The faculty of language: what's special about it?

Abstract

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is "perfect," non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for 0022-2860/$ -see front matter q

The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s special about it?

“…In the case of language it is not hard to imagine selectional pressures that put a premium on expressive, precise, and rapid communication and therefore favored populations with a richer narrow language capacity. To be sure, what one finds easy to imagine is not always correct, and there is considerable dispute in the literature about the existence and richness of a narrow language capacity and the succession of events behind its evolution (compare Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002with Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005; for example). But whatever one may imagine about language, by comparison we find far less compelling the imaginable pressures that would favor the evolution of a narrow musical capacity (not that the literature lacks hypotheses, e.g., Cross, 2003;Huron, 2003; many papers in Wallin, Merker, & Brown, 2000).…”

“…And so are the principles for understanding melodies in terms of pitch reductions. Moreover, although recursion of some sort or another is widespread among human cognitive systems (Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005), the kind of recursion appearing in pitch reductions seems to be special to music. In particular, there is no structure like it in linguistic syntax.…”

Distinct morphological processing of recently learned compound words: An ERP study

“…Hauser et al, 2002;Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005). (1997) people add about a thousand word forms per year.…”

Topic-openendedness: Why recursion is overrated

“…I propose that a central factor is the flexibility of the symbols that make up language, the words. Our ability to create and use symbols is at the heart of our special linguistic ability (Deacon, 1997, Bickerton, 2009 signals that are associated with (or represent) a concept (Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005), are crucial for using language to refer to entities of various kinds (humans, animals, objects), actions, states, emotions, abstract concepts and more. The ability to create new words, employed constantly and incessantly by language users, is the basis for our capacity to apply language to novel situations.…”