11/7/2015 The roots of language | Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello | Science | The Guardian

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The roots of language: what makes usdifferent from other animals?At the heart of our unique language ability lie other forms of cognition and cooperation, argue PaulIbbotson and Michael Tomasello

Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello

Thursday 5 November 2015 14.29 GMT

The natural world is full of wondrous adaptations such as camouflage, migration andecholocation. In one sense, the quintessentially human ability to use language is nomore remarkable than these other talents. However, unlike these other adaptations,language seems to have evolved just once, in one out of 8.7 million species on earthtoday. The hunt is on to explain the foundations of this ability and what makes usdifferent from other animals.

Grammar 1.0

The intellectual most closely associated with trying to pin down that capacity is NoamChomsky. He proposed a universal grammatical blueprint that was unique to humans.This blueprint operated like a computer program. Instead of running Windows or Excel,this program performed “operations” on language – any language. Regardless of whichof the 6000+ human languages that this code could be exposed to, it would guide thelearner to the correct adult grammar.

It was a bold claim: despite the surface variations we hear between Swahili, Japaneseand Latin, they are all run on the same piece of underlying software. As ever, remarkableclaims require remarkable evidence, and in the 50 years since some of these ideas werelaid out, history has not been kind.

First, it turned out that it is really difficult to state what is “in” universal grammar in away that does justice to the sheer diversity of human languages. Second, it looks as ifkids don’t learn language in the way predicted by a universal grammar; rather, they startwith small pockets of reliable patterns in the language they hear, such as Where’s the X?,I wanna X, More X, It’s a X, I’m X-ing it, Put X here, Mommy’s X-ing it, Let’s X it, Throw X,X gone, I X-ed it, Sit on the X, Open X, X here, There’s a X, X broken … and gradually buildtheir grammar on these patterns, from the “bottom up”.

Universal cognition

If not universal grammar, then what? We know language uses a lot of mental processesthat are not unique to language, such as memory, categorisation and forming analogies.For example, when a child says, “We holded it,” they have made an analogy to pasttense verbs with the regular -ed ending. These kinds of mistakes give us vital clues to themechanisms children are using to build their language.

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Acknowledging that much of language uses the same process as the rest of cognition, anew branch of linguistics has developed from those principles. This can’t be the wholestory, however. The limitation of this approach is that although these processes are notunique to language, they are not unique to our species either. For example, chinchillascan form categories based on speech, yet clearly lack anything like human language. Sowhat is going on?

Putting our heads together

It might be that general cognitive processes such as memory and categorisation arenecessary, but not sufficient, for language. For a string of sounds to be understood aslanguage, something else is needed – Chomsky knew this, and his proposal was universalgrammar. There is exciting new evidence showing that this “something else” is a broaderadaptation for culture and cooperation. This brings us right back to the original questionof our place in the natural world. We share similar but different histories from ourevolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees. Why is that we can understand language andacts of communication, such as pointing, and they cannot?

Understanding communication requires a deeper understanding of how humans work –their intentions and, specifically, their communicative intentions. Chimpanzees justdon’t share this level of understanding. Chimpanzees and other great apes can discernwhat someone is intending to do when she pursues a concrete goal, like obtaining abanana, but they cannot discern what someone intends them to pay attention to or tothink, which is the purpose of communicative intentions.

Importantly, these same basic processes of intention-reading are necessary not only forlanguage, but also for discerning what someone is communicating when they simplypoke their index finger out in a particular direction for the purpose of communication.To understand why someone is pointing to, for example, a bicycle leaning against a tree,one must share some background experience and knowledge with that person todetermine why on earth they would be directing one’s attention to this particularsituation at this particular moment.

The idea is that something (we don’t precisely know what) in our evolutionary historyplaced pressure on us (but not chimpanzees) to evolve the kind of mental machinerythat allows us to read communicative intentions. One of the consequences of this wasthat it provided a key mental capacity for language. But it also put in place the potentialfor us to take part in ever more complex and large-scale cooperative ventures that formthe fabric of our different cultures.

The place of language

So in some ways, saying language is unique is stating things the wrong way around.Language is not the unique thing in itself – it is an expression of what is unique: theability to put our heads together and collaborate. Language is our species’ party trick,akin to the octopus rolling up like a coconut. Unlike the octopus, humans’ uniqueadaptation caused a profound cascade of consequences for our species, the full breadthof which we are still grappling to understand.

Paul Ibbotson is a lecturer in developmental psychology at the Open University. MichaelTomasello is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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