

by Peter Dizikes
Christine Daniloff/MITCredit:

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, an endangered primate, lives in the rainforests. In a behavior that's unusual for a primate, the silvery gibbon sings: It can vocalize long, complicated songs, using 14 different note types, that signal territory and send messages to potential mates and family.

Far from being a mere curiosity, the silvery gibbon may hold clues to the development of language in humans. In a newly published paper, two MIT professors assert that by re-examining contemporary , we can see indications of how could have evolved from the systems underlying the older communication modes of birds and other primates.

From birds, the researchers say, we derived the melodic part of our language, and from other primates, the pragmatic, content-carrying parts of speech. Sometime within the last 100,000 years, those capacities fused into roughly the form of human language that we know today.

But how? Other animals, it appears, have finite sets of things they can express; human language is unique in allowing for an infinite set of new meanings. What allowed unbounded human language to evolve from bounded language systems?

"How did human language arise? It's far enough in the past that we can't just go back and figure it out directly," says linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. "The best we can do is come up with a theory that is broadly compatible with what we know about human language and other similar systems in nature."

Specifically, Miyagawa and his co-authors think that some apparently infinite qualities of modern human language, when reanalyzed, actually display the finite qualities of languages of other animals—meaning that human communication is more similar to that of other animals than we generally realized.

"Yes, human language is unique, but if you take it apart in the right way, the two parts we identify are in fact of a finite state," Miyagawa says. "Those two components have antecedents in the animal world. According to our hypothesis, they came together uniquely in human language."

Introducing the 'integration hypothesis'

The current paper, "The Integration Hypothesis of Human Language Evolution and the Nature of Contemporary Languages," is published this week in Frontiers in Psychology. The authors are Miyagawa; Robert Berwick, a professor of computational linguistics and computer science and engineering in MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems; and Shiro Ojima and Kazuo Okanoya, scholars at the University of Tokyo.

The paper's conclusions build on past work by Miyagawa, which holds that human language consists of two distinct layers: the expressive layer, which relates to the mutable structure of sentences, and the lexical layer, where the core content of a sentence resides. That idea, in turn, is based on previous work by linguistics scholars including Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Hale, and Samuel Jay Keyser.

The expressive layer and lexical layer have antecedents, the researchers believe, in the languages of birds and other mammals, respectively. For instance, in another paper published last year, Miyagawa, Berwick, and Okanoya presented a broader case for the connection between the expressive layer of human language and birdsong, including similarities in melody and range of beat patterns.


But the researchers think certain parts of human language actually reveal finite-state operations that may be linked to our ancestral past. Consider a linguistic phenomenon known as "discontiguous word formation," which involve sequences formed using the prefix "anti," such as "antimissile missile," or "anti-antimissile missile missile," and so on. Some linguists have argued that this kind of construction reveals the infinite nature of human language, since the term "antimissile" can continually be embedded in the middle of the phrase.

However, as the researchers state in the new paper, "This is not the correct analysis." The word "antimissile" is actually a modifier, meaning that as the phrase grows larger, "each successive expansion forms via strict adjacency." That means the construction consists of discrete units of language. In this case and others, Miyagawa says, humans use "finite-state" components to build out their communications.

The complexity of such language formations, Berwick observes, "doesn't occur in birdsong, and doesn't occur anywhere else, as far as we can tell, in the rest of the animal kingdom." Indeed, he adds, "As we find more evidence that other animals don't seem to posses this kind of system, it bolsters our case for saying these two elements were brought together in humans."

An inherent capacity

To be sure, the researchers acknowledge, their hypothesis is a work in progress. After all, Charles Darwin and others have explored the connection between birdsong and human language. Now, Miyagawa says, the researchers think that "the relationship is between birdsong and the expression system," with the lexical component of language having come from primates. Indeed, as the paper notes, the most recent common ancestor between birds and humans appears to have existed about 300 million years ago, so there would almost have to be an indirect connection via older primates—even possibly the silvery gibbon.


"You have these two pieces," Berwick says. "You put them together and something novel emerges. We can't go back with a time machine and see what happened, but we think that's the basic story we're seeing with language."

Andrea Moro, a linguist at the Institute for Advanced Study IUSS, in Pavia, Italy, says the current paper provides a useful way of thinking about how human language may be a synthesis of other communication forms.

"It must be the case that this integration or synthesis [developed] from some evolutionary and functional processes that are still beyond our understanding," says Moro, who edited the article. "The authors of the paper, though, provide an extremely interesting clue at the formal level."

Indeed, Moro adds, he thinks the researchers are "essentially correct" about the existence of finite elements in human language, adding, "Interestingly, many of them involve the morphological level—that is, the level of composition of words from morphemes, rather than the sentence level."

Miyagawa acknowledges that research and discussion in the field will continue, but says he hopes colleagues will engage with the integration hypothesis.

"It's worthy of being considered, and then potentially challenged," Miyagawa says.

More information: "The integration hypothesis of human language evolution and the nature of contemporary languages." Shigeru Miyagawa, et al. Front. Psychol., 09 June 2014. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00564

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User comments

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5 / 5 (1) Jun 11, 2014
I think that human language was the result of emergent cognitive abilities. At a certain point the brain started to look for grammar that wasn't in the existing verbal communications. Verbal communications were an aggregate of signs not a system. Those with the cognitive ability to look for grammar started using it and it spread. In other words where was no protolanguage. Language either exists or it doesn't.
not rated yet Jun 11, 2014
I see language as an inevitability of a sufficiently-complex socially-oriented species - all information is composed of temporal and spatial components and auditory / vocal information is ideally suited for communication. The basic principles of both 'melodic' and lexical etymology are implicit within the contexts of their requirements and possible applications.. and the same goes for recursion. It's quite unnecessary to invoke 'stepping stone' developments from distantly-related species IMHO.
1 / 5 (3) Jun 11, 2014

"Particular single nucleotide polymorphisms are associated with core deficits of children with specific language impairment and also coincide with language delays in autistic children [120]. In songbirds, CNTNAP2 is differentially expressed in some song control nuclei, but whether FoxP2 regulates CNTNAP2 in songbirds has not yet been addressed [121]. These findings are encouraging in the light of potential deep homologies between human speech and bird song."

My comment: Bird song and speech homologies extend an unbroken biophysically constrained hierarchy of nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled ecological adaptations from microbes to insects and from birds to man.

Alternatively, constraint-breaking mutations may link morphological and behavioral phenotypes across species. However, there is no model or model organism that can be used to support those assertions.
not rated yet Jun 12, 2014
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge by Terence McKenna best theory of language evolution in existence, and a good read.


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