Language: Unlocking the past's most powerful secret | New ......the same time, the advantages of communicating successfully would create new selection pressures on humans: brains evolved

11/9/17, 2(30 AMLanguage: Unlocking the past's most powerful secret | New Scientist

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Language:Unlocking thepast’s mostpowerfulsecretThe to and fro that happens whenwe talk is key to understandinglanguage, and challenges the waywe view human nature, argue twobooks

Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos

All modern human languages depend on fast-pacedexchange

By Alun Anderson

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DO LINGUISTS need to get away from thelibrary and spend more time talking? Eversince Noam Chomsky revolutionisedlinguistics in the 1950s, research has focusedon the structures underlying grammaticallycorrect sentences and on our astonishingability to both generate and understand aninfinity of expressions. Now two new booksseparately argue that the to and fro ofconversation is key to understandinglanguage. If they are right, the idea oflanguage as a computational system needs tomake some room for that of language as a toolfor cooperative communication.

Daniel Everett of Bentley University,Massachusetts, and Nick Enfield at theUniversity of Sydney start from differentplaces. Everett’s wide-ranging How LanguageBegan is rooted in his 30 years working withtribal groups in the Amazon as ananthropologist. Enfield’s How We Talk comesout of the lab and speeds throughextraordinary experiments on the fast-paced,interactive flow of conversation.

Everett has already had a famous debate withChomsky and his colleagues, related inEverett’s bestseller Don’t Sleep, There AreSnakes. He set out as a missionary to live withthe Pirahã, a group of Amazonian hunter-gatherers, aiming to learn their language andtranslate the New Testament into it. Instead,his encounter with this happy culture, whichvalues “immediacy of experience” overunsubstantiated tales, led him to lose his faithand to discover that their language was unlikeanything studied before.

Pirahã appears not to use recursion, the way inwhich other languages tuck phrases insideother phrases to build more complex



sentences. That seemed to challenge coreideas about language and sparked a hugecontroversy. Now it is more accepted thatlanguages can be expressive withoutnecessarily using recursive forms.

“Homo erectus,who lived over60,000generationsbefore us, ledthe way: we aremerely anupgrade”

Surprisingly, the hero of How Language Beganis not modern humans, but Homo erectus, wholived over 60,000 generations before us. “Thegreatest hunter. The greatest communicator.The most intrepid traveller. Perhaps thegreatest distance runner on Earth” is howEverett sees our ancestor. H. erectus led theway: we are merely an upgrade.

Everett’s speculative account of our forebear’slife and travels are the most remarkable partsof a remarkable book. I felt I had been born 1.8million years too late. Although my brainwould have been just two-thirds of its modernsize, a pristine world would have lain beforeme.

H. erectus left their home in Africa and spreadthroughout Europe and Asia, ever onwards.Their tools, settlements, use of fire andcrossing of waterways in boats or rafts allshout to Everett that it was “upright man” whofirst had symbolic thought and culture, andmust have invented the first forms oflanguage, too.



Everett begins his argument with the life of H.erectus and the origins of symbolic thought,moving through millennia of “upgrades” to ourbrains, vocal apparatus and language in all itsvarieties. We travel from H. erectus‘s simpleexchanges to our ability to pour out over 100words per minute in conversation.

By pushing language’s origins back so far,Everett again collides with Chomsky, who seeslanguage emerging in Homo sapiens about80,000 years ago. But Everett doesn’t merelydispute the “when” of language, but also whyit was invented and how it changed. By“invented”, Everett means just that: languagewas a creation of culture, growing out ofhumans’ developing social cognition andcapacity to use symbols. For him, language is acommunicative tool and not the product ofsudden genetic change that gave H. sapiensnew powers of thought, as Chomsky argues.

What kind of language might H. erectus havespoken? The earliest languages might simplyhave had a series of loosely ordered words andgestures. The shared context and culturewould have been enough “to determine theinterpretation needed”, writes Everett. Morecomplex languages, with hierarchy andrecursion, could have evolved from there.



At each step, language would have to fit ourcognitive and perceptual limitations, auditoryrange, vocal apparatus and brain structures. Atthe same time, the advantages ofcommunicating successfully would create newselection pressures on humans: brains evolvedfor languages, and languages evolved forbrains. But, stresses Everett, language didn’tbegin with the first word but “the firstconversation, which is both the source and thegoal of language”. Language is aboutinteraction, about the simplest exchange in ashared culture.

Everett’s “baby steps” version of how languageevolved is at odds with Chomsky, who explainsin Why Only Us, his 2016 book with RobertBerwick, that language did not emerge forcommunication, but from a “slight rewiring”giving some individuals new powers ofthought. Chomsky is adamant that “there is noroom in this picture for any precursors tolanguage – say a language-like system withonly short sentences”. There is a clear choice:communication and conversation came firstand grammar later, or a language of thoughtcame first and was later “externalised”, as

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Chomsky puts it.

Conversation is central for Enfield, too. Hissparkling book, How We Talk, sets out to showthat the power of the “conversation machine”is as astonishing as any of our grammaticalachievements, and that how we direct our fast-paced exchanges challenges how we thinkabout human nature.

The action, Enfield explains, is concentrated ina 1-second window that opens as soon assomeone stops speaking. Taking an averagefrom 10 languages, an answer to a questionwill appear in around 200 milliseconds – thetime it takes to blink. English speakers average236 ms, while the Japanese manage it in anastonishing 7 ms and the deeply thoughtfulDanes in 468 ms.

We soon discover the timing of replies can bemanipulated. “Do you want to go for a drink?”Reply “yes” inside 200 ms and you are off tothe bar; delay another 400 ms and you will beasked if you really want to go. But choosing“no” in the first 100 ms signals flat rejection.Say nothing in that 1-second window and youmay face a frown for your lack of cooperationand be asked again.

Then there are the “uhs” and “ums” of English:“uh” says hold on for a short time (about 250ms), while “um” indicates you should expect alonger delay (about 700 ms). Both delays caneither signal “Hold on, I’m processing whatyou’ve said”, or warn that a negative responseis coming.

Finally, there is “huh”. In 2013, Enfield and hiscolleagues found that this, or somethingsounding very similar, was the one universal“word” in all languages. It is, he explains, the



quickest, easiest sound humans can make, anda speedy sound is needed to interrupt fastwhen you lose track of a conversation andneed help.

There is a deeper significance here, too. “Thislittle word, like the turn-taking system itoperates in, suggests a moral architecture tocommunication,” says Enfield. “Huh”symbolises “universal cooperation”, thecommitment people make to “help each other,where necessary and possible, to stay on trackin conversation”. That requires socialcognitive skills unique to our species, writesEnfield, for even 2-month-old babies love totake turns in their interactions with adults.

Enfield closes his slim book with an inspiringchapter. We are, he argues, “on the verge of afull-blown scientific revolution in research onthe human capacity for language”. He lays outthe two current big ideas: that language can’texist without specifically human forms ofsocial cognition and interaction; and thatlanguage is a “private, purpose-specificcomputational system for operating uponinformation”.

For Enfield, though, there is no need for oneidea to triumph over the other. Rather, we candraw on all sorts of research. We can, say,welcome what has been learned about thestructure of language while looking at how theflow of conversation may have shapedgrammar. Despite the dismissive and brutalarguments common in linguistics, he isoptimistic a new generation will build bridges.

I suspect Everett would welcome that futuretoo.

Book information



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How Language Began: The story of humanity’sgreatest inventionDaniel Everett

Profile Books

How We Talk: The inner workings of conversationN.J. Enfield

Basic Books

This article appeared in print under the headline“The amazing power of the conversationmachine”

Alun Anderson is an

editor emeritus of NewScientist

Magazine issue 3151,

published 11 November

2017

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Language: Unlocking the past's most powerful secret | New ......the same time, the advantages of communicating successfully would create new selection pressures on humans: brains evolved