Language Among the Topsy-Turvy
In the last post I commented on the paper “Wild Voices” byChris Knight andJerome Lewis inCurrent Anthropology. The article focuses on the social changes that were required to make language possible. The changes should be generally familiar to regulars on this blog.The main one is the switch from a society based on dominance and submission to a community held together by trust and a willingness to cooperate.These behavioral changes have been accompanied by several biological changes as well. One, mentioned before on this blog, is the switch from black to white eyes that make it easy to see where one ’s attention is fo...
Source: Babel's Dawn - July 17, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Hey Interesting Topic, What ’s Your Name?
I want to propose the embrace of an ugly word:logogenology (low-go-jen-ahl-oh-gee). It comes from three Greek words,logos [word],gennesi [birth], andlogia [study of], and it names the study of language origins. In other words, it refers to this blog ’s beat.Normally I dislike academic coinages, but in this case I think we need to recognize that there is a community of scholars who began in many fields —e.g., linguistics, literature, biology, psychology, archaeology, and anthropology—who share common questions and are interested in one another’s results. Thus a biologist might learn from a linguist and come to a con...
Source: Babel's Dawn - July 10, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Attention and Language
The most important thing I have learned in working on this blog has been the relationship between language and attention. Language, I have concluded, works by sharing and directing attention to a topic. It is really that simple, yet it is rich in implications.EvolvabilityAttention is widespread in the animal world and all primates, certainly all apes, are well endowed with the ability to direct their attention to different points in their environment and stay focused on a task for an undefined length of time. Thus, any special human attention tasks such as joint-attention, interactive attention, etc. that language might de...
Source: Babel's Dawn - June 11, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Which came first: Words or Syllables?
Back when this blog was starting out Ireported on a paper given by Judy Kegl (nowJudy Shepard-Kegl) at a conference in South Africa. Kegl is an expert on sign language and had observed a new sign language emerge at a school for the deaf in Nicaragua. She listed four innate qualities that lead to language: (1) love of rhythm or prosody, (2) a taste for mirroring (imitation), (3) an appetite for linguistic competence, and (4) the wish to be like one ’s peers. I found this an interesting and plausible list and have wondered why I don’t see more references to it. Rereading that old post has made the silence more comprehens...
Source: Babel's Dawn - May 24, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
News From Prairie Dog Town
This week ’sNew York Times Sunday Magazine has an article titledCan Prairie Dogs Talk?The answer is so obviouslyno, that one is forced to read it to see what kind of case the author can make. Turns out he makes an interesting one.It is easy to come up with a definition of language that bars prairie-dogese. If you define a language as the set of sentences that can be generated by its syntactical rules, why then the answer is stillno. Prairie dogs do not speak in sentences and appear to have no generative syntax. But I don ’t define language that way.A biologist with the unusual name of Constantine Slobodchikoff has been...
Source: Babel's Dawn - May 15, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
The Ultimate Test
I got a letter the other day that presented a theory of language my correspondent wanted me to consider. Regrettably, I doubted his idea could be accomplished by plain old evolution and I told him that I cannot take seriously any account of language that requires a miraculous beginning.Years ago I read Stephen Pinker ’s famous bookThe Language Instinct. Pinker is a gifted writer and his book is filled with interesting and entertaining facts, but I could never persuade myself to even consider his account of how language works. His system requires a set of modules in the brain for generating sentences. If language had be...
Source: Babel's Dawn - April 18, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
