The Evolution of Language(s)

A lot of recent stuff on the evolution of language (the linguistic faculty) and languages ("tongues")

There is a good article in Seed Magazine ("Science is Culture"; I like their slogan !) about recent research on the evolution of language.

Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years—an eye-blink of evolution.

Why are humans the only species to have suddenly hit upon the remarkable possibilities of language? If speech is a product of our DNA, then surely other species also have some of the same genes required for language because of our basic, shared biochemistry. One of our closest relatives should have developed something that is akin to language, or another species should have happened upon its attendant advantages through parallel evolution.

See also:

• Fogassi, L., & Ferrari, P. F. (2007). Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Embodied Language. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(3), 136-141.
• Kirby, S., Dowman, M., & Griffiths, T. L. (2007). Innateness and culture in the evolution of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(12), 5241.
• Pollick, A. S., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2007). Ape gestures and language evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 8184.
• Lieberman, E., Michel, J., Jackson, J., Tang, T., & Nowak, M. A. (2007). Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language. Nature, 449(7163), 713-716.
  
• Pagel, M., Atkinson, Q. D., & Meade, A. (2007). Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history. Nature, 449(7163), 717-720.
• Streaming videos on language evolution (Nature).
• Fitch, W. T. (2007). Linguistics: An invisible hand. Nature, 449(7163), 665-667. [about Lieberman et al. and Pagel et al., papers]

And Michael C. Corballis reviews two books on the motor origins of language here:

• Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind. Margalit Fox. Simon and Schuster, 2007.
  
• The Gestural Origin of Language. David F. Armstrong and Sherman E. Wilcox. Oxford University Press, 2007
  

In an older article, he explains his gestural theory of language.

The Stuff of Thought

Unless you live on a desert island, you might have heard of Steven Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought. Language as a Window into Human Nature.

If you are interested in knowing more about it, here are an excerpt online, a book review and an interview.

Last but not least, two video lectures of Pinker at Ted Talks (an amazing collection of lecture by great scholars):

" In an exclusive preview of his new book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. By analyzing common sentences and words, he shows us how, in what we say and how we say it, we're communicating much more than we realize."





"In a preview of his next book, Steven Pinker takes on violence. We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we've come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about."

The linguistic basis of social preferences

Surprising (at least to me) finding, published in PNAS today. Young infants display a strong preference for agents that speak their own language. More than smell, look, and sound, social attachment seems to be mediated by linguistic (and accent) similarity. We like those who speak like us. From this findings, researchers draw three conclusions:

First, language provides a cue to social preferences, even in infants who have not begun to produce or understand speech. Second, the tendency to favor otherwise unfamiliar members of one's own social group begins to emerge early in human life and well before children begin to learn about the nature and history of social-group conflicts. The passage from infants' social preferences to adults' social conflicts may be long and circuitous, but such a path may exist and may explain, in part, why conflicts among different language and social groups are pervasive and difficult to eradicate. Third, because human languages vary, and the native language must be learned, the tendency to make social distinctions is shaped by experience. Because language learning is especially adaptable early in development, social preferences also may be malleable at young ages. This early adaptability of preference formation for familiar characteristics of individuals may obtain for many potential indicators of social group membership.

• Katherine D. Kinzler, Emmanuel Dupoux, and Elizabeth S. Spelke. The native language of social cognition. PNAS 104: 12577-12580