Human Language, unique, innate or learnt?
- Thread starter weltweit
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Lots of animals communicate in all kinds of interesting and complex ways. That's not the same as having language. All human languages have certain qualities that have not yet been found in other animals' communication – it is endlessly creative, abstracted from the message, able to be used at a distance in both time and space from the subject.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Not just chimps either, plenty of mammals exhibit behaviours analogous to gossip - important social glue, just as it is in human societies.
Language needs the brain, but won't arise automatically. The capacity for language is innate but language itself has to be learned. It relies on some kind of feedback loop. A baby babbling in total isolation will not learn language, it requires feedback on the efficacy of its sounds to begin to form word-like sounds and then requires exposure to syntactical speech to go beyond that.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Well, they did teach chimps ASL. But they never mastered a fast and fluent and abstracted use of language- not even those chimps who were taught the signing by the parents. This suggests there is a fundemental difference in the nueral architecture of a human as compared to a chimp
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Pidgin will do, though, won't it – a group of children exposed to only pidgin from adults will develop a fully expressive creole among themselves.
Yes, it's not just down to some general capacity for learning. Chimps do better on some short-term memory tests than humans. Some animals that store food in different places in wintertime can remember hundreds of different locations.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
It's probably the aural equivalent of lolcats and porn
I'm not really well up on this debate - I'll have to watch horizon on iplayer. Having said that I would imagine the potential for languange is innate, however the function and use of language is shaped by and contingent upon the social environment. So its likely a bit of both nature and nurture, surprise surprise.
Thora
Differently Ethical
I seem to remember something similar from cases of extremely neglected children. Children who were so neglected that they were effectively denied human interaction in their early years failed to learn language even once they had been rescued. A set of twins did better though, because they were able to develop some form of language/communication between themselves, so were able to learn language later.
Jonti
what the dormouse said
We can be pretty confident of the answer as nature is unkind enough to perform the experiment for us; some children are born deaf. Without intervention, they grow up to be dumb mutes, village idiots.
Yet where two or three congenitally deaf children grow up together, and are allowed to use gestural language with each other, they spontaneously create their own language, and intellectual development is unimpaired.
Oliver Sacks is good on this history, and writes movingly about Martha's Island.
Ibn Khaldoun
the present is dead, long live the future . . .
London_Calling
Pleasant and unpatronising
I saw this. Man, I love the way DNA analysis is sorting all these ideas that go back decades, sometimes even centuries. It's a great time to be living if you like your scientific mysteries solved.
Two tiny friggin chromosome mutations and bamb! the capability for speech.
Obviously on the iPlayer if you want to catch it.
Two tiny friggin chromosome mutations and bamb! the capability for speech.
Obviously on the iPlayer if you want to catch it.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
But I don't think it is as simple as that, there was the case that they proved that a family with speech impediments did have that chromosome mutation but that does not suggest that it is just those chromosomes that control speech, just that they are involved. There could be a lot more chromosomes also involved in the ability to use language.
Of course there is a difference BUT that doesn't mean that animals are not capable of language.
What you must take into consideration when looking at studies with chimps and ASL is that the sign language, is a human language (English) that has been translated from verbal to physical words.
Judging apes capacity for grammar is never going to be that accurate using this method.
I love Chomsky but he was wrong in this instance.
Only the second post, but that's the thread answered!
Language gives us a past and a future.
No animals have that. They don't have the language, they don't have the manipulation of time that we have, and everything that comes with that concept.
That is not true.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
As DeepStoat says, fela's assertion is unjustified, and false.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
It's not an assertion, it's an inference, surely?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Actually it's both – the first bit is an assertion, the second an inference – both unjustified as it happens.
It might be useful to me to hear why, and in what way, what i said is unjustified and false, but only if you feel like explaining your reply further.
Incidentally, you and kyser might like to remind yourselves the difference between 'infer' and 'imply'.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Ok. You said that language gives us a past and a future. I would say that this is false. Language gives us a way of communicating ideas about the past and future to others, but plenty of animals have problem-solving skills that demonstrate an ability to imagine future events, for instance - crows, for one.
I think you may be falling into the seductive trap that our linguistic ability sets us - thinking that it is necessary to have language to conceptualise. Language is a powerful tool for conceptualisation, but it really isn't the only way to do it.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
I think we have had a similar exchange before, but I am of the belief that MOST animal consciousness exists in an eternal 'now' and does not conceptualise future and past in the same way the human animal does. Patterns of skills and such may be passed on-but not to the advent of language to the level which we use language, that gives us later, then, before, now. Maybe dolphins have similar. We don't have the cognates to converse with them though
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Urban repeats itself shocker!
Yes, we have done this before - I think you're partially right, but that some other animals do demonstrate an extended consciousness that does conceptualise future and past in a similar way to humans. Elephants, as I think I said before, are the most likely candidates. Ours is a hand-driven intelligence. Theirs is trunk-led. Extended consciousness could well have come about as an accidental side-product of brain enlargement that was driven by the possibilities of hands and trunks.
Yes, we have done this before - I think you're partially right, but that some other animals do demonstrate an extended consciousness that does conceptualise future and past in a similar way to humans. Elephants, as I think I said before, are the most likely candidates. Ours is a hand-driven intelligence. Theirs is trunk-led. Extended consciousness could well have come about as an accidental side-product of brain enlargement that was driven by the possibilities of hands and trunks.
In fact i completely agree with your point in the second paragraph. I have just argued this in the other thread.
Meditation is man's way of getting into the present and out of the future or past. I strongly suspect that all animals only live in the present. They do what they have to do when they have to do it. They are perhaps totally guided by instincts. We have language that has blunted our own instinctive ability (when that big tsunami occurred for example, elephants in sri lanka, and other animals in other affected countries, headed off away from the sea sharpishly; humans just carried on swimming), but of course has provided other guides to our life.
If you analyse the present simple tense, we mostly use it to describe states that are always true, or we use it to describe actions/events that have no specific time related to them. Language has given us our ability to conceptualise both past and future.
However, that said, i'd be interested to hear how crows think about the future!
Now i read this, i have to recall that i've read more than one story of how elephants have memories. I can't remember the details but one time a man who had done wrong to another elephant at a previous time was then trampled to death by another elephant that knew of the man's misdeeds.
So perhaps i was wrong with my original claim that only humans have past and future. Oh well.
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