[Paleopsych] the origins of language

[HowlBloom at aol.com]

Re: Pre-adolescent children typically possess better linguistic learning 
abilities than adults, making it easier for them to learn a new language. But this 
ability normally disappears around adolescence and why this should happen 
remains unclear.  Kita suggests that this could have had an evolutionary 
advantage, helping to reinforce linguistic bonds by making it more difficult for those 
who grew up outside of a social group to learn its language.
 
hb: This quote from the article below is an extremely interesting suggestion 
about the origin of language.  It hints that language may have developed as an 
individual display mechanism, a way of showing off your powers to impress 
other males or to seduce females.  It also suggests that language evolved with a 
dual purpose--not just to show off the power of your brain, but to show off 
the power and identity of your group.  It was a group display device as well as 
an individual bit of flash.
 
And it was a group bonding mechanism.  Then there's its function in 
communicating and all that that entails, culture-building, sharing tips and secrets, 
gossiping and keeping others in line, coming up with complex plans, coordinating 
strategies, negotiating alliances and trades,  frantically gabbling to others 
about your latest techno-dreams, putting down folks you want to rise above, 
praising those whose favor you thirst for, and in the process of your 
snobberies and imitations of those above you creating the basic units of large-scale 
social structures.   

Talk about multi-tasking.  Language may have evolved with five or six 
simultaneous functions, five or six different ways of being useful, five or six 
different ways of transforming upright apes into human beings.  Howard 


Retrieved September 17, 2004, from the World Wide Web  
http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99996411 Childhood learning may determine linguistic 
rules 19:00 16 September 04 NewScientist.com news service The way children 
learn may determine the building blocks of language, suggests a study of deaf 
Nicaraguan children.  Ann Senghas of New York's Columbia University, US, and 
colleagues studied three generations of deaf schoolchildren from the Nicaraguan 
capital, Managua. The first deaf schools were established in 1977, giving many 
deaf children their first a chance to interact with one another. Pupils from 
these schools gradually developed their own form of hand-based communication, 
known today as Nicaraguan Sign Language.  Senghas and colleagues showed deaf 
pupils a video of a cartoon cat tumbling down a hill and asked them to describe 
the event using sign language.  They found that older students used hand 
signals resembling the gestures employed by hearing people, mimicking the entire 
event physically. But younger pupils - who had interacted with other deaf 
children from an early age - used a more complex series of signs. They split the 
scene into component parts and arranged these sequentially to convey the 
incident. The constructions resemble the way words and sentences are built in verbal 
languages, using segments structured in a linear fashion. This indicates that 
way the younger children learnt the sign language helped reshape it according 
to these linguistic rules. Learning bias  "Our findings indicate that children 
have a learning mechanism with a bias towards linear and hierarchical 
organisation of information," says Sotaro Kita at the University of Bristol, UK, and 
one of the team. "It may tell us why languages all have this linear, 
hierarchical organisation of information."  Languages the world over exhibit similar 
structural features, perhaps indicating that humans have a biological 
predisposition to communicate in this way. The new study suggests that the way children 
learn a language may play a critical role in constructing these linguistic 
rules.  The new study may also provide unique insight into the way language 
evolved, says Karen Emmorey, an independent linguistics expert from the Salk 
Institute in California, US. "It tells us about the way language emerges," she told 
New Scientist. "The exciting thing is that there's just no way to get at this 
data for spoken languages as you can't go back in time."  Pre-adolescent 
children typically possess better linguistic learning abilities than adults, making 
it easier for them to learn a new language. But this ability normally 
disappears around adolescence and why this should happen remains unclear.  Kita 
suggests that this could have had an evolutionary advantage, helping to reinforce 
linguistic bonds by making it more difficult for those who grew up outside of a 
social group to learn its language.  Journal reference: Science (vol 305, p 
1779)  Will Knight  Return to news story © Copyright Reed Business Information 
Ltd.  

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Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of 
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 
21st Century
Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Faculty 
Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic 
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The 
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy 
of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International 
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive 
editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: 
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from 
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, 
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang 
to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
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