How children pick up a language: not instinct (Humans)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 12, 2016, 21:20 (3084 days ago) @ dhw

Quote: But surely the most profound spur on the road to speech would have been the development of our instinct for co operation. By this, I don't mean to say that we always get on. But we do almost always recognise other humans as minded creatures, like us, who have thoughts and feelings that we can attempt to influence[/i].”
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> dhw: I think the author has both hit and missed the point: ALL language, from individual cells to humans, must stem from cooperation of some sort, since it is always a means of communication. My suggestion is that the human level of consciousness has almost infinitely expanded the subject matter to be communicated. A small range of sounds could not encompass the concepts they had to convey. For the range to expand, the physical tools also had to expand, and this may have been the spur to the anatomical changes that enabled us to make new sounds. (We must remember that writing is a much later addition to our language tools.) Using my favoured hypothesis: the inventive mechanism (intelligence) of the cell communities would have reorganized the vocal mechanisms in response to the need for greater complexity of sound. (my bold)
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> As for Chomsky, I agree totally with the author: "Chomsky's idea dominated the science of language for four decades. And yet it turns out to be a myth. A welter of new evidence has emerged over the past few years, demonstrating that Chomsky is plain wrong.” -My bold is a key point in regard to your cell communities: To be humanly vocal our bodies had to change in many ways from apes: high arched palate, dropped larynx which requires a special epiglottis, specialized lip and tongue muscle development, and development in the brain of speech and hearing centers. If the development is not gradual, and you've agreed to that, we are dealing with a complex saltation, way beyond the learning capacities of cell committees unless they have a complexity mechanism they can turn on to guide the development.