The Social Origins of Language
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The Social Origins of Language
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Overview
How human language evolved from the need for social communication
The origins of human language remain hotly debated. Despite growing appreciation of cognitive and neural continuity between humans and other animals, an evolutionary account of human language—in its modern form—remains as elusive as ever. The Social Origins of Language provides a novel perspective on this question and charts a new path toward its resolution.
In the lead essay, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney draw on their decades-long pioneering research on monkeys and baboons in the wild to show how primates use vocalizations to modulate social dynamics. They argue that key elements of human language emerged from the need to decipher and encode complex social interactions. In other words, social communication is the biological foundation upon which evolution built more complex language.
Seyfarth and Cheney’s argument serves as a jumping-off point for responses by John McWhorter, Ljiljana Progovac, Jennifer E. Arnold, Benjamin Wilson, Christopher I. Petkov and Peter Godfrey-Smith, each of whom draw on their respective expertise in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Michael Platt provides an introduction, Seyfarth and Cheney a concluding essay. Ultimately, The Social Origins of Language offers thought-provoking viewpoints on how human language evolved.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400888146 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/05/2017 |
| Series: | Duke Institute for Brain Sciences Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE
Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney
Human language poses a problem for evolutionary theory because of the striking discontinuities between language and the communication of our closest animal relatives, the nonhuman primates. How could language have evolved from the common ancestor of these two very different systems?
The qualitative differences between language and nonhuman primate communication are now well known (see Fitch 2010 for review). All human languages are built up from a large repertoire of learned, modifiable sounds. These sounds are combined into phonemes, which are combined into words, which in turn are combined according to grammatical rules into sentences. In sentences, the meaning of each word derives both from its own, stand-alone meaning and from its function role as a noun, verb, or modifier. Grammatical rules allow a finite number of elements to convey an infinite number of meanings: the meaning of a sentence is more than just the summed meanings of its constituent words. Languages derive their communicative power from being discrete, combinatorial, rule-governed, and open-ended computational systems, like the number system or the use of 1s and 0s in a digital computer (Jackendoff 1994; Pinker 1994).
By contrast, nonhuman primates (prosimians, monkeys, and apes) — and indeed most mammals — have a relatively small number of calls in their vocal repertoire. These calls exhibit only slight modification during development; that is, their acoustic structure appears to be largely under genetic control (see Hammerschmidt and Fischer 2008 for review). Furthermore, while animals can give or withhold calls voluntarily and modify the timing of vocal production (reviewed in Seyfarth and Cheney 2010), different call types are rarely given in rule-governed combinations (but see Ouattara, Lemasson, and Zuberbuhler 2009; Zuberbuhler 2014). When call combinations do occur, there is little evidence that individual calls play functional roles as agents, actions, or patients. As a result, primate vocalizations, when compared to language, appear to convey only limited information (Bickerton 1990; Hurford 2007; Fitch 2010).
Differences between human language and nonhuman primate communication are most apparent in the domain of call production. Continuities are more apparent, however, when one considers the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie call perception, and the social function of language and communication in the daily lives of individuals. Here we begin by briefly reviewing the evidence that homologous brain mechanisms in human and nonhuman primates underlie the recognition of individual faces and voices; the multimodal processing of visual and auditory signals; the recognition of objects; and the recognition of call meaning. These results are relevant to any theory of language evolution because they suggest that, for much of their shared evolutionary history, human and nonhuman primates faced similar communicative problems and responded by evolving similar neural mechanisms.
What were these similar communicative problems? In the second part of this essay we compare how language functions in human social interactions with the function of vocalizations in the daily lives of animals, particularly baboons. We argue that, while the two systems of communication are structurally very different, they share many functions. These shared functions help explain the evolution of homologous neural mechanisms.
To understand the function of primate vocalizations, one must understand what primates know about each other. In baboons, for example, this includes knowledge of individual identity, dominance rank, matrilineal kin membership, and the use of different vocalizations in different social circumstances. In chimpanzees, it includes knowledge of other animals' alliance partners. In the third part of this essay we show that selection has favored in baboons — and, by extension, other primates — a system of communication that is discrete, combinatorial, rule-governed, and open-ended. We argue that this system was common to our prelinguistic primate ancestors and that when language later evolved from this common foundation, many of its distinctive features were already in place.
SHARED BRAIN MECHANISMS
An area in the human temporal cortex, the fusiform face area, responds especially strongly to the presentation of faces and appears to be specialized for face recognition (Kanwisher, McDermott, and Chun 1997). A similar area, consisting entirely of face-selective cells, exists in the macaque temporal cortex (Tsao et al. 2003, 2006; Freiwald, Tsao, and Livingston 2009). Humans also have a region in the superior temporal sulcus that is particularly responsive to human voices and appears to play an important role in voice recognition (Van Lancker et al. 1988; Belin et al. 2000; Belin and Zattore 2003). Petkov et al. (2008) document the existence of a similar area in the macaque brain.
When communicating with one another, humans exhibit multisensory integration: bimodal stimuli (voices and concurrent facial expressions) consistently elicit stronger neural activity than would be elicited by either voices or faces alone (e.g., Wright et al. 2003). Human infants are sensitive to the "match" between speech sounds and their corresponding facial expressions, responding more strongly to incongruent than to congruent vocal and visual stimuli (Kuhl and Meltzoff 1984; Patterson and Werker 2003). A variety of studies document similar multisensory integration in monkeys (Ghazanfar and Logothetis 2003; Ghazanfar et al. 2005; Ghazanfar, Chandrasekaran, and Logothetis 2008; Sliwa et al. 2011; Adachi and Hampton 2012).
In both humans and macaques, neurons in the ventral premotor cortex exhibit neural activity both when performing a specific action and when observing another perform the same action (see Ferrari, Bonini, and Fogassi 2009 for review). These "mirror neurons" seem likely to be involved in the development of novel behaviors and may constitute a shared, homologous neural substrate for imitative behavior (Ferrari, Bonini, and Fogassi 2009; de Waal and Ferrari 2010).
We take it for granted that humans can classify words according to either their meaning or their acoustic properties. Judged according to their meaning, treachery and deceit are alike whereas treachery and lechery are different; judged according to their acoustic properties, these assessments would be reversed. The "ape language" projects were the first to suggest that, like humans, nonhuman primates can classify communicative signals according to either their physical properties or their meaning (Premack 1976; Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1980); field experiments using vocalizations are consistent with this view (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; Zuberbuhler, Cheney, and Seyfarth 1999). In a study of the underlying neural mechanisms, Gifford et al. (2005) found that, as in humans, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex plays an important role in the classification of conspecific calls with different acoustic properties that either are or are not associated with the same events in the animals' daily lives.
From fMRI studies of human cognition, there is increasing evidence that we respond to object words and to the sight of objects using a distributed perceptual representation based on an object's physical features, the motor movements used to interact with it, and a "semantic representation" based on previously acquired information (Martin 1998:72; Barsalou et al. 2003; Yee, Drucker, and Thompson-Schill 2010). Preliminary evidence supports the view that there exists, in monkeys, "a homologous system ... for representing object information" (Gil da Costa et al. 2004:17518; see also Cheney and Seyfarth 2007:241–243).
To summarize, human and nonhuman primates share many neurological mechanisms for perceiving, processing, and responding to communicative signals. These shared mechanisms are unlikely to have arisen by accident. Instead, it seems likely that during their long, common evolutionary history (roughly 35–25 million years ago: Steiper, Young, and Sukarna 2004), Old World monkeys, apes, and humans faced similar problems in communication and evolved homologous mechanisms to deal with them. The unique, more recent evolution of language in the human lineage (during the past 5–6 million years: Enard et al. 2002) built upon these shared mechanisms. What were the common communicative problems that gave rise to them? How is language used in human social interactions, and how does its use compare with the function of vocalizations in the social interactions of monkeys and apes?
THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE
In his review and analysis of language use, Herbert Clark proposes that language is a form of joint action, used by people to facilitate and coordinate their activities. The individuals involved, moreover, are not "generic speakers and addressees, but real people, with identities, genders, histories, personalities, and names" (1996:xi). As will become clear, the parallels with monkeys could hardly be more striking.
Clark (1996:23–24) offers six propositions that characterize how language functions in the daily lives of humans. We repeat these propositions here because they provide an ideal background against which to compare the social function of language with the social function of vocalizations in the lives of primates.
• Language is used for social purposes. People don't just use language, they use it for doing things: gossiping, manipulating, planning, and so on. "Languages as we know them wouldn't exist if it weren't for the social activities" in which they play an instrumental role.
• Language use is a type of joint action that requires a minimum of two agents and the coordination of activities.
• Language use always involves speaker's meaning and addressee's understanding. "We are not inclined to label actions as language use unless they involve one person meaning something for another person who is in a position to understand what the first person means."
• The basic setting for language use is face-to-face conversation. "For most people conversation is the commonest setting of language use, ... and if conversation is basic, then other settings are derivative in one respect or another."
• Language use often has more than one layer of activity. While "conversation, at its simplest, has only one layer of action ... any participant can introduce further layers by telling stories or play-acting at being other people."
• The study of language use is both a cognitive and a social science. While "cognitive scientists have tended to study speakers and listeners as [isolated] individuals, ... social scientists have tended to study language use primarily as a joint activity. [But] if language use truly is a species of joint activity, it cannot be understood from either perspective alone." It must be both a cognitive and a social science.
Here we use Clark's propositions as a starting point from which to compare the social function of language and the social function of nonhuman primate vocalizations.
THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF ANIMAL VOCALIZATIONS
Theoretical Background
Animals often compete: over food, a mate, a territory, or some other resource. But rather than escalate immediately to physical fighting, individuals typically engage in nonaggressive communicative displays, like the roaring of red deer (Clutton-Brock et al. 1979), the "jousting" displays of stalk-eyed flies (Wilkinson and Dodson 1997), the croaking of European toads (Davies and Halliday 1978), or the loud "wahoo" calls of male baboons (Kitchen, Cheney, and Seyfarth 2003). Ethologists now have a good understanding of how these displays have evolved — that is, why they are evolutionarily stable. In red deer, for example, roaring is energetically costly, so only males in good physical condition can roar repeatedly, for long durations (Clutton-Brock and Albon 1979). Moreover, the acoustic features of a male's roar are constrained by his body size, so only large males can produce deep-pitched roars (Reby et al. 2005). And larger males are more successful fighters (Clutton-Brock et al. 1979). As a consequence, a male's roaring cannot be faked — because small males and males in poor condition cannot produce low-pitched roars at a high rate — and roaring serves as an honest indicator of size, condition, and competitive ability.
Natural selection has therefore favored listeners who decide whether to escalate or retreat based on their opponent's roars. As a result, both giving roars to competitors and judging an opponent on the basis of his roars have become evolutionarily stable. From the signaler's perspective, it's always better to roar than to remain silent: if you're a large male, you can win the dispute without risking a fight; if you're a small male, you will avoid costly aggression and the risk of injury and you may, occasionally, deceive your opponent into thinking you are larger or more powerful than you actually are. From the listener's perspective, judging a male's relative competitive ability according to the quality of his roars provides an accurate measure of his fighting ability without incurring the potential costs of physical confrontation. Because selection favors recipients who attend only to those features of displays that are correlated with the signaler's competitive ability, signals that are not honest indicators will disappear and the displays that persist will be generally truthful, or "honest on average" (see Grafen 1990a, b for theoretical details; Searcy and Nowicki 2005 for a full review; Laidre and Johnstone 2013 for a recent useful treatment).
The honest signaling hypothesis assumes that signals function as they do because one individual's display provides another with information, defined as a reduction in the recipient's uncertainty about the signaler or what the signaler will do next (Beecher 1989; Seyfarth et al. 2010). Signals are informative whenever there is a predictable relation between the signal and current or future events, thereby reducing the recipient's uncertainty about what is likely to happen next. No special cognition is required. Simple Pavlovian conditioning could suffice: a tone predicts shock, not food; an alarm call predicts an eagle, not a leopard; an individually distinctive scream predicts that animal X, and not animal Y, is involved in a dispute (Seyfarth and Cheney 2003; Seyfarth et al. 2010).
Communication during Cooperative Interactions
Does the honest signaling hypothesis — developed originally to explain the ubiquity of competitive displays — also apply to the many other signals that animals use in more cooperative circumstances? As Searcy and Nowicki (2005) point out, whenever two animals come together there is uncertainty about the outcome, because the best strategy for one depends upon what the other does, and vice versa. Communicative signals have evolved, at least in part, to resolve this uncertainty.
Consider, for example, the grunts given by female baboons when they attempt to interact with another female's newborn infant (Silk et al. 2003). All females are attracted to young infants, but mothers are sometimes reluctant to allow their infants to be handled and avoid other females' approaches, particularly those of higher-ranking females (Cheney, Seyfarth, and Silk 1995a). The interaction has an uncertain outcome because neither female knows what the other's response will be. Field observations (Cheney, Seyfarth, and Silk 1995b) suggest that grunting by the approaching female reduces this uncertainty, because friendly interactions are much more likely to occur when she grunts than when she does not.
Silk, Kaldor, and Boyd (2000) tested this hypothesis in a study of rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) females, who often give grunts or "girney" vocalizations as they approach mothers with infants. They found that these vocalizations did, indeed, predict an approaching female's subsequent behavior. If she gave a vocalization, she was significantly less likely to be aggressive, less likely to elicit submissive behavior from the mother, and more likely to groom the mother than if she remained silent.
There was, in other words, a contingent, predictable relation between the approaching female's vocalizations and what she did next. Anxious mothers had learned to recognize this relation; they acquired information from the approaching females' vocalizations because the vocalizations reduced their uncertainty about what was likely to happen next. The calls had acquired meaning. The grunts and girneys of baboons and macaques provide one of many examples in the animal kingdom where "under favorable conditions, unsophisticated learning dynamics can spontaneously generate meaningful signaling" (Skyrms 2010:19).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
The Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Michael L Platt
Part 1
The Social Origins of Language 9
Robert M Seyfarth and Dorothy L Cheney
Part 2
1 Linguistics and Pragmatics 37
John McWhorter
2 Where Is Continuity Likely to Be Found? 46
Ljiljana Progovac
3 Fluency Effects in Human Language 62
Jennifer E Arnold
4 Relational Knowledge and the Origins of Language 79
Benjamin Wilson and Christopher I Petkov
5 Primates, Cephalopods, and the Evolution of Communication 102
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Part 3
Conclusion 123
Robert M Seyfarth and Dorothy L Cheney
Notes 131
References 135
Index 163
What People are Saying About This
"Centered on the seminal work of Seyfarth and Cheney, this concise book provides a fine overview of what leading investigators consider the likely origins of language. While The Social Origins of Language shows that this issue remains unclear, it lays out the full spectrum of intriguing possibilities."—Dale Purves, coeditor of Neuroscience"The origin of language is a perplexing problem because important elements, such as semantics and syntax, have no parallels in other taxa. In this book, Seyfarth and Cheney contend that a productive approach would focus on pragmatics, as meaning provides important insight about the selective value of vocal signals. Their argument is debated by experts from a range of disciplines, making this essential reading for all those interested in how language evolved."—Joan Silk, coauthor of How Humans Evolved"This is an inspiring discourse on the social function of communication. In response to a magnificent essay by Seyfarth and Cheney, the grandmasters of primate communication studies, leading scholars engage in a vivid debate on the origins of language. A must-read!"—Julia Fischer, author of Monkeytalk"In this fascinating book, Seyfarth and Cheney, two of the most eminent living primatologists, propose a new idea of fundamental importance in understanding language evolution: that primate social cognition provided the foundations for linguistic meaning. Detailed commentaries by five leading scholars round out the volume, making it a major contribution to modern thinking about the evolution of language."—Tecumseh Fitch, author of The Evolution of Language"Focused around a central essay by Seyfarth and Cheney, with five commentary essays by experts from relevant fields, this book is original in its specific linking of key generative features of language with the brain mechanisms and social functions of nonhuman primate communication. It will be read widely within primatology and language evolution circles."—Thom Scott-Phillips, author of Speaking Our Minds"There is no doubt in my mind that this book will attract attention and will be widely referred to."—Cedric Boeckx, Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies