Human evolution; language development sans instinct (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 22, 2020, 18:27 (1335 days ago) @ David Turell

A totally different view completely opposing Chomsky:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct?utm_source=Aeon...

"In the 1960s, the US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky offered what looked like a solution. He argued that children don’t in fact learn their mother tongue – or at least, not right down to the grammatical building blocks (the whole process was far too quick and painless for that). He concluded that they must be born with a rudimentary body of grammatical knowledge – a ‘Universal Grammar’ – written into the human DNA.

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"It’s brilliant. 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.

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"The general lesson from these unfortunate individuals is that, without exposure to a normal human milieu, a child just won’t pick up a language at all. Spiders don’t need exposure to webs in order to spin them, but human infants need to hear a lot of language before they can speak. However you cut it, language is not an instinct in the way that spiderweb-spinning most definitely is.

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"And In 2005, the US linguist-anthropologist Daniel Everett has claimed that Pirahã – a language indigenous to the Amazonian rainforest – does not use recursion at all. This would be very strange indeed if grammar really was hard-wired into the human brain.

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"...children appear to pick up their grammar in quite a piecemeal way. For instance, focusing on the use of the English article system, for a long time they will apply a particular article (eg, the) only to those nouns to which they have heard it applied before. It is only later that children expand upon what they’ve heard, gradually applying articles to a wider set of nouns.

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"We seem to construct our language by spotting patterns in the linguistic behaviour we encounter, not by applying built-in rules. Over time, children slowly figure out how to apply the various categories they encounter. So while language acquisition might be uncannily quick, there isn’t much that’s automatic about it: it arises from a painstaking process of trial and error. (my bold)

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"...cognitive neuroscience research from the past two decades or so has begun to lift the veil on where language is processed in the brain. The short answer is that it is everywhere. Once upon a time, a region known as Broca’s area was believed to be the brain’s language centre. We now know that it doesn’t exclusively deal with language – it’s involved in a raft of other, non-linguistic motor behaviours.

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"And indeed, we now believe that several of Chomsky’s evolutionary assumptions were incorrect. Recent reconstructions of the Neanderthal vocal tract show that Neanderthals probably did, in fact, have some speech capacity, perhaps very modern in quality. It is also becoming clear that, far from the dumb brutes of popular myth, they had a sophisticated material culture – including the ability to create cave engravings and produce sophisticated stone tools – not dissimilar to aspects of the human cultural explosion of 50,000 years ago. It is hard to see how they could have managed the complex learning and co-operation required for that if they didn’t have language... it now looks like early Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis could have co-habited and interbred. It does not seem farfetched to speculate that they might also have communicated with one another. (my bold)

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"...we don’t have to assume a special language instinct; we just need to look at the sorts of changes that made us who we are, the changes that paved the way for speech. This allows us to picture the emergence of language as a gradual process from many overlapping tendencies. It might have begun as a sophisticated gestural system, for example, only later progressing to its vocal manifestations. But surely the most profound spur on the road to speech would have been the development of our instinct for co‑operation.

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"Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative purposes of the adults around them."

Comment: An enormous article from which I've presented cogent points. We were given the physical attributes to develop language without instinct.