Human evolution; using gestures (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 15, 2021, 19:12 (1286 days ago) @ David Turell

All humans can communicate this way:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/no-shared-language-no-problem-people-across-cul...

"One of the hardest questions for evolutionary linguists is why humans speak at all. When people don’t share a language, they quickly resort to using their hands, rather than their voices: It’s easier to mime “drink” than it is to make a noise that sounds like drinking. Those gestures, over time, can easily blossom into full-fledged sign languages. “If gesture is good enough for language,” says Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguistics Ph.D. student at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, “why the hell do we talk?”

"In a new study, Ćwiek and her colleagues help answer that question: People from very different cultures can understand nonlinguistic vocal clues better than expected by chance, they find. Speakers of 28 languages could all successfully guess meanings in a charadeslike game where other people expressed words like “water” using vocal sounds—but no language.

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"They found that participants could guess general meanings surprisingly well. Each correct meaning was presented along with five incorrect options, so guessing at random would give participants a 17% chance of being right. But on average, people across all languages guessed correctly 65% of the time, they report this week in Scientific Reports. That’s enough to show participants often understood the clues, researchers say.

"Some words were easier than others: Participants nearly always correctly guessed the sound for “sleep.” But guesses for the more abstract “that” and “gather” scraped in only just above chance. English speakers were correct 74% of the time, suggesting a shared culture helps, says senior author Marcus Perlman, a linguist at the University of Birmingham. But the lowest score, for Thai speakers, was 52%—still far above chance.

"To cast the cultural net even wider, the researchers also tested participants in communities that seldom use written language. This included speakers of three additional languages in Vanuatu, French Guiana, and Brazil. Rather than asking people to choose the written word that matched the clue they heard, they were asked to choose pictures, limiting the test to concepts that could be shown in a photograph.

"Again, people were surprisingly good at the task. Participants were correct at least 34% of the time (compared with 8% if they’d been right by chance), with Daakie speakers from Vanuatu getting nearly half the answers right. “It’s cool to think that we … can communicate meaning just with the sound of our voice,” Perlman says. “People don’t just make meaningless sounds.”

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"Although it’s simple, it challenges an old and central idea in linguistics: that there’s no relationship between the sounds that make up a word and the meaning of that word. For instance, there’s nothing about the word “cat” that is obviously connected to the animal. But this study adds to a growing pile of evidence that iconicity in speech isn’t limited to just the rare case of onomatopoeia, like “meow.”

"If vocalization, like gesture, can convey meaning without being part of a language, it could have played a role in the emergence of early linguistic systems, Perlman says. The finding makes it possible for linguists to start to explore how vocalization and gesture might have worked in tandem in the evolution of language, Raviv says, rather than arguing about which came first: “It makes the mystery of the shift from gesture to spoken language obsolete.'”

Comment: Certainly erectus using its enlarged brain got by with a few understood words and lots of gestures. That even unrelated language speakers could guess meanings is very significant.