucial stage in the development of language, but what it lacks is: any structural
organization.

All languages, including sign language, require the organizing and combining of sounds or signs in specific arrangements.
We seem to have developed a part of our brain that specializes in making these arrangements.

If we think in terms of the most basic process involved in primitive tool-making, it is not enough to be able to grasp
one rock (make one sound); the human must also be able to bring another rock (other sounds) into proper contact with
the first in order to develop a tool.

In terms of language structure, the human may have first developed a naming ability by producing a specific and
consistent noise (e.g. bEEr) for a specific object. The crucial additional step was to bring another specific noise (e.g.
gOOd) into combination with the first to build a complex message (bEEr gOOd).

Several thousand years of development later, humans have honed this message-building capacity to a point where, on
Saturdays, watching a football game, they can drink a sustaining beverage and proclaim This beer is good. As far as we
know, other primates are not doing this.

The genetic source

We can think of the human baby in its first few years as a living example of some of these physical changes taking place.
At birth, the baby’s brain is only a quarter of its eventual weight and the larynx is much higher in the throat, allowing
babies, like chimpanzees, to breathe and drink at the same time. In a relatively short period of time, the larynx
descends, the brain develops, the child assumes an upright posture and starts walking and talking.

This almost automatic set of developments and the complexity of the young child’s language have led some scholars to
look for something more powerful than small physical adaptations of the species over time as the source of language.

Even children who are born deaf (and do not develop speech) become fluent sign language users, given appropriate
circumstances, very early in life. This seems to indicate (wskazuje na to, że) that human offspring (potomstwo) are
born with a special capacity for language.

It is innate (wrodzone), no other creature seems to have it, and it isn’t tied to a specific variety of language.

Is it possible that this language capacity is genetically hard-wired in the newborn human?

As a solution to the puzzle of the origins of language, this innateness hypothesis would seem to point to something in
human genetics, possibly a crucial mutation, as the source.

This would not have been a gradual change, but something that happened rather quickly. We are not sure when this
proposed genetic change might have taken place or how it might relate to the physical adaptations described earlier.

However, as we consider this hypothesis, we find our speculations about the origins of language moving away from
fossil evidence or the physical source of basic human sounds toward analogies with how computers work (e.g. being
pre-programmed or hard-wired) and concepts taken from the study of genetics.

The investigation of the origins of language then turns into a search for the special “language gene” that only humans
possess.