Linguistic anthropology

•! Pinker…a cognitive developmental psychologist

with a research emphasis on language and a

theoretical emphasis on evolutionary psychology

•! The Luxuriant and Flowing Hair Club for Scientists,

member

•! Project Steve, member: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve

•! On “Colbert…” http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/218577/february-11-2009/steven-pinker

•! Serious interview (7 mins.,) : http://bigthink.com/ideas/24067

Language is an Instinct

!e evolved, inna" abili# $ acquire language; %e adapta&on; '(ature)*

+xposure $ , language bein- .sed by o/ers; %e environment; '(urture)*

+* =*0alking an1 .nderstandin- o/ers talk; /2 3ombo; /e stu4 5e see organism6 being and doing*

Language Development is

Based on Instincts

•! Children are born with an ability to hear and produce sounds present in any of the world’s languages; when exposed to only the sounds present in one’s immediate environment (listening to others talk on a daily basis), children retain the ability to hear and produce the local sounds, and lose the ability to produce (and even hear, i.e., discern) nonlocal sounds

–! example from the !Kung—speech includes several click sounds; outsiders are often unable to distinguish multiple kinds of clicks—as if there were only one click “letter”

•! These sounds are phonemes and morphemes

•! Children are born with an ability to acquire the language(s) to which they were exposed at a critical time during development: birth to ~7 years; this is why it is easy/automatic to learn a new language prior to 7 and much more difficult after 7

Sound parts

•! Phoneme: one of the units of sound that gets strung together to form a morpheme, roughly corresponding to the alphabet –! b, f, a, z

–! Also combinations: ou, sh

–! Also nonEnglish alphabets (ö or oe in German; like push)

–! Also versions of the clicks, even though the Hadza do not have an alphabet

•! Morphemes: combinations of phonemes in to meaningful word parts like un-micro-wave-abil-ity (or very short words: he)

Language Structure:

Parts of Speech

•! A noun is NOT just a person place or thing (e.g., an abstraction like “square root” is a noun)

•! Other parts of speech are not so simple either

•! Parts of speech are tokens that obey particular formal rules; nouns follow noun-y rules; our brains pay attention to these rules and parse words into categories that follow these rules; words can be in multiple categories (e.g. “They sleep” (sleep = verb) and “Last night’s sleep was unrestful” (sleep = noun, modified by other words).

Universal Grammar

•! Grammar: the way sentences are structured

•! Not a word chain device, but a word tree device

•! Roughly, a sentence (S) includes a noun phrase (NP), a verb phrase (VP), and various modifiers

•! This fundamental sentence structure appears in all languages (i.e., it is universal), but there are many variations

•! This is UG: Universal Grammar

Ethnocentrism

•! “Jabbering” as described by Leahy in “First Contact” film: implies they were speaking in an inferior way

•! Their “jabbering” is actually a very sophisticated language

•! Less-technologically advanced peoples do NOT have more simplistic languages

•! Example: Cherokee vs. English

–! English: “we”

–! Cherokee: 4 different kinds of “we”: •! “you and I”

•! “another person and I”

•! “several other people and I”

•! “you, one or more other persons, and I”

–! Cherokee is both more complex and more precise—the extra pronouns have real meanings

Black English Vernacular (BEV)

vs.

Standard American English (SAE)

•! 1960s: educational psychologists thought that American black children had been so deprived culturally that they lacked true language and were confined to a “non-logical mode of expressive behavior”

•! Linguistic anthropologist Labov studied BEV; he analyzed the grammar of BEV and found very sophisticated structure—a grammar common to all who speak BEV—the grammar is simply different than that of SAE

•! Example: “He working”…

Labov and BEV

•! “He working” in BEV means that right now, he is at work, working

•! “He be working” in BEV means that he generally works; he is currently employed

•! What about SAE? “He is working” means BOTH of those things—and you cannot distinguish between the two meanings without having to say additional things—

•! NOW which language seems more accurate and precise?

BEV and Ethnocentrism

•! BEV’s grammar rules are not absent , deprived, or nonlogical

•! Until Labov, most people thought that grammar rules were absent from BEV or “wrong.”

•! Further, saying BEV and its rules are “wrong” is ethnocentric.

•! It is a myth that nonstandard dialects of English are grammatically deficient

Pidgins •! Often related to colonialism and slavery

•! When owners wanted workers/slaves to work in a new region, he would (sometimes intentionally) get people from varied regions who could not talk to each other; they still had to cooperate for some tasks, however, and when they did, they did so in the language of the colonizers

•! Example: the Papua New Guinean “carriers” in the film “First Contact”?—e.g., could you make out “Masta Mike”—a pidgin term borrowed from English but that clearly had aspects of a Papua New Guinean language?

•! A pidgin is a choppy string of words borrowed from the colonizer’s language which has very little grammar

Pidgins

•! Pidgins :

–! Lack consistent word order

–! Lack prefixes and suffixes

–! Use separate words to indicate tense,

–! Lack structure more complex than a simple clause (e.g., no clauses embedded

within clauses)

–! Use repetition to indicate plurality

–! and no way to tell who did what to whom (e.g., subjects and objects)

•! Pidgins can slowly become more complex over decades, but sometimes something else happens…

Creoles •! When the laborers have children, the children, during the

0-7 critical period of development, are exposed to the pidgin. Exposure is to the pidgin of a caretaker who collectively took care of them away from their parents (thus, the children use common words, and are surrounded by many children) (Bickerton)

•! A creole is a pidgin that, filtered though the brains of children, becomes a real language with consistent grammar--this is because the children’s minds are unadulterated by the language input of their parents, and, seeking grammar in development, the children spontaneously impose it on the vocabulary of the pidgin

Creoles

•! There is an uncanny resemblance of the grammars of unrelated creoles around the world--perhaps children in these circumstances impose an innate, universal grammar on the pidgin’s vocabulary

•! With most people, the universal grammar gets remolded by the specific preexisting grammar peculiar to those individuals in the immediate environment who are constantly speaking it

Pidgins, Creoles,

and Sign Language

•! Bickerton’s work was based on his reconstructions in the past; can we see this in action? Yes!

•! American Sign Language (ASL) does not resemble English or British Sign Language, and is more like Navajo or Bantu—how did this happen? Same story as pidgins becoming creoles

Pidgins, Creoles,

and Sign Language •! Another example in Nicaragua: prior to 1979, deaf children were isolated from

each other (I.e., no special programs for attending schools with other deaf children). In 1979, such schools were created. Schools focused on drills and lip-reading, and failed horribly. On playgrounds, however, children talked to each other with signs. LSN spoken by individuals over 10 when they acquired the language. LSN is a pidgin that everyone uses differently, and users must rely on elaborate circumlocutions due to the absence of a consisten grammar.

•! But the children who were younger when they started and who came to the school once LSN was around, it was a different story. ISN (a creole of the pidgin LSN) was spontaneously standardized by the young children. The young children all speak it in the same way, and have a very sophisticated, fluid signing style. ISN’s grammar was imposed on LSN by these younger minds that had not passed the critical age of language acquisition.

Signing •! When deaf infants are raised by signing parents, they learn signing the same

way hearing infants learn spoken language.

•! Most deaf children are born to non-deaf parents, so do not have this learning opportunity unless they attend a school where fluent signers are present.

•! But if they do not, and are forced to learn lipreading, they never develop signing fluency. Consequently, if they seek out a deaf community as adults, it is much more difficult to learn sign language fluently--much like it is for adults to learn a foreign spoken language for the first time.

•! If parents have a deaf child and they have no experience with signing, they should immediately expose the child to fluently-signing individuals, in order to help them be able to communicate more easily for the rest of their lives.

•! But even children born to poorly-signing parents (e.g., parents who themselves learned to sign later in life) will spontaneously apply universal grammar to their the signs they are exposed to by their parents. *Of course, one wants the child’s grammar to eventually match that of his or her peers.

Grammar is like Walking •! We do not have to instruct our children in

grammar—parents just talk and kids learn the meaning of words and consistent ways for connecting those words

•! Walking: similarly, kids are built and psychologically pre-programmed to walk and to want to walk. (In the US, parents use toy walking assistance devices that ultimately hinder a child’s development of walking because we think we need to; however, there are important cultural differences…)

Language is “Hard-Wired”

in the Brain •! If language is an instinct, universal

grammar is real, and children even

impose meaningful, sophisticated

grammar onto pidgin languages

which lack it, then there must be

some physical circuitry in the brain

that houses language

•! If that specific circuitry is damaged,

then language will be impaired.

•! Aphasia: the loss or impairment of

language abilities following brain

damage

Broca’s Aphasia •! The Broca’s area of the brain is left hemisphere,

lower part of frontal lobe.

•! If it is injured due to stroke, wound, or a birth

defect, there is a specific kind of aphasia.

•! Grammar is impaired.

•! Meaning, if it can be inferred without grammar, is

intact.

•! Mr. Ford: Broca’s area damaged by a stroke, and

he lost the ability to use grammar, but not the

abilities to think and discern meaning; when

reading, he skipped over grammar-relevant words,

but did read them when presented as nouns (bee &

oar but not be and or)

•! All other aspects of cognition, too, were intact

(mapreading, etc.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2IiMEbMnPM&feature=related!

Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

•! Hereditary--possibly due to a dominant gene

•! Many grammatical mistakes

•! A strain to plan out a sentence using conscious thought to get the grammar right

•! The wug test: subjects shown a picture of one wug (a birdlike creature); then shown 2 pictures of a wug and told “now there are two of them; there are 2 ____”; English-speaking SLI people get it wrong (e.g., wugness instead of wugs)

“Chatterbox Syndrome” •! Intelligence is not always intact when language is

impaired; there are several forms of mental retardation, some which have different effects on grammar, meaning, and other forms of cognition

•! People with hydrocephalic (“water on the brain”) disorders (“Denyse”) can have “chatterbox syndrome”

•! Quote p. 39-40

“Chatterbox Syndrome”

•! They are loquacious, sophisticated conversationalists with intact grammar, but severely developmentally delayed in other ways

•! Denyse has no bank account, no boyfriend.

•! She is in fact severely retarded and cannot handle many aspects of everyday living

•! Perhaps the hydrocephalic disorder damaged brain regions related to other kinds of intelligence, but left intact the language areas

Williams Syndrome •! A rare form of developmental disability

with specific physical markers

•! Defective gene on chromosome 11 that impacts calcium’s regulation in the body/brain

•! Associated with short slight, narrow faces with broad foreheads, flat nose bridges, full lips, sharp chins, star-shaped irises, and small distantly-spaced teeth

•! Severely developmentally disabled (IQ~50)

•! Cannot perform simple everyday tasks like retrieving an object from a cupboard

•! Very friendly

•! Fluent and prim conversationalists!\

–! Prefer unusual words like ibix

–! Tests reveal competence at grammar

•! video clip and p. 42 “Crystal” quote

Wernicke’s Aphasia •! Recall: Broca’s area: grammar affected

•! Wernicke’s area is another part of the brain

•! p. 316-317 quote

•! Speech of those affected is grammatical, but makes no sense and has frequent neologisms and word substitutions like “knee” for “elbow”

•! Those affected do not understand the speech around them

•! Various combinations of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia (due to, e.g. damage to multiple brain regions via stroke) produce different effects--e.g., people can recite what they hear quite accurately, but without understanding the meaning of what they say

•! It isn’t entirely clear what these brain regions do, but Wernicke’s has something to do with retrieving the right words, and understanding their meanings

Language Development

•! Children reliably develop language without being explicitly taught grammar

•! But, the critical times ARE important! Children MUST be exposed, though not really instructed, to a language at the right time; children MUST minimally be exposed to the speech of other human beings; TV isn’t enough

–! Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language”: very funny if you’ve ever tried to learn German AS AN ADULT, and if you are not German):”

–! http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html

Language Development

•! Overgeneralization by children of grammatical rules while they are learning

language:

•! “Mama, I eated it,” and “Daddy goed to the store.” These indicate that general

rules are picked up (here, add “-ed” to the end of a verb to make it past tense);

and abnormal verbs with regard to tense have not yet been picked up (we know

because they don’t say “I ated it” or Daddy wented to the store”). •! This morning my daughter in the car while making silly sounds with Daddy:

•! “I spitted more than you Daddy, so I winned”

•! Correction by Daddy: “You mean ‘I spat, [thus]…won’”

•! Correction by Mommy: “Spat” isn’t a word”

•! Correction by Dictionary.com: yes, it is a word, no, really, even though “brang” is wrong

•! This related to the arbitrariness of the symbol that Pinker discusses throughout

the text: it IS arbitrary over time and across cultures

•! Right or Wrong??....discussion…

Language Learning

•! To restate:

•! The experience of language PLUS the neural wiring are what make language—both are essential

•! We’ve seen that without the wiring, there are major problems in knowing grammar and/or meaning

•! Without the exposure there are of course problems as well. Evidence: –! Most adults never learn a foreign language, much less master one’s

phonology (phonemes)

–! “Wild Children”

Language Development

•! “Wild children”

–! Raised in isolation by sick and depraved parents; rare but it does happen

–! Children become mute, and remain mute despite efforts to teach them language once they are rescued

–! There MUST BE responsive language, live in the child’s environment, for it to develop

Ape Language •! Nonhumans, including apes, cannot speak because

they don’t have the vocal apparatus

•! Washoe the chimp and other apes were taught American Sign Language (ASL) to see if they could communicate with it

•! Apes communicated with a few signs, but apes use an extremely rudimentary system of ASL; human ASL speakers are far more sophisticated--not even close to what nonhuman apes do

•! Apes do not have grammar, and did not impart it onto the object signs they may have learned (the way human children do naturally when learning a language)

•! Apes relied more heavily on gestures in their natural repertoire than learning ASL signs with their combinatorial phonological structure of hand shapes, motions, locations, and orientations.

•! p. 346 quote from a deaf ASL research assistant asked to record data on a chimp ASL project…

Language as Evidence for Paths of

Human Diaspora •! Just as genes accumulate mutations over time, languages change over time

–! With genes, mutations involve the wrong A, T, G, or C at a particular spot in DNA

–! With language, “mutations” are changes in phonemes or morphemes over time

–! http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/phonemes/

•! Mutations will lead to different genes being present at different locations across the world

•! Same with phoneme and morpheme “mutations”

•! You can use this information to map human migration throughout the world: diaspora

•! It turns out that maps generated with genetic data corroborate maps generated with linguistic data!

•! See work by the Cavalli-Sfozas if you are interested, esp. “The Great Human Diasporas”

Language and Thought •! That we must have language in order to think implies that the foundational

categories of reality are not “in” the world but are imposed by one’s culture; one’s culture’s language, and therefore one’ thoughts, are determined by one’s culture, not by real things in the world; a.k.a. “linguistic determinism” (c.f. “genetic determinism”); a.k.a. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

•! Hopi ways of thinking are fundamentally unlike ours because they don’t have references to time

–! A. wrong

–! B. lab studies do not support the earlier anthro studies

•! Evidence that you do not need language to think

–! Nonhuman animals do not have language, but they clearly have “thought,” albeit it possibly unconscious; does a cheetah’s brain not process visual information about a gazelle and use it in making an attack?

–! But, okay, some might argue that it depends on how you define “thought”--I’ve been using the loosest definition possible. What if we limit “thought” to conscious human thought, which in some ways seems qualitatively different than just neural circuitry processing information…

Language and Conscious

Human Thought •! We still don’t need language! Evidence:

–! Mr. Ford! No grammar but adept at other cognitive tasks

–! Deaf children who lack language then invent it

–! Deaf people with no spoken language and no sign language: do they not think? Preposterous! Read about Idelfonso on p. 58

–! Infants as young as 5 days old perceive number though have no language

–! Cheney and Seyfarth’s vervet monkeys with no language can still discern kinship in their groups

–! Creative people (artists: expressing feelings with visuals rather than words (often)

–! Scientific people (physicists: thoughts are “geometrical”)

–! Being unable to put words to thoughts (“cat-got-your-tongue”) and deja-vu kind of experiences)

•! Language helps us transform the language of thought (mentalese) into communicable utterances understandable to others