Linguistic anthropology
•  Pinker…a cognitive developmental psychologist
with a research emphasis on language and a
theoretical emphasis on evolutionary psychology
•  The Luxuriant and Flowing Hair Club for Scientists,
member
•  Project Steve, member: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve
•  On “Colbert…”
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/218577/february-11-2009/steven-pinker
•  Serious interview (7 mins.,) : http://bigthink.com/ideas/24067
Language is an Instinct
The evolved,
innate ability to
acquire language;
the adaptation;
“Nature”
+
Exposure to a
language being
used by others;
the environment;
“Nurture”
=
Talking and
understanding
others talk; the
combo; the stuff
we see organisms
being and doing
Language Development is
Based on Instincts
•  Children are born with an ability to acquire the language(s) to which they were
exposed at a critical time during development: birth to ~7 years; this is why it is easy/
automatic to learn a new language prior to 7 and much more difficult after 7
• 
Children are born with an ability to hear and
produce sounds present in any of the world’s
languages; when exposed to only the sounds present
in one’s immediate environment (listening to others
talk on a daily basis), children retain the ability to
hear and produce the local sounds, and lose the
ability to produce (and even hear, i.e., discern)
nonlocal sounds
–  example from the !Kung—speech includes several
click sounds; outsiders are often unable to distinguish
multiple kinds of clicks—as if there were only one
click “letter”
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These sounds are phonemes and morphemes
Sound parts
•  Phoneme: one of the units of sound that gets strung
together to form a morpheme, roughly corresponding to
the alphabet
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b, f, a, z
Also combinations: ou, sh
Also nonEnglish alphabets (ö or oe in German; like push)
Also versions of the clicks, even though the Hadza do not have an
alphabet
•  Morphemes: combinations of phonemes in to meaningful
word parts like un-micro-wave-abil-ity (or very short
words: he)
Language Structure:
Parts of Speech
•  A noun is NOT just a person place or thing (e.g., an
abstraction like “square root” is a noun)
•  Other parts of speech are not so simple either
•  Parts of speech are tokens that obey particular formal
rules; nouns follow noun-y rules; our brains pay attention
to these rules and parse words into categories that follow
these rules; words can be in multiple categories (e.g.
“They sleep” (sleep = verb) and “Last night’s sleep was
unrestful” (sleep = noun, modified by other words).
Universal Grammar
•  Grammar: the way sentences
are structured
•  Not a word chain device, but
a word tree device
•  Roughly, a sentence (S)
includes a noun phrase (NP),
a verb phrase (VP), and
various modifiers
•  This fundamental sentence
structure appears in all
languages (i.e., it is
universal), but there are many
variations
•  This is UG: Universal
Grammar
Ethnocentrism
•  “Jabbering” as described by Leahy in “First Contact” film:
implies they were speaking in an inferior way
•  Their “jabbering” is actually a very sophisticated language
•  Less-technologically advanced peoples do NOT have more
simplistic languages
•  Example: Cherokee vs. English
–  English: “we”
–  Cherokee: 4 different kinds of “we”:
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“you and I”
“another person and I”
“several other people and I”
“you, one or more other persons, and I”
–  Cherokee is both more complex and more precise—the extra
pronouns have real meanings
Black English Vernacular (BEV)
vs.
Standard American English (SAE)
•  1960s: educational psychologists thought that American
black children had been so deprived culturally that they
lacked true language and were confined to a “non-logical
mode of expressive behavior”
•  Linguistic anthropologist Labov studied BEV; he analyzed
the grammar of BEV and found very sophisticated
structure—a grammar common to all who speak BEV—
the grammar is simply different than that of SAE
•  Example: “He working”…
Labov and BEV
•  “He working” in BEV means that right now, he is at work,
working
•  “He be working” in BEV means that he generally works;
he is currently employed
•  What about SAE? “He is working” means BOTH of those
things—and you cannot distinguish between the two
meanings without having to say additional things—
•  NOW which language seems more accurate and precise?
BEV and Ethnocentrism
•  BEV’s grammar rules are not absent , deprived, or
nonlogical
•  Until Labov, most people thought that grammar
rules were absent from BEV or “wrong.”
•  Further, saying BEV and its rules are “wrong” is
ethnocentric.
•  It is a myth that nonstandard dialects of English
are grammatically deficient
Pidgins
•  Often related to colonialism and slavery
•  When owners wanted workers/slaves to work in a new region, he
would (sometimes intentionally) get people from varied regions who
could not talk to each other; they still had to cooperate for some tasks,
however, and when they did, they did so in the language of the
colonizers
•  Example: the Papua New Guinean “carriers” in the film “First
Contact”?—e.g., could you make out “Masta Mike”—a pidgin term
borrowed from English but that clearly had aspects of a Papua New
Guinean language?
•  A pidgin is a choppy string of words borrowed from the colonizer’s
language which has very little grammar
Pidgins
•  Pidgins :
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Lack consistent word order
Lack prefixes and suffixes
Use separate words to indicate tense,
Lack structure more complex than a simple clause (e.g., no clauses embedded
within clauses)
–  Use repetition to indicate plurality
–  and no way to tell who did what to whom (e.g., subjects and objects)
• 
Pidgins can slowly become more complex over decades, but sometimes
something else happens…
Creoles
•  When the laborers have children, the children, during the
0-7 critical period of development, are exposed to the
pidgin. Exposure is to the pidgin of a caretaker who
collectively took care of them away from their parents
(thus, the children use common words, and are surrounded
by many children) (Bickerton)
•  A creole is a pidgin that, filtered though the brains of
children, becomes a real language with consistent
grammar--this is because the children’s minds are
unadulterated by the language input of their parents, and,
seeking grammar in development, the children
spontaneously impose it on the vocabulary of the pidgin
Creoles
•  There is an uncanny resemblance of the grammars of
unrelated creoles around the world--perhaps children in
these circumstances impose an innate, universal grammar
on the pidgin’s vocabulary
•  With most people, the universal grammar gets remolded by
the specific preexisting grammar peculiar to those
individuals in the immediate environment who are
constantly speaking it
Pidgins, Creoles,
and Sign Language
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Bickerton’s work was based on
his reconstructions in the past;
can we see this in action? Yes!
American Sign Language (ASL)
does not resemble English or
British Sign Language, and is
more like Navajo or Bantu—how
did this happen? Same story as
pidgins becoming creoles
Pidgins, Creoles,
and Sign Language
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In Nicaragua: prior to 1979, deaf children were isolated from each other—
there were no special programs where deaf children attended schools with
other deaf children. In 1979, such schools were created. These schools focused
on drills and lip-reading, and failed horribly. On playgrounds, however,
children talked to each other with the signs they were taught. The signs made
up LSN (Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense, a pidgin form of Nicaraguan Sign
Language.) LSN is a pidgin that everyone uses differently, and users must rely
on elaborate circumlocutions due to the absence of a consistent grammar. LSN
is spoken by individuals who were over 10 when they acquired the language.
BUT, for the children who were younger than 10 when they started the school
and were exposed to LSN, it was a different story. ISN (Idioma de Señas de
Nicaragua) is a sign language largely spontaneously developed by deaf
children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s.
ISN is a creole of the pidgin LSN that was spontaneously standardized by the
young children. The young children all speak it in the same way, and have a
very sophisticated, fluid signing style. ISN’s grammar was imposed on LSN
by these younger minds that had not passed the critical age of language
acquisition.
Signing
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When deaf infants are raised by signing parents, they learn signing the same
way hearing infants learn spoken language.
Most deaf children are born to non-deaf parents, so do not have this learning
opportunity unless they attend a school where fluent signers are present.
But if they do not, and are forced to learn lipreading, they never develop
signing fluency. Consequently, if they seek out a deaf community as adults, it
is much more difficult to learn sign language fluently--much like it is for
adults to learn a foreign spoken language for the first time.
If parents have a deaf child and they have no experience with signing, they
should immediately expose the child to fluently-signing individuals, in order to
help them be able to communicate more easily for the rest of their lives.
But even children born to poorly-signing parents (e.g., parents who themselves
learned to sign later in life) will spontaneously apply universal grammar to
their the signs they are exposed to by their parents. *Of course, one wants the
child’s grammar to eventually match that of his or her peers.
Grammar is like Walking
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We do not have to instruct our children in
grammar—parents just talk and kids learn
the meaning of words and consistent ways
for connecting those words
Walking: similarly, kids are built and
psychologically pre-programmed to walk
and to want to walk. (In the US, parents use
toy walking assistance devices that
ultimately hinder a child’s development of
walking because we think we need to;
however, there are important cultural
differences…)
Language is “Hard-Wired”
in the Brain
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If language is an instinct, universal
grammar is real, and children even
impose meaningful, sophisticated
grammar onto pidgin languages
which lack it, then there must be
some physical circuitry in the brain
that houses language
If that specific circuitry is damaged,
then language will be impaired.
Aphasia: the loss or impairment of
language abilities following brain
damage
Broca’s Aphasia
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The Broca’s area of the brain is left hemisphere,
lower part of frontal lobe.
If it is injured due to stroke, wound, or a birth
defect, there is a specific kind of aphasia.
Grammar is impaired.
Meaning, if it can be inferred without grammar, is
intact.
Mr. Ford: Broca’s area damaged by a stroke, and
he lost the ability to use grammar, but not the
abilities to think and discern meaning; when
reading, he skipped over grammar-relevant words,
but did read them when presented as nouns (bee &
oar but not be and or)
All other aspects of cognition, too, were intact
(mapreading, etc.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2IiMEbMnPM&feature=related
Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
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Hereditary--possibly due to a
dominant gene
Many grammatical mistakes
A strain to plan out a sentence
using conscious thought to get
the grammar right
The wug test: subjects shown a
picture of one wug (a birdlike
creature); then shown 2 pictures
of a wug and told “now there are
two of them; there are 2 ____”;
English-speaking SLI people get
it wrong (e.g., wugness instead
of wugs)
“Chatterbox Syndrome”
•  Intelligence is not always intact when language is
impaired; there are several forms of mental retardation,
some which have different effects on grammar, meaning,
and other forms of cognition
•  People with hydrocephalic (“water on the brain”) disorders
(“Denyse”) can have “chatterbox syndrome”
•  Quote p. 39-40
“Chatterbox Syndrome”
•  They are loquacious, sophisticated conversationalists with
intact grammar, but severely developmentally delayed in
other ways
•  Denyse has no bank account, no boyfriend.
•  She is in fact severely mentally challenged, and cannot
accomplish many aspects of everyday living.
•  Perhaps the hydrocephalic disorder damaged brain regions
related to other kinds of intelligence, but left intact the
language areas.
Williams Syndrome
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A rare form of developmental disability
with specific physical markers
Defective gene on chromosome 11 that
impacts calcium’s regulation in the body/
brain
Associated with short slight, narrow faces
with broad foreheads, flat nose bridges,
full lips, sharp chins, star-shaped irises,
and small distantly-spaced teeth
Severely developmentally disabled
(IQ~50)
Cannot perform simple everyday tasks
like retrieving an object from a cupboard
Very friendly
Fluent and prim conversationalists!
–  Prefer unusual words like ibix
–  Tests reveal competence at grammar
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video clip and p. 42 “Crystal” quote
Wernicke’s Aphasia
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Recall: Broca’s area: grammar affected
Wernicke’s area is another part of the brain
p. 316-317 quote
Speech of those affected is grammatical, but makes
no sense and has frequent neologisms and word
substitutions like “knee” for “elbow”
Those affected do not understand the speech around
them
Various combinations of Broca’s and Wernicke’s
aphasia (due to, e.g. damage to multiple brain
regions via stroke) produce different effects--e.g.,
people can recite what they hear quite accurately,
but without understanding the meaning of what they
say
It isn’t entirely clear what these brain regions do,
but Wernicke’s has something to do with retrieving
the right words, and understanding their meanings
Language Development
•  Children reliably develop language without
being explicitly taught grammar
•  But, the critical times ARE important!
Children MUST be exposed, though not really
instructed, to a language at the right time;
children MUST minimally be exposed to the
speech of other human beings; TV isn’t
enough
Language Development
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Overgeneralization by children of grammatical rules while they are learning
language:
“Mama, I eated it,” and “Daddy goed to the store.” These indicate that
general rules are picked up (here, add “-ed” to the end of a verb to make it past
tense); and abnormal verbs with regard to tense have not yet been picked up
(we know because they don’t say “I ated it” or Daddy wented to the store”).
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This morning my daughter in the car while making silly sounds with Daddy:
“I spitted more than you Daddy, so I winned”
Correction by Daddy: “You mean ‘I spat, [thus]…won’”
Correction by Mommy: “Spat” isn’t a word”
Correction by Dictionary.com: yes, it is a word, no, really, even though “brang” is wrong
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This related to the arbitrariness of the symbol that Pinker discusses throughout
the text: it IS arbitrary over time and across cultures
Right or Wrong??....discussion…
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Language Learning
•  To restate:
•  The experience of language PLUS the neural wiring are
what make language—both are essential
•  We’ve seen that without the wiring, there are major
problems in knowing grammar and/or meaning
•  Without the exposure there are of course problems as well.
Evidence:
–  Most adults never learn a foreign language, much less master
one’s phonology (phonemes)
–  “Wild Children”
Language Development
•  “Wild children”
–  Raised in isolation by sick and depraved parents; rare
but it does happen
–  Children become mute, and remain mute despite efforts
to teach them language once they are rescued
–  There MUST BE responsive language, live in the
child’s environment, for it to develop
Ape Language
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Nonhumans, including apes, cannot speak because
they don’t have the vocal apparatus
Washoe the chimp and other apes were taught
American Sign Language (ASL) to see if they
could communicate with it
Apes communicated with a few signs, but apes
use an extremely rudimentary system of ASL;
human ASL speakers are far more sophisticated-not even close to what nonhuman apes do
Apes do not have grammar, and did not impart it
onto the object signs they may have learned (the
way human children do naturally when learning a
language)
Apes relied more heavily on gestures in their
natural repertoire than learning ASL signs with
their combinatorial phonological structure of hand
shapes, motions, locations, and orientations.
p. 346 quote in Pinker from a deaf ASL research
assistant asked to record data on a chimp ASL
project…
Language as Evidence for Paths of
Human Diaspora
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Just as genes accumulate mutations over time, languages change over time
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With genes, mutations involve the wrong A, T, G, or C at a particular spot in DNA
With language, “mutations” are changes in phonemes or morphemes over time
http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/phonemes/
Genetic mutations will lead to different genes being present at different locations across the world
Same with phoneme and morpheme “mutations”
You can use this information to map human migration throughout the world: diaspora
It turns out that maps generated with genetic data corroborate maps generated with linguistic data!
See work by the Cavalli-Sfozas if you are interested, esp. the book “The Great Human Diasporas”
Language and Thought
•  One’s culture’s language, and therefore one’s thoughts, are determined by
one’s culture, not by real things in the world.
•  The linguistic relativity principle, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, is the
idea that differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive
categories affect the way people think, so that speakers of different
languages will tend to think and behave differently depending on the
language they use.
•  Evidence that you do not need language to think
–  Nonhuman animals do not have language, but they clearly have “thought,”
albeit it possibly unconscious; does a cheetah’s brain not process visual
information about a gazelle and use it in making an attack?
–  But, okay, some might argue that it depends on how you define “thought”--Ive
been using the loosest definition possible. What if we limit “thought” to
conscious human thought, which in some ways seems qualitatively different
than just neural circuitry processing information…
Language and Conscious Human
Thought
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We still don’t need language! Evidence:
–  Mr. Ford! No grammar but adept at other cognitive tasks
–  Deaf children who lack language then invent it
–  Deaf people with no spoken language and no sign language: do they not think?
Preposterous! Read about Idelfonso on p. 58
–  Infants as young as 5 days old perceive number though have no language
–  Research on vervet monkeys by Cheney and Seyfarth: monkeys can discern kinship
relations in their groups, even though monkeys do not have language
–  Creative people (artists: often expressing feelings with visuals rather than words)
–  Scientific people (physicists: thoughts are “geometrical”)
–  Being unable to put words to thoughts (“cat-got-your-tongue”) and deja-vu types of
experiences)
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Pinker’s conclusion: spoken language helps us transform the language of thought
(mentalese) into communicable utterances understandable to others