https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2024/07/10/humans_are_changing_how_we_learn_langu...

"The societal gulf raises two questions. Is frequent adult-to-child direct speech really the single, optimal pathway to language development? And could it be that children raised in Western settings learn language differently from how our ancestors did?

"Western scientists have previously visited indigenous communities like the Yucatec Maya in southeastern Mexico and the Rossel Islanders in Papua New Guinea. These academic visitors found that, in contrast to Western infants, infants in these societies primarily hear speech directed to others, rather than directed to them. And these youngsters develop their native language skills just as ably.

***

"Tseltal infants are rarely spoken to, “yet have the opportunity to overhear a great deal […] by virtue of being carried on their mothers’ backs,” the authors described.

“'They are also almost never put down, or even passed to siblings, ensuring that they are witness to practically the entirety of their mothers’ social interactions,” they added.

***

"The results show that human infants are clearly capable of learning language through observation, suggesting that talking directly to young children is not a requirement. Rather, as an international team of scientists wrote in an article published in 2022 to PLoS Biology, WEIRD societies might be the weird ones when it comes to language learning.

***

"Could there be further ramifications of altering the way we’ve historically learned language?

“'Children raised in child-centered contexts may come to expect their attention to be managed by their caregivers and learn to ignore interactions around them,” Foushee and Srinivasan wrote in their paper. “Conversely, children raised in contexts in which child-directed language is rare and other-directed language is common may develop a keen ability to attend to and learn from interactions around them.”

“'One of the ramifications of this general idea is that children from different language environments might excel at different forms of learning and assessment,” they added in an interview.

***

"Perhaps, above all, the latest results showcase the truly amazing ability of the youngest minds to learn their native tongues, Foushee and Srinivasan said.

“'Language development is often admired for its robustness and resilience… Our findings invite the perspective that children successfully acquire their native languages across variable environments in part because they are flexible in how they learn.'”

Comment: that infants sop up language easily is obvious. The theory that syntax is built in seems correct. I wonder why it is a lost process after about age eight.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-fetuses-learn-to-talk-while-theyre-still-in-the-womb?utm_sou...

"Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus...The obstetrician Malcolm McLane described an incident that occurred in a hospital in the United States in 1897. He was prepping a patient for a c-section, when her unborn baby began to wail, and kept going for several minutes....In 1973, doctors in Belgium recorded the vitals of three wailing fetuses and concluded that vagitus uterinus is not a sign of distress.

***

"Vagitus uterinus occurs – always in the last trimester – when there’s a tear in the uterine membrane. The tear lets air into the uterine cavity, thus enabling the fetus to vocalise. Vagitus uterinus provided scientists with some of the earliest insights into the fetus’s vocal apparatus, showing that the body parts and neural systems involved in the act of crying are fully functional before birth.

***

"...babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech.

"Babies communicate as soon as they are born. Rigorous analyses of the developmental origins of these behaviours reveal that, contrary to popular belief – even among scientists – they are not hardwired into our brain structures or preordained by our genes. Instead, the latest research – including my own – shows that these behaviours self-organise in utero through the continuous dance between brain, body and environment.

***

Recent studies of prematurely born infants...have brought to light that fetuses born as young as 32 weeks (eight weeks before the usual date) do more than cry. They produce protophones, the infant sounds that eventually turn into speech. Meaning that a fetus in the last trimester of pregnancy can make all the sounds of a newborn infant.

***

My work with Ghazanfar and Takahashi established – for the first time in a primate – that the ability to vocalise at birth is not ‘innate’. Rather, it undergoes a lengthy period of prenatal development, even before sound can be produced.

***

While individual speech sounds are suppressed in the womb, what remains prominent are the variations in pitch, intensity and duration – what linguists refer to as the prosody of speech.

Prosody is what gives speech its musical quality. When we listen to someone speak, prosody helps us interpret their emotions, intentions and the overall meaning of their message. Different languages have different prosodic patterns... They found that the infants had learned the prosodic patterns – duration contrast versus pitch contrast – of their mother tongue.

Language learning begins in the womb, and it begins with prosody. Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages. The mother’s voice is the most dominant and consistent sound in the womb, so the person carrying the fetus gets first dibs on influencing the fetus. If the mother speaks two languages, her infant will show equal preference and discrimination for both languages.

***

The newborns had not just memorised the prosody of their native languages; they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this prosody in their own vocalisations. Babies are communicating as soon as they are born, and these abilities are developing in the nine months before birth.

There is no genetic blueprint, programme or watchmaker who knows how it must turn out in the end. The reality of how these behaviours come to be is far more sophisticated and elegant. They develop through continuous interactions across multiple levels of causation – from genes to culture.

"...which of these factors are the primary drivers of vocal development – our genes or brain? – and which ones are merely supporting – the body? How much of their communication do babies owe to nature versus nurture? Is it more nature or nurture? I guarantee you, there are no scientifically defensible answers to these questions.

Comment: our ability to speak with real words is obviously a built-in process affected by all of the influences the author lists. Every one is of equal importance. Picking up syntax seems a built-in attribute of the brain. We were evolved to have language.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/science/lila-gleitman-dead.html?campaign_id=2&em...

"Until the 1970s, most linguists believed that the structure of language existed out in the world, and that the human brain then learned it from infancy. Building on the work of her friend Noam Chomsky, Dr. Gleitman argued the opposite: that the structures, or syntax, of language were hard-wired into the brain from birth, and that children already had a sophisticated grasp of how they work.

“'The study of language acquisition, her primary scientific concern, was her field in a special sense,” Dr. Chomsky said in a statement. “She virtually created the field in its modern form and led in its impressive development ever since.”

"Dr. Chomsky, who like Dr. Gleitman received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, devised the theory. But it was Dr. Gleitman who figured out elegant ways to test it in the real world, starting with her own children.

***

"With Barbara Landau, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, she showed how even blind children were able to learn “sighted” words like “look” and “see” — not by experiencing them in the world, but by inferring their meaning from their syntactic and semantic contexts. She conducted similar research on deaf students with another former student, Susan Goldin-Meadow, now at the University of Chicago.

***

"Working with a colleague, John Trueswell, Dr. Gleitman studied first how children learn “hard” words — verbs, conceptual nouns — and then turned around and looked at how they learn concrete nouns and other “easy” words, which she argued were not as easy as they might seem."

Comment: Hard-wired syntax seems correct. Even obituaries teach us.

https://theconversation.com/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-langua...

"...surprisingly, Danish children have trouble learning their mother tongue. Compared to Norwegian children, who are learning a very similar language, Danish kids on average know 30% fewer words at 15 months and take nearly two years longer to learn the past tense.

***

"There are three main reasons why Danish is so complicated. First, with about 40 different vowel sounds – compared to between 13 and 15 vowels in English depending on dialect – Danish has one of the largest vowel inventories in the world. On top of that, Danes often turn consonants into vowel-like sounds when they speak. And finally, Danes also like to “swallow” the ends of words and omit, on average, about a quarter of all syllables. They do this not only in casual speech but also when reading aloud from written text.

"Other languages might incorporate one of these factors, but it seems that Danish may be unique in combining all three. The result is that Danish ends up with an abundance of sound sequences with few consonants. Because consonants play an important role in helping listeners figure out where words begin and end, the preponderance of vowel-like sounds in Danish appears to make it difficult to understand and learn. It isn’t clear why or how Danish ended up with these strange quirks, but the upshot seems to be, as the German author Kurt Tucholsky quipped, that “the Danish language is not suitable for speaking … everything sounds like a single word.”

***

"Danish children do, of course, eventually learn their native tongue. However, our group has found that the effects of the opaque Danish sound structure don’t go away when children grow up: Instead, they seem to shape the way adult Danes process their language. Denmark and Norway are closely related historically, culturally, economically and educationally. The two languages also have similar grammars, past tense systems and vocabulary. Unlike Danes, though, Norwegians actually pronounce their consonants.

***

"We found that because Danish speech is so ambiguous, Danes rely much more on context – including what was said in the conversation before, what people know about each other and general background knowledge – to figure out what somebody is saying compared to adult Norwegians.

***

"Our discovery about Danish challenges the idea that all native languages are equally easy to learn and use. Indeed, learning different languages from birth may lead to distinct and separate ways of processing those languages."

Comment: This still doesn't negate the theory of a universal syntax The Hawaiian language has lots of vowels all of which are pronounced. I doubt their kids have a problem.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/childrens-brains-hear-language-differently/?...

"Young children use both brain hemispheres to understand language, neuroscientists say, which may explain why they appear to recover from neural injury more easily than adults.

"Previous brain scanning research and the clinical findings of language loss in patients who suffered a left hemisphere stroke have shown that, in almost all adults, sentence processing is possible only in the left hemisphere.

"However, this pattern is not established in young children, according to a team led by Elissa L Newport, from Georgetown University, US. Brain networks that localise specific tasks to one hemisphere start during childhood but are not complete until a child is about 10 or 11.

***

"The findings show that at the group level even young children showed left-lateralised language activation, they say, but a large proportion of the youngest children also showed significant activation in the corresponding right-hemisphere areas.

"In adults, the corresponding area in the right hemisphere is activated in different tasks, such as, processing emotions expressed with the voice. In young children, both hemispheres are engaged in comprehending the meaning of sentences and recognising the emotional affect."

Comment: Language development in young children is a carefully choreographed process, and it is protective of early brain injury. A carefully thought out plan to protect very young humans before civilization made life less violent. I explain this as God setting up useful protections.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200312142254.htm

"Even before uttering their first words, babies master the grammar basics of their mother tongue. Thus eight-month-old French infants can distinguish function words, or functors -- e.g. articles (the), personal pronouns (she), or prepositions (on) -- from content words -- e.g. nouns (rainbow), verbs (to drive), or adjectives (green). Functors are frequently encountered because there are fewer of them, and they are placed before content words in languages such as English and French.

"In contrast, there is a much greater diversity of content words, which are also longer. Experiments conducted by three researchers from the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (CNRS/Université de Paris) with 175 eight-month-old babies, using a simple artificial language, demonstrated that these infants understood functors were more frequent and came before content words in their mother tongue (French).

"The young participants quickly adapted to new content words but showed little interest for newly introduced functors -- as though already aware there were only a limited number of prepositions, determiners, and other words in this category. Babies' preferences were evaluated by observing how long they looked at visual displays associated with the grammar words. "

Comment: Obviously the ability to quickly pick up a language in built into the brain. What is not obvious is that the history of complex grammatical language being 50,000-70,000 years old does not fully tell us how much language capacity was present at that time, and how much was contemporaneously developed with use. When H. sapiens appeared 315,000 years ago, how much language ability was present in the brain is not known.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/newborns-can-isolate-words-from-speech

"Babies are born with the ability to pick out distinct words from continuous speech, according to a study published in the journal Developmental Science.

"Picking out individual words is a necessary first step for language development, but it’s challenging because speech lacks clear boundaries.

“Language is incredibly complicated,” says lead author Ana Flò, from the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, France. “We often think of language as being made up of words, but words often blur together when we talk.”

"Infants appear to have worked out how to detect words by the middle of their first year. But it’s not clear whether they have these “segmentation abilities” from birth or develop them through language exposure and/or brain development.

***

"In both experiments, babies were exposed to a three-minute familiarisation phase involving a stream of syllables that gave either statistical distribution or prosody cues.

"The researchers used a non-invasive brain imaging technique, Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, during a subsequent test phase to show if infants could identify word boundaries.

"They found that the newborns were able to detect distinct words in both conditions. That means they can use both mechanisms, independently from each other.

“'Our study showed that at just three days old, without understanding what it means, they are able to pick out individual words from speech,” Flò says.

"The findings also suggest that “newborns have remarkable short-term memory capacities”, the authors write.

“'We think this study highlights how sentient newborn babies really are and how much information they are absorbing,” says co-investigator Alissa Ferry from the University of Manchester, UK."

Comment: This appears to be an innate ability and humans are definitely programmed to have speech and language.

DAVID's comment: The sentences in bold raise an issue that fits my theory about human brains. We were given the capacity in our large complex brain to invent language, which is immaterial. As such it is our invention, not a product of evolution which deals in the material.

dhw: Under "dualism verses materialism", in your capacity as a dualist, you finally agreed that our large complex brain does not invent anything: the brain supplies information and IMPLEMENTS the ideas provided/invented by the “soul”. But of course it is our invention, just as the weaverbird’s nest is the bird’s invention, the anthill is the ants’ invention, and whale language is the whale’s invention. That does not mean that it did not come about through a process of evolution. The problem as always is the unknown source of consciousness, and in the case of humans, the reason for our hugely enhanced degree of consciousness. But our ancestors must have had their own means of expression (one definition of language), just as modern apes do, and my proposal – as you well know – is that our enhanced consciousness resulted in the need for a more complex form of expression. And just like the efforts of land animals to adapt to life in the water, or fish to adapt to life on the land, or Little Billy to transform himself into Big Billy by exercising his body, pre-Sapiens’ efforts to create new sounds resulted in the necessary changes to the brain and the anatomy. I find this hypothesis more convincing than the proposal that your God made all the changes before pre-whales swam, fish walked, and humans talked. But we have now agreed to disagree on this.

DAVID: You forget that our larynx dropped to the proper position for speech at the time sapiens arrived, but it took over 200,000 years to learn how to use it. Form first, use second.

dhw: Nobody has a clue when humans first started to use human language, so I don’t know where you get your 200,000 years from. Do you think pre-sapiens and early sapiens had no means of communication? And have you heard recordings of the sounds they made? None of this provides any evidence that your God changed human anatomy before humans could come up with words, as opposed to humans seeking to make new sounds and thereby changing their anatomy. This is what we have agreed to disagree on.

OK

dhw: Under "dualism verses materialism", in your capacity as a dualist, you finally agreed that our large complex brain does not invent anything: the brain supplies information and IMPLEMENTS the ideas provided/invented by the “soul”. But of course it is our invention, just as the weaverbird’s nest is the bird’s invention, the anthill is the ants’ invention, and whale language is the whale’s invention. That does not mean that it did not come about through a process of evolution. The problem as always is the unknown source of consciousness, and in the case of humans, the reason for our hugely enhanced degree of consciousness. But our ancestors must have had their own means of expression (one definition of language), just as modern apes do, and my proposal – as you well know – is that our enhanced consciousness resulted in the need for a more complex form of expression. And just like the efforts of land animals to adapt to life in the water, or fish to adapt to life on the land, or Little Billy to transform himself into Big Billy by exercising his body, pre-Sapiens’ efforts to create new sounds resulted in the necessary changes to the brain and the anatomy. I find this hypothesis more convincing than the proposal that your God made all the changes before pre-whales swam, fish walked, and humans talked. But we have now agreed to disagree on this.

DAVID: You forget that our larynx dropped to the proper position for speech at the time sapiens arrived, but it took over 200,000 years to learn how to use it. Form first, use second.

Nobody has a clue when humans first started to use human language, so I don’t know where you get your 200,000 years from. Do you think pre-sapiens and early sapiens had no means of communication? And have you heard recordings of the sounds they made? None of this provides any evidence that your God changed human anatomy before humans could come up with words, as opposed to humans seeking to make new sounds and thereby changing their anatomy. This is what we have agreed to disagree on.

QUOTE: "The light that illuminates Wolfe’s book is the idea that humans invented speech, the way we invented so many other things. Evolution doesn’t explain the invention any more than it explains kaleidoscopes or microprocessors. That we can and do invent tools, luxuries, games, and cultures testifies to capacities that set us apart from animals. Where those capacities came from is a question still worth asking." (DAVID's bold)

DAVID's comment: The sentences in bold raise an issue that fits my theory about human brains. We were given the capacity in our large complex brain to invent language, which is immaterial. As such it is our invention, not a product of evolution which deals in the material.

dhw: Under "dualism verses materialism", in your capacity as a dualist, you finally agreed that our large complex brain does not invent anything: the brain supplies information and IMPLEMENTS the ideas provided/invented by the “soul”. But of course it is our invention, just as the weaverbird’s nest is the bird’s invention, the anthill is the ants’ invention, and whale language is the whale’s invention. That does not mean that it did not come about through a process of evolution. The problem as always is the unknown source of consciousness, and in the case of humans, the reason for our hugely enhanced degree of consciousness. But our ancestors must have had their own means of expression (one definition of language), just as modern apes do, and my proposal – as you well know – is that our enhanced consciousness resulted in the need for a more complex form of expression. And just like the efforts of land animals to adapt to life in the water, or fish to adapt to life on the land, or Little Billy to transform himself into Big Billy by exercising his body, pre-Sapiens’ efforts to create new sounds resulted in the necessary changes to the brain and the anatomy. I find this hypothesis more convincing than the proposal that your God made all the changes before pre-whales swam, fish walked, and humans talked. But we have now agreed to disagree on this.

You forget that our larynx dropped to the proper position for speech at the time sapiens arrived, but it took over 200,000 years to learn how to use it. Form first, use second.

DAVID's comment: The sentences in bold raise an issue that fits my theory about human brains. We were given the capacity in our large complex brain to invent language, which is immaterial. As such it is our invention, not a product of evolution which deals in the material.

Under "dualism verses materialism", in your capacity as a dualist, you finally agreed that our large complex brain does not invent anything: the brain supplies information and IMPLEMENTS the ideas provided/invented by the “soul”. But of course it is our invention, just as the weaverbird’s nest is the bird’s invention, the anthill is the ants’ invention, and whale language is the whale’s invention. That does not mean that it did not come about through a process of evolution. The problem as always is the unknown source of consciousness, and in the case of humans, the reason for our hugely enhanced degree of consciousness. But our ancestors must have had their own means of expression (one definition of language), just as modern apes do, and my proposal – as you well know – is that our enhanced consciousness resulted in the need for a more complex form of expression. And just like the efforts of land animals to adapt to life in the water, or fish to adapt to life on the land, or Little Billy to transform himself into Big Billy by exercising his body, pre-Sapiens’ efforts to create new sounds resulted in the necessary changes to the brain and the anatomy. I find this hypothesis more convincing than the proposal that your God made all the changes before pre-whales swam, fish walked, and humans talked. But we have now agreed to disagree on this.

https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/reviews-of-tom-wolfes-kingdom-of-speech-actually-...

"The Kingdom of Speech is an extraordinary display of intellectual independence.[1] This is a book that treats Charles Darwin as a toplofty prig and Noam Chomsky as a haughty fake—which is to say it aims to harpoon two of the biggest whales of modern secular thought.

***

"But there is a gap between “capacity to speak” and actual speech, and it is a gap that has proven devilishly hard to bridge.

***

"The gap between mere vocal expression and human language differs in profound ways from the gaps filled by all the micro-adaptations that shaped the human foot, knee, pelvis, or hand. The jump from “woof woof” to “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” is not just larger than the switch from tree-climbing to walking upright; it is different in nature.

"Wolfe, who knows a thing or two about expressive language, dives into this subject. He writes not so much as an anti-evolutionist than as a scourge of intellectual arrogance. His starting point is a sentence in a psychology journal to the effect that the experts can’t really explain the origins of human language.

"Why not? Didn’t Charles Darwin settle this long ago? And suddenly we are off on a clever retelling of how Darwin stole credit for the idea of evolution by natural selection from the itinerant South Seas bug collector, Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace had come up with natural selection independently and confided his discovery to Darwin in the hope of getting the older man’s help in publishing it. Darwin did help, but artfully announced it as coincident with his own version of the idea, long mulled but never announced.

"Darwin was comfortable and socially connected: precisely the kind of person that Wolfe has made a career of skewering in his essays and novels. Darwin, of course, treated Wallace with patronizing generosity, and poor Wallace never realized he had been had.

***

" Language, however, presented that chasm of difference that natural selection even augmented by sexual selection could not seem to bridge. Darwin’s last attempt to make human speech conform to his model was to treat human speech as just an elaboration of animal vocalization. Wolfe has a pleasant time recounting the disdain with which linguists treated the “bow wow” hypothesis.

"Wolfe’s takedown of Chomsky involves an elaborate parallel of Darwin’s patronizing and sometimes dismissive treatment of Wallace. The Wallace figure in Chomsky’s life is itinerant South American ethnographer Daniel L. Everett, who found a human language that differs in fundamental ways from what Chomsky claims to be the unalterable basics of human speech. A key issue is that the language of the Amazonian Pirahã (the name is pronounced something like PEE-da-HA) lacks a feature called “recursion”—the embedding of sentences within sentences. Everett’s analysis has been met with skepticism by Chomsky loyalists, but Wolfe is convinced that the skepticism is merely a power play. The skeptics set out “to carpet bomb, obliterate, every syllable Everett had to say about this miserable little tribe.”[3] But wonderful to say, Everett outmaneuvered them both in scholarship and appeal to the general public.

***

" Wolfe has no inhibitions on that score, nor need he. The Kingdom of Speech is a can opener, not a treatise; a harpoon, not a nail file. Some reviewers have been aghast at his temerity, and nearly all have gasped at the bravado of his closing sentences: “To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”

"The light that illuminates Wolfe’s book is the idea that humans invented speech, the way we invented so many other things. Evolution doesn’t explain the invention any more than it explains kaleidoscopes or microprocessors. That we can and do invent tools, luxuries, games, and cultures testifies to capacities that set us apart from animals. Where those capacities came from is a question still worth asking." (my bold)

Comment: The sentences in bold raise an issue that fits my theory about human brains. We were given the capacity in our large complex brain to invent language, which is immaterial. As such it is our invention, not a product of evolution which deals in the material. It is a product of time. We had to learn to use our giant brain from its time of appearance 300,000 years ago until the time language theoretically appeared 50-70,000 years ago. Language then speeded up the further development and use of the brain.

There are two other reviews at the website along with other commentaries. All worth reading.

https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-study-of-language-a-science?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&am...

"In Wolfe’s breathless re-telling, the dominant scientific theory is Noam Chomsky’s concept of a ‘universal grammar’ – the idea that all languages share a deep underlying structure that’s almost certainly baked into our biology by evolution. The crucial hypothesis is that its core, essential feature is recursion, the capacity to embed phrases within phrases ad infinitum, and so express complex relations between ideas (such as ‘Tom says that Dan claims that Noam believes that…’). And the challenging fact is the discovery of an Amazonian language, Pirahã, that does not have recursion. The scientific debate plays out as a classic David-and-Goliath story, with Chomsky as a famous, ivory-tower intellectual whose grand armchair proclamations are challenged by a rugged, lowly field linguist and former Christian missionary named Daniel Everett.

***

"Linguistics therefore requires you to look beyond what you think you know, and start looking instead at what you don’t know that you know. This implicit knowledge has been the object of study in linguistics since the 1950s. Back then, Chomsky revolutionised the field when he observed that grammar is a generative system. That is, a language is not a big set of all the words and sentences people say in that language; rather, it’s a mental system of rules for generating acceptable sentences. We have the ability to create sentences we’ve never heard that conform to norms we’ve never explicitly learned. From the limited, finite exposure we get while learning our native language, we somehow acquire an unlimited, infinitely productive system of rules.

"Trying to pinpoint those rules depends on a rather counterintuitive practice: not collecting examples of what people actually say, but carefully crafting sentences that no one would ever say.

***

"Determining the nature of those structures has been the project of linguistics for decades now. The linguist forms a hypothesis about the configuration of words (Mary [believed [the rumour [that Bill was eating spaghetti.]]]); formulates a rule referring to that structure, which is violated by the unacceptable sentence (you can’t move the object of a verb out to the what position if it has to cross over a noun-phrase level – ‘the rumour’ – to get there) and tests the hypotheses by coming up with more good and bad sentences.

"This is an incredibly counterintuitive way to think about language, which after all is a thing we intuitively know how to use. But it’s still science, an effort to discover the nature of something by forming hypotheses and testing them against evidence. Sentence 3 is evidence that the hypothesis mentioned above it – about the distance of what from the place it traces to – is incorrect. It’s just that the evidence here is not language as spoken ‘out there’ in the world, but an idealised set of consciously contrived sentences.

***

"However, for Chomskyans there is a standing commitment to this idea. Universal grammar is not a hypothesis to be tested, but a foundational assumption. Plenty of people take issue with that assumption, but all types of linguists generally agree that there are indeed constraints on what a human language can be, that languages don’t do absolutely anything. They differ on where those restrictions come from.

***

"The phrase ‘universal grammar’ gives the impression that it’s going to be a list of features common to all languages, statements such as ‘all languages have nouns’ or ‘all languages mark verbs for tense’. But there are very few features shared by all known languages, possibly none. The word ‘universal’ is misleading here too. It seems like it should mean ‘found in all languages’ but in this case it means something like ‘found in all humans’ (because otherwise they would not be able to learn language as they do.)

***

"The years-long immersion in Pirahã culture and the struggle to understand it had a profound personal effect on Everett. His encounter with their concept of truth made him rethink his belief in God and eventually become an atheist. His renunciation of universal grammar involved a similar disillusionment, since he had worked within the framework for the first 25 years of his career. Yet Everett’s study of the Pirahã falsifies neither Christianity nor universal grammar, since they are not designed for falsification in the first place. They are both a way to try to get a handle on reality. The first asks that you take a set of assumptions on faith because they are the truth. The second provides a set of assumptions for generating a line of enquiry that might at some point lead to the truth.

"I’m not sure whether you can call yourself a Christian if you reject the foundational tenets of Christianity – but you can certainly reject the assumptions of universal grammar and still call yourself a linguist. In fact, a drive to debunk Chomsky’s assumptions has led to a flourishing of empirical work in the field. Even as a foil, villain or edifice to be crumbled, the theory of universal grammar offers a framework for discovery, a place to aim the magnifying glass, chisel or wrecking ball, as the case may be."

Comment: The battle goes on.

Dhw: Briefly, all organisms need to communicate. Humans with their enhanced consciousness need enhanced forms of communication. I have never heard of anybody saying that language “is the mind”: it is the principal [I should have corrected this error earlier] code the mind uses in order to communicate. “Window into the soul” is nice and poetic – but it’s usually used of the eyes, which might be a much better guide. You only have to listen to our politicians to know that language can be used to hide as much as it reveals. There are said to be about 7000 different languages in the world, all serving the same purpose, which means inevitably they will have certain features in common, such as sounds that denote different objects or actions, but there is no universal “grammar”, and children learn to use the particular sounds, structures, “grammars” they hear in their particular environment. Feral children learn the language of the animals that have brought them up. All organisms must have an innate ability to learn the language of their species, using whatever means are available to them. If God exists and created life, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that he gave all organisms the ability to communicate in their own particular ways. One might ask why he gave humans different languages to communicate in, but my guess would be that he didn’t: mine would be that different sets of humans worked out their own sounds, structures, “grammars”.
DAVID: You are in disagreement with most linguists who think there is a universal grammar.

As in most of the subjects we discuss, there are different opinions, and it may depend to a large degree on how you define grammar. I would define it as a set of rules that govern the use of language. However, you say you agree with Chomsky. I have reproduced my last post above, so please tell me which points of mine you disagree with, and why.

TONY: From a biblical perspective, universal grammar makes sense, as all root languages have the same origin.

I echo David’s sentiments in welcoming you back! As you say, root languages by definition have the same origin. They are a perfect illustration of how evolution works, as the original form is changed beyond all recognition by a continual process of innovation and variation. Darwin’s theistic conclusion regarding species could be applied just as aptly to language: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one….from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Tony: From a biblical perspective, universal grammar makes sense, as all root languages have the same origin.

Glad top hear from you. Hope you have time to stay.

QUOTE: "Language is not the mind–it is the principle code the mind uses. It is a window into the soul."

David’s comment: this authoritative comment seals the discussion for me. Chomsky is correct if Paraha is as expressive as this author describes it. God would want humans to have this language ability.

dhw: One might ask why he gave humans different languages to communicate in, but my guess would be that he didn’t: mine would be that different sets of humans worked out their own sounds, structures, “grammars”.

You are in disagreement with most linguists who think there is a universal grammar.

David’s comment: this authoritative comment seals the discussion for me. Chomsky is correct if Paraha is as expressive as this author describes it. God would want humans to have this language ability.

I’m pressed for time, but in any case have expressed my own views on several occasions. Briefly, all organisms need to communicate. Humans with their enhanced consciousness need enhanced forms of communication. I have never heard of anybody saying that language “is the mind”: it is the principle code the mind uses in order to communicate. “Window into the soul” is nice and poetic – but it’s usually used of the eyes, which might be a much better guide. You only have to listen to our politicians to know that language can be used to hide as much as it reveals. There are said to be about 7000 different languages in the world, all serving the same purpose, which means inevitably they will have certain features in common, such as sounds that denote different objects or actions, but there is no universal “grammar”, and children learn to use the particular sounds, structures, “grammars” they hear in their particular environment. Feral children learn the language of the animals that have brought them up. All organisms must have an innate ability to learn the language of their species, using whatever means are available to them. If God exists and created life, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that he gave all organisms the ability to communicate in their own particular ways. One might ask why he gave humans different languages to communicate in, but my guess would be that he didn’t: mine would be that different sets of humans worked out their own sounds, structures, “grammars”.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/kingdom-of-speech-everett-is-wrong-ab...

"Noel Rude, a specialist in native American languages,wrote to offer some thoughts on Tom Wolfe’s takedown of Noam Chomsky’s language theories in The Kingdom of Speech. Chomsky’s theories dominated linguistics for decades. His progressive politics, which were, strictly speaking, irrelevant to his work are often considered to play a role in his prominence.

"Along the way, he clashed with linguist Daniel Everett who had, with an inexcusable lack of political correctness, found an apparent exception to Chomsky’s theories in a remote Brazilian language, Piraha.

"Wolfe chronicles the conflict from both sides, making clear that current theories about the origin of human language are not useful.
Here is the perspective of Noel Rude, an ID-friendly linguist (a specialist in native American languages):

***

"One of the impressions, I’m afraid, that Wolfe’s book might leave is that Everett is right about language. Pirahã really is a primitive language lacking recursion, and if one language out of thousands lacks recursion then Chomsky must have been wrong. Language is not innate–it’s just another human invention. Nothing to see here. Linguistics is of no interest to ID.

"I checked with an Amazonian linguist, one well within the Darwinian “cog-ling” camp and no supporter of Chomsky. He says that Everett is wrong about Pirahã.
Pirahã has more phonemes than Hawaiian. Unlike Hawaiian, it also has complex lexical tones some of which may be grammatical. The grammar is already complex:
There are, yes, primitive cultures lacking vocabulary we consider essential. Sometimes even numbers are unnamed (though these cultures generally count on their fingers). A few decades ago R. M. W. Dixon (1972, 1977, etc.) introduced linguists to such languages and their exotic grammars. We were all impressed.

"There is no language that cannot distinguish cause from effect, temporal relationships, volitional agents, consciousness, intention and purpose–even though elite materialists demean all this as merely “subjective” and not part of the reality they envision.

"One might conclude from Wolfe’s book that linguistics has failed to discover much at all. Chomsky strove for a theory of universal syntax that did not appeal to function, but other than acknowledging the fact that all languages are structured hierarchically, many now think the enterprise failed. But this does not mean there are no universals of grammar. There are many.

"There are absolute universals, implicational universals, universal tendencies, and so on. Linguistics is like biology. There is no comprehensive “theory” of biology. Biology is more observational than theoretical. And structure is linked to function much as in the typological-functional (now called “cognitive”) school of linguistics.
Nevertheless, Chomsky was right that grammar is instinctive. Children seem programmed to learn it. It is, in fact, children who create grammar.

"In learning a language, adults typically focus on words and miss the grammar. Little children do not parrot what they hear. They say, “Daddy goed store.” They grasp for grammatical regularities and learn later to incorporate irregularities. We are programmed to speak just as we are programmed to walk. We are empowered to invent and create and advance technology. We are not programmed to invent and create—hence “primitive” cultures with sophisticated grammars.

"Whence then this language facility? Likely, let me suggest, all the following:
1. Grammar is biologically innate
2. Grammar adapts to reality
3. Grammar is Platonic

"The study of stroke victims proves that the brain is involved. Cross-language studies reveal how grammar adapts to the environment. And if you are a mathematical realist, then why wouldn’t the mind of a child be attuned to logic that is “out there”? Maybe Michael Denton,’s “laws of biology?” Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonances” perhaps also play a role. Adults have conscious access to vocabulary, and know when a foreigner gets pronunciation and grammar wrong, but adults mostly do not have conscious access to their grammars. Only little children have that.

"Language is not the mind–it is the principle code the mind uses. It is a window into the soul."

Comment: this authoritative comment seals the discussion for me. Chomsky is correct if Paraha is as expressive as this author describes it. God would want humans to have this language ability.