Just so!
This from
Scientific
American (full text by subscription) in an article headed
Infant pacification may have led to the
origin of language:
In a
paper slated for the August Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Florida
State University physical anthropologist Dean Falk proposes that just
as motherese forms the scaffold for language acquisition during child
development, so, too, did it underpin the evolution of language. Such
baby talk itself originated, she posits, as a response to two other
hallmarks of human evolution: upright walking and big brains.
In contrast to other primates, humans
give birth to babies that are relatively undeveloped. Thus, whereas a
chimpanzee infant can cling to its quadrupedal mother and ride along on
her belly or back shortly after birth, helpless human babies must be
carried everywhere by their two-legged caregivers. Assuming, as many
anthropologists do, that early humans had chimplike social structures,
moms did most of the child rearing. But having to hold on to an infant
constantly would have significantly diminished their foraging
efficiency, Falk says.
She argues that hominid mothers
therefore began putting their babies down beside them while gathering
and processing food. To placate an infant distressed by this
separation, morn would offer vocal, rather than physical, reassurance
and continue her search for sustenance. This remote comforting, derived
from more primitive primate communication systems, marked the start of
motherese, Falk contends. And morns genetically blessed with a keen
ability to read and control their children, so the theory goes, would
successfully raise more offspring than those who were not. As mothers
increasingly relied on vocalization to control the emotions of their
babies--and, later, the actions of their mobile juveniles--words
precipitated out of the babble and became conventionalized across
hominid communities, ultimately giving rise to language.
Just so! And indeed Falk's powerful idea can be applied not
only in linguistics and anthropology, but also in zoology and paleobiology. For
example, I had always suspected that Kipling was entirely wrong about
the elephant's trunk: it is clearly a child rearing adaption which mama
Nelly uses not only to put all the little Dumbos in a row, but also to
wash them.
Mind you, Kipling has the better punchline (Kipling's full text
here):
Then
the Elephant's Child felt his legs slipping, and he said
through his nose, which was now
nearly five feet long, 'This is
too butch for be!'
But back to linguistics. The SciAm article at least does cite the
commentary of a suitably skeptical linguist (though one with his own
little story to tell about the origins of language):
Linguists
likewise demur. Falk's account sheds considerable light on the origins
of speech, writes Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii at
Honolulu in an accompanying commentary. Unfortunately, he continues, it
reveals nothing about the origins of language. He charges that the
hypothesis fails to address how the two fundamental features of
language--namely, referential symbols and syntactic structure--arose,
noting that speech is merely a language modality, as are Morse code and
smoke signals. Falk's scenario does not explain how mother's melodic
utterances acquired meaning in the first place, Bickerton insists.
Somehow Bickerton's insistence is not quite as persuasive or as damning
as I'd like. The thing is: language doubtless has some child rearing
benefit just as it has payoffs in all other social arenas, though a
little less than in most cos kids are so incredibly stupid and don't
have the faintest idea what all the cooing is about. Even if we allow
that child rearing benefit is a factor in the evolution of language,
why on earth would we isolate it as the prime mover above everything
else? I'm curious to know if the actual article when it appears
in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (hmm,
maybe online already) will contain even one shred of evidence. I mean,
an actual observation of language in the process of significant
development through child rearing in any species is obviously more than
we can expect. But still, some shred, just to convince me that the eds.
of BBS are not crazy.
Well, at least Falk can be seen as a gender balancing antidote to Geoffrey Miller's
Mating Mind theory of language evolution, a theory which I seem to remember gives males trying to impress mates a similar innovative role in language evolution that Falk wants to give mothers. Mind you, in Miller's model it's still the women that make the selection. I'm not sure whether Falk's model has a place for weaned males. An occasional grunt, perhaps.
Posted by David Beaver at July 1, 2004 04:33 AM