Chomsky wrong on language?
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Dave B wrote:Does anybody have any further details of Chomsky’s breakout of Africa circa 100,000 years ago which is central to his sudden language hypothosis? Not that I disagree with it, I discussed it in general terms on out forum a couple of years ago re genetic archaeology and mitochondrial DNA etc. I even went to a lecture given by the lead developer of the technique a couple of years ago. There are implications I think as the sudden breakout may have been due to sudden climate change and the lake of toba thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory. Ie our modern humans could have been gradually evolving language and social skills etc for some time before the opportunity came to take advantage of it.
http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=3285Origin of the languages in Southwestern Africa
I haven’t read Chomsky, at least not lately, so cannot offer an opinion on his claim that we are born with a “universal grammar”, or that this was shunted into our evolutionary path in one single action.However, this is how I understand the situation:-· Genes build brains, for example, human brains and chimpanzee brains. Society, wonderful as it is, cannot build brains.· If you raise a chimpanzee in a human family alongside a human baby, the chimpanzee will neither learn to speak, nor to understand, human language.· Human babies and toddlers learn language very fast.· There must therefore be something innate about the human brain that primes it for learning language.This seems so obvious to me that it hardly needs stating. It does not mean that the environment has no job to do – of course it does – and it starts early on. It is claimed that babies in the womb listen to the sounds of their mother’s speech and thus are already primed for the sounds of the language they will be born into. Society then teaches the child its “mother tongue”.Some have also said that a gene, or genes, “for” language have not been found. Maybe so. But with the speed of current genetics research, they may very well soon be. THE FOXP2 gene is just one interesting case in point:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2This is a rare example of the mutation of one gene causing one specific speech and language condition. More often, several genes are involved in the expression of a trait. To me, the obvious thing is that genes build brains, and that the human brain is different from any other brain, enabling it to absorb language at an early age. I am not so worried about the specifics; i.e. exactly which genes are involved in building that particular part, or parts, of the brain.YMS mentioned autism and language. Autism is a fascinating condition with many traits, one of them being problems with language development. People with classic autism often will not develop speech. People who go on to be diagnosed with high functioning autism mostly have late onset of speech. People with Asperger’s syndrome (similar to HF autism) often have stilted, pedantic speech. The language problem is part of a “triad” of impairments, of social interaction, communication and imagination.Most researchers believe that autism is highly heritable.http://www.autism.org.uk/24984https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/initiatives/autism-genome-projecthttps://www.autismspeaks.org/science/initiatives/autism-genome-project/first-findings I think a bit of humility is called for when deciding whether genes “for” something will or won’t be found. As Steve Jones says in “The Language of the Genes”, Appendix, p 317: “Trying to keep up with the scientific literature is like running up a down escalator. However much one reads, more and more is published until at last one is forced to give up from mere exhaustion, to be plunged into the Basement of Ignorance. Genetics moves so swiftly that it is necessary to sprint upwards to stay in the same place.” Meel
Just to add to what I said before about the environment kicking in at an early stage of human development, below is a (non-language) example from the “hot” field of epigenetics (amenable to environmental influences):“Deficiency of folic acid in the diet of pregnant women leads to an increased risk of defects in the formation of the spinal cord, which may cause hydrocephalus, known as “water on the brain”, together with failure to close the spinal canal in the lower spine. Today we know the epigenetic explanation. Folic acid is an essential factor in making the amino acid, methionine, serve as a donor of the methyl group during DNA methylation. So a lack of folic acid in the mother’s diet early in pregnancy results in an impaired epigenetic ability in the foetus, and this leads directly to the spinal defect.” Frank Ryan: Virolution, p324.So, I am happy to consider early influences of the environment on the developing foetus, whether by epigenetics or any other way – but I still believe there must be machinery in place in the human brain that allows us to handle language in a unique way, right from the very beginning.From the “Basement of Ignorance”, looking out with awe and wonder at the escalator of accumulating knowledge about genetics…..Meel
For those interested in this topic, and further to my post where I mentioned the FOXP2 gene, I have just read an interesting account of some of the history of the discovery of this gene, in a book called “Not a Chimp” by Jeremy Taylor. Apparently, there was quite furore surrounding its discovery and claims and counter claims for what it was and exactly what it did, or did not – and how. The background was research involving a family named the “KE” family; several of its members having the same speech and language defects.Some extracts from the book:”FOXP2 was certainly not a ‘grammar gene’ as such, but turned out to play a far more fundamental role in the chain of events that lead to language.” P 35“On the one hand, the human brain is so awesomely plastic and adaptable that even radical surgery fails to de-rail speech and language, yet a tiny point mutation in a single gene, FOXP2, leaves affected individuals with dramatic impairments in speech articulation and language comprehension and production from which they never recover, despite decades of speech therapy. The reason for the widespread effects of FOXP2 lies in the fact that it is a master-controller gene, one of a number of genes that produce transcription factors. ….” P 35“Information from birds, together with Faraneh Vargha-Khadem’s imaging studies on the affected members of the KE family, show us that the articulation of speech and the comprehension of speech use the same circuits in the brain. Language is not abstract, but grounded in and restrained by the physical process of articulation.” P 39“Not surprisingly, several groups world-wide are now trying to discover the array of ‘downstream’ genes that seem to be under the control of FOXP2 in the brain. Although FOXP2 is not directly implicated in any other type of language disability, an international group of scientists, drawn mainly from the Wellcome Centre for Human genetics in Oxford, has discovered one member of this ‘downstream orchestra’, a gene called CNTNAP2, whose activity is under direct control by FOXP2. CNTNAP2 is active in the developing cortex of the brain and variants of the gene have been associated with specific language impairment and language delays in children with autism.” P 41…”suggesting that the correct context to explore the action of FOXP2 is sensorimotor coordination, not language per se – …”(“sensorimotor systems” being “those neural system that control muscular responses to sensory information”.)The last couple of extracts are interesting, as people with autism, as well as language problems, also often have problem with fine, and sometimes gross, motor skills.Anyway, the book was written in 2009, possibly a long time ago as genetics research goes.As Jeremy Taylor says, commenting on primate research in particular: “This is science in the making: we are trying to hit a moving target – and that target is moving rapidly.” P 21
Was Chomsky right on language and the existence of a universal grammar?A team at New York University believe they have research results which at least corroborate, if not directly prove, his contention:http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2015/12/07/chomsky-was-right-nyu-researchers-find-we-do-have-a-grammar-in-our-head.html
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