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Emergence of Communication in Socio-Biological Networks

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How experimental setup influences how language evolves

For animals that use combinations of calls such as some songbirds and some whales , the meanings of the combinations are not made up of the meanings of the parts though there are many species that have not been studied yet. And the attempts to teach apes some version of human language, while fascinating, have produced only rudimentary results.

So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world. How did we get from there to here? All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - years or so - things look basically the same. Languages change gradually over time, sometimes due to changes in culture and fashion, sometimes in response to contact with other languages.

How experimental setup influences how language evolves

Current Work and Open Problems: A Road-Map for Research into the Emergence of Communication and Language Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Caroline Lyon, and. Request PDF on ResearchGate | Emergence of Communication and Language | Old questions on the origins of language and communication are illuminated.

But the basic architecture and expressive power of language stays the same. The question, then, is how the properties of human language got their start. Obviously, it couldn't have been a bunch of cavemen sitting around and deciding to make up a language, since in order to do so, they would have had to have a language to start with! Intuitively, one might speculate that hominids human ancestors started by grunting or hooting or crying out, and 'gradually' this 'somehow' developed into the sort of language we have today.

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Such speculations were so rampant years ago that in the French Academy banned papers on the origins of language! The problem is in the 'gradually' and the 'somehow'. Chimps grunt and hoot and cry out, too. What happened to humans in the 6 million years or so since the hominid and chimpanzee lines diverged, and when and how did hominid communication begin to have the properties of modern language? Of course, many other properties besides language differentiate humans from chimpanzees: lower extremities suitable for upright walking and running, opposable thumbs, lack of body hair, weaker muscles, smaller teeth - and larger brains.

According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with. So the question of the origin of language rests on the differences between human and chimpanzee brains, when these differences came into being, and under what evolutionary pressures. The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do.

About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract the mouth, tongue, and throat : Until anatomically modern humans, about , years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds.

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But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began then. Earlier hominids could have had a sort of language that used a more restricted range of consonants and vowels, and the changes in the vocal tract may only have had the effect of making speech faster and more expressive. Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then gradually or suddenly switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.

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These issues and many others are undergoing lively investigation among linguists, psychologists, and biologists. One important question is the degree to which precursors of human language ability are found in animals. For instance, how similar are apes' systems of thought to ours? Do they include things that hominids would find it useful to express to each other? There is indeed some consensus that apes' spatial abilities and their ability to negotiate their social world provide foundations on which the human system of concepts could be built.

Gesture and Speech. Such inherited de-differentiations of brain pathways might have contributed to the functional complexity that characterizes human language. Tommaso M. And this is why will we spend the next four weeks studying the morphology, syntax and phonology of diverse languages. Where mathematics comes from. A report by the British Council suggests that the number of people learning English is likely to continue to increase over the next years, peaking at around 2 billion, after which a decline is predicted. The Plum Print next to each article shows the relative activity in each of these categories of metrics: Captures, Mentions, Social Media and Citations.

A related question is what aspects of language are unique to language and what aspects just draw on other human abilities not shared with other primates. This issue is particularly controversial. Some researchers claim that everything in language is built out of other human abilities: the ability for vocal imitation, the ability to memorize vast amounts of information both needed for learning words , the desire to communicate, the understanding of others' intentions and beliefs, and the ability to cooperate.

Current research seems to show that these human abilities are absent or less highly developed in apes. Other researchers acknowledge the importance of these factors but argue that hominid brains required additional changes that adapted them specifically for language. How did these changes take place?

The result is referred to as a "pidgin", which has a lexicon adequate for everyday communicative purposes but little to no structural regularity. Over a few generations, a pidgin can begin to develop its own structural regularities on the way to becoming a fully linguistic system known as a "creole". Creole languages have been studied extensively because they tend to exhibit very similar structural properties, even though they arise in different parts of the globe from completely different superstrate and substrate languages.

One hypothesis among many proposed has been that children born into pidgin-speaking populations add structural complexity and regularity to the language system they are exposed to, thus driving the development of a pidgin toward a full-fledged creole language. There is a documented case of one humpback vocalization "dialect" supplanting another when an Indian Ocean population came into contact on the eastern coast of Australia with a Pacific population.

The situations that give rise to new sign languages are more happenstance. Of particular note among several documented cases of new sign languages are situations in Nicaragua and among a Bedouin community in Israel. Prior to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, children who lost their hearing were seldom schooled, nor were they exposed to any form of sign language. Under the Sandinista program of universal education, including special education, many deaf individuals who had previously lived apart from one another were brought together for the first time in centralized educational settings.

Instruction was given in lip-reading and speaking, but students communicated gesturally with each other on their own, using gestural systems they had developed at home, or from interacting with others. Over time, a full-blown sign language known as "Nicaraguan Sign Language" emerged whose properties have been studied. On the basis of studies comparing cohorts of students in the deaf schools by decade, it appears to be the case that it is indeed the younger members of the community who provide systematicity and add structural complexity to the language 4,5.

The situation of the Bedouin community in Israel is in many ways different from that in Nicaragua: the typical cause of deafness is not childhood disease but hereditary deafness. The frequency of deafness across families has led to wide use of the sign language among hearing as well as deaf members of the community.

The signing community has existed over three generations, with conventionalization of lexicon and sentence structure. Y ounger signers in the Bedouin community produce longer utterances and sign at a faster rate than older generations of signers, which is one of several markers of language emergence and change over time.

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Crucially, though, it was the language of the powerful leaders and administrators and of the Roman military - and, later, of the ecclesiastical power of the Roman Catholic Church - and this is what drove its rise to arguably global language status. Thus, language can be said to have no independent existence of its own, and a particular language only dominates when its speakers dominate and, by extension, fails when the people who speak it fail.

The influence of any language is a combination of three main things: the number of countries using it as their first language or mother-tongue, the number of countries adopting it as their official language, and the number of countries teaching it as their foreign language of choice in schools. The intrinsic structural qualities of a language, the size of its vocabulary, the quality of its literature throughout history, and its association with great cultures or religions, are all important factors in the popularity of any language. But, at base, history shows us that a language becomes a global language mainly due to the political power of its native speakers, and the economic power with which it is able to maintain and expand its position.

With the advent since of large international bodies such as the United Nations and its various offshoots - the UN now has over 50 different agencies and programs from the World Bank, World Health Organization and UNICEF to more obscure arms like the Universal Postal Union - as well as collective organizations such as the Commonwealth and the European Union, the pressure to establish a worldwide lingua franca has never been greater. As just one example of why a lingua franca is useful, consider that up to one-third of the administration costs of the European Community is taken up by translations into the various member languages.

Some have seen a planned or constructed language as a solution to this need. Today the best known is Esperanto, a deliberately simplified language, with just 16 rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings and no illogical spellings. Many of these universal languages including Esperanto were specifically developed with the view in mind that a single world language would automatically lead to world peace and unity. Setting aside for now the fact that such languages have never gained much traction, it has to be said this assumption is not necessarily well-founded.

For instance, historically, many wars have broken out within communities of the same language e. Switzerland, Canada, Singapore, etc manage to coexist, on the whole, quite peaceably. IMAGE Language hotspots, where many languages are near extinction from National Geographic , using data from Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages While its advantages are self-evident, there are some legitimate concerns that a dominant global language could also have some built-in drawbacks.

Among these may be the following:. IMAGE A family tree representation of the spread of the English language around the world from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, after Peter Strevens As can be seen in more detail in the section on English Today , on almost any basis, English is the nearest thing there has ever been to a global language.

Language and Power

Its worldwide reach is much greater than anything achieved historically by Latin or French, and there has never been a language as widely spoken as English. Many would reasonably claim that, in the fields of business, academics, science, computing, education, transportation, politics and entertainment, English is already established as the de facto lingua franca. As we have seen, a global language arises mainly due to the political and economic power of its native speakers.