Untitled

Origins of Human Language

• Humans are the only species which possess and utilize language, distinguishing from other animals that communicate in more limited ways.
• Unique human activities such as gossiping, seminars, interviews, board meetings, poems, treaties, marriage ceremonies, and criminal trials revolve around language and talking.
• Language is nearly unique to humans, though humans also participate in other unique activities.
• Language is differentiated from other uniquely human activities because all humans do it, past and present, even though not all humans design bridges.
• Genes contribute to language acquisition, with one perspective that language is an innate instinct, while another see it as a by-product of cognitive abilities.
• Steven Pinker's 1994 book, The Language Instinct, supports the nativist view, suggesting genes endow language capacity and general structure.
• An opposing anti-nativist view suggests language isn't an instinct but comes from the impressive cognitive abilities of humans as superlearners.
• Daniel Everett's Language: The Cultural Tool suggests human beings invented language to solve problems like efficiently transmitting information.
• Language is universal like arrows in hunter-gatherer societies, driven by problem-solving competence rather than specific genes.
• Diverse fields of language sciences are yet unable to resolve the debate.
• Questions remain about the definition of language, involved learning, physical and mental machinery. The role of genes in language remains uncertain.
• The Linguistic Society of Paris forbade origin-of-language papers at its conferences in 1866.

Why Us?

• Human language differs from animal communication, such as the honeybees' dance language, by humans making symbolic representations.
• Karl von Frisch identified and described the dance language of honeybees.
• A worker bee communicates nectar location with a waggle dance.
• The bee's dance communicates the nectar source's direction, distance, and quality.
• Direction is indicated by the bee's movement in line with vertical top of hive indicates direction to sun, and angle is relative
• Distance is indicated by length of bee's dance
• Quality of of of nectar source is indicated by vigor
• Different bee species have variations in this dance, each with their own dialect. Bees introduced do not adopt dialect of new hive. Bees can learn each other's dialects
• Honeybee dance language has similarities to human language because it uses body movements to represent things in the real world. It also relies on symbolic representation to ground meanings.
• Human language uses sounds made in the mouth as symbolic units like "eat fruit."

Human Language vs Bee Language

• Bee dances communicate specific information while human language has arbitrary associations.
• Bee dances function like drawing maps with bodies, human language with words.
• Bee dances are limited to one topic of food or water, while human language handles endless topics.
• Human language encompasses making requests, promises, sympathy, and directions. Human language also involves a complexity of structure bees' dance language does not.
• Charles Hockett listed "design features" as common to all human languages, like vocal-auditory channel, broadcast transmission, rapid fading, and interchangeability.

Primate Vocalizations

• Primate communication has a limited repertoire with specific purposes.
• Vervet monkeys have distinct alarm calls for different predators, but their calls lack displacement, duality of patterning and productivity.
• Vervet calls exhibit semanticity and arbitrariness. Their calls are genetically wired and instinctively linked to predator categories. The sounds are fixed from birth and are culturally transmitted, so that eagle alarm is not made in reaction to a pigeon.
• Genetic programming for language is more flexible in humans, enabling versatile language learning, and the nativist position suggests common structural ingredients in all languages.
• Primates show greater flexibility in interpreting signals than producing them
• Vervets do not seem to be born with an understanding of the alarms but learn over time with experiences.

Can Language Be Taught to Apes?

• Non-human primates lack language-like vocalization in the wild, so non-nativists evaluate ape learning with human interaction
• Apes raised in a language-rich environment with other humans could master hundreds of words and symbols.
• Apes can use symbols to request objects, comment on environment, refer to objects not present, and even lie. They’ve also shown suggesting of Hockett's ‘productivity’.
• Comprehension skills are much quicker for apes that production of the language-like units
• Apes struggle to use vocal sounds to represent meaning. Apes cannot articulate different-sounding words.
• Apes can build up a large vocabulary using signed language for spoken languages and adopt visual symbols arranged in systematic structures.

Hockett's Design Features

• Vocal-auditory channel: language is produced in vocal tract and transmitted as sound.
• Broadcast Transmission and directional reception: language can be heard coming from one direction.
• rapid Fading: sounds produced by speech quickly
• Interchangeability: user of a language can send and receive the same message
• Total feedback: Senders of message can hear message
• Specialization: production of sound in language other than to communicate
• Semanticity: There are aspects and the units of language
• Arbitrariness: meaningful associations
• Discreteness: units of language are separate and not part of whole
• Displacement: language an be used to communicate things not present in time
• Productivity: can say things not been said before
• Traditional transmission: specific language is adopted to exposure of other users
• Duality of Patterning: words combined with sounds in patterns
• Prevarication: used to make false statements
• Reflexiveness: language to describe itself
• Learnability: use of language to learn to use a different language

Evolution of Communication

• Genetically, the most common view is that humans have some innate capabilities for language that evolved as adaptations
• Evolutionary adaptations transmit traits that gives individuals advantages, with the advantageous gene spreading
• The piano-playing analogy questions why only humans use language if apes' language capabilities evolved before divergence.

Social Cognition

• Humans are inclined to share information while other primates have not been able to discover the benefits of doing so. Social behavior is more important to humans.
• Chimps are less altruistic/caring than humans
• To navigate the human world we need a certain social aptitude that chimps do not. Language, law, money - require buy in
• Socially-oriented motivation
• Humans have the capacity for joint attention: more are more individuals are paying attention to the same thing
• Joint attention skills are evident in extremely young humans. Toward the en of te first year, babies direct people's attention and use elaborate vocalizations.
• Humans have a sense of "commenting with humans."

Language Structure

• Language has the properties of both symbols and combination.
• Combination requires two levels:
  • Words: using relatively few sounds to communicate, but they cannot communicate complex ideas.
  • Sentences: requires combining meaningful elements like sounds, but requires agreed upon rules of syntax so meanings are clear.

The Structure of Language

• The question of recursivity and syntax goes past vocabulary and word choice in generating meaning from the elements that are used.
• "Nesting" of related clauses or other linguistic units within each other

The Evolution of Speech

• The ability to speak was the third factor in being contribute to human language.
• Speech requires a finely tuned delivery system through which the linguistic signal is transmitted.
• Human distinctiveness stems from both symbols/structure of words. Humans use speech, other primates do not.
• Apes can barely utter more than four indistinct words no matter how hard they try.
• Human speech production involves pushing air through lungs, control lips,and coordinate these parts at millisecond timing.
• Chimpanzee's larynx is not as low as human's. Chimpanzee cannot pronounce vowels in bead or boo.
• Having correct anatomy involves the ability to learn any skills for equipment.
• It does not make you a guitar player if someone gives you a guitar

The Vocalization of Primates

• Most primates have a relatively fixed and largely innate set of vocalizations that is not largely affected by the environment. This does not occur in babies who change their voices over time.
• Vocal imitation has birds and aquatic animals
• Several researchers have argued that not all vocalizations made by humans or other animals are rooted through the neural pathway.
• It needs to be in a way that is related to arousal, emotion, and motivation. The sounds that are made largely in born for the most part.
• Human animals can make a vocal call through a cognitive pathway involving auditory before can be reliably. Different from other primates
• Hockett was wrong. Human languages are universally spoken as truth. Speech has been default for transmit language.

Hockett's Design Features of Human Language

• Language is produced in the vocal channel and transmitted as sound and is through auditory channels.
• There is broad cast transmission or direction reception. Language can be heard from many directions, coming from one particular
• A user of language can send and receive the same message. Language can be deliberate to make false statements
• There is rapid fading and the sounds produced by language has the ability to be transmitted quickly.
• The user and sender can hear internalized messages
• The production of sounds
• Users can use it to describe or refer to itself and can learn use in a different language.

The Evolution of Gestures

• Humans have evolved perfectly with anatomy and the nervous system. Adaptations have been made for linguistic communication and humans are not dependent on it through speech in any modality.
• The hypothesis shows the earliest forms of human language and the ancestors communication comes down to gestures. Apes bad communicate any of speech from any semblance

The Innateness of Language

• Primates do use spontaneous gestures. This is the interesting flexible vocals. Vocal sounds are limited to very specific context and the Ape see is able to use gestures.
• Gestures can be adapted in varying settings like words. Gesture has made a plausible communication towards the primate line. Vocalizations have been unlike humans

The Study of Language

• People who are deaf can be separated from hearing communities. Children can invent sign and gestures with the help and the instruction of their parents
• If deaf people are separated, the communication can be system systematically. If you can't hear it, you're separated to become innovative or complicated.
• In addition to being born with the capacity to learn, language children can be born to invent languages and similarities or together
• But who are relatively raised to the otherwise are socially have made it be useful analogies. It's not easy to make it Some things would and maybe wouldn’t be depending on the circumstances but all that have a shared system that helps a group of sign be made more in order to gain something about their language The Nicaraguan kids so basic on the language. It's altered to what was best more creative. and some efficiency is gained with certain aspects by being restructured and reorganized.
• The efficiency is gained by those that is known as Pantomiming. If he'd just get still production in a series and certain order.

Evolutionary Linguistics

• Senghas researchers suggested 2 ingredients on how shared home sign needs to process past its humble beginings: the comminuty by language, a progession of exposure.
• The greatest is the greatest competence is had with new learners having the structure that put all there

Language and Genetics

• There are a high amount of linguistic input. The window of of during when should see a see the to to be a foreign speaker like their nature. Easy to see in imigrant in their newly.
• But what do they show They also need to show them show them.

Evolution

• Many nativists have seen that a sensitive period of language supports the view that has an intermitted specified with vigorous capacity
• The the sensitive period of language comes to get the sounds right with hours of practice The researchers see parts of the language. But that has the language is easy from
• Theories are also more compatible for people that speak
• In these cases, they often are good in areas like tests, which may make one understand With how much of how did that, and what do you do with have with They that what
• So how is our language related have

The Evolution of Language - Genetics

• Since 1950s, Down Syndrome was identified as linked genetics. It is known that ability and to make functions or or or or or a glitch, has a certain point These important to know to learn there be system has a a as If language is from ability have should what on And hand as was would that that module not a a know to is is is is there? Well with genetic a language of have with genetic and and and with genetic would