The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (6 page)

Some of the name changes marked big shifts in ideas. For example, in the earliest theories of UG, children were born with innate, very specific rules for languages. In the principles and parameters theory, children are born with a finite set of parameters for language that their experience of a particular language then modifies. So the differences in the syntax of different languages can be reduced to this collection of settings. Overall, though the many shifts make it hard to imagine that more than a few syntacticians can really track all the distinctions between them, a vision of language has remained consistent for all this time. Chomsky emphasized repeatedly both the complex nature of language and the fact that the human brain was especially designed to acquire and to implement it. As he wrote in 1975: “A human language is a system of remarkable complexity. To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training. He can then quite effortlessly make use of an intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles to convey his thoughts and feelings to others, arousing in them novel ideas and subtle perceptions and judgments.
²⁷

Declaring the revolution over turned out to be premature, and the downturn in the fortunes of generative linguistics was merely a blip. Just a few years after Chomskyan linguistics was supposed to be over, barely anyone remembered that it had been in peril. People continued to wax superlative at the mention of Chomsky’s name, and comparisons to the great men of intellectual history kept rolling out: He was the Newton, the Einstein, of language. He was an intellectual colossus, a special kind of genius that made the merely normal geniuses look dim-witted. Not only did Chomsky’s influence reassert itself, but in 1980 Charles Hockett complained of his “eclipsing stance.” By now people didn’t just think Chomsky’s ideas were the most important thing in linguistics; they had begun to believe that nothing important had ever happened before Chomsky.

Writing about the many problems for Chomskyan theory in the 1980s that were simply ignored, the linguist and historian Peter Matthews likened the advance of generative linguistics in that period to the German army’s march across France in World War II. (After World War I, the French built a huge fortification on the French-German border called the Maginot Line. When the Germans invaded France in World War II, they basically went around the fortification by going through Belgium, and from there they entered France unimpeded.)
²⁸
Students continued to be attracted to Chomsky’s work. One way of measuring the power of an academic is to count his intellectual children, the students he influences who leave the university, get jobs on other campuses and in other countries, and continue to teach the ideas of the teacher. These students’ students become teachers and in turn influence their students. In this way, an academic lineage is created. Chomsky has been a prolific father; his heirs have gone forth and multiplied. The 1988 four-volume Cambridge survey of linguistics describes, for the most part, Chomskyan linguistics.

Says Steven Pinker, “The bulk of modern linguistic work has dealt with problems or phenomena that Chomsky noted.” Still, even though Chomsky has had a powerful influence on other sciences, they have had a notorious lack of influence on him. All theories of language evolution in the last decade, as well as most ideas about language and the brain, are usually characterized as for or against him.

It’s ironic that Chomsky, who began his career striking a blow against totalitarian ideas in the form of Skinner and who also happens to be one of the best-known radical-left figures in politics, is now himself a figure of totemic power. For decades, his name appeared in the synopses of conferences, the papers of students, and the articles of academics with all the frequency and duty that portraits of the leader appear in the classrooms of third-world dictatorships.
²⁹

How does one man inspire both blistering rage and religious devotion? There is little evidence to suggest that Chomsky has sought to create the sociological marvel that is his career. Academics who are familiar with him will—without exception—describe the way he insists that he is a minor figure with little real influence.

It is Chomsky’s legend rather than any rationale that he advanced that stifled language evolution research during the latter half of the twentieth century. His public comments on the topic have mostly been cryptic. In his book
Language and Mind
he wrote, “It is perfectly safe to attribute this development [of innate mental structure] to ‘natural selection,’ so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.”
³⁰

In the same book, Chomsky went on to wonder how many possible alternatives to transformational, generative grammar exist for an animal that evolved in the way humans did. Perhaps none exist, or only a few. If this were the case, he said, “talk about the evolution of language capacity is beside the point.”
³¹

In the 1980s Chomsky acknowledged that language must have given us some kind of evolutionary advantage but its origins were more likely to have been accidental than the result of slow evolutionary change. “We have no idea, at present,” he said, “how physical laws apply when neurons are placed in an object the size of a basketball, under the special conditions that arose during human evolution.”
³²

Certainly no one knew whether language was a function more of physics than of behavior or biology. Instead of resulting from adaptation and selection, language may have arisen as a by-product of a very complex mental machine. But at the time, few people engaged in any meaningful way with the idea. As a result, when confronted with this kind of Chomskyan koan, almost no one took the question of adaptation any further.
³³

Having stripped away all of the untidy bits of language as “performance,” Chomsky defined language as an idealized, perfect, and elegant system. The brain, on the other hand, he said, was messy. How did something so messy develop something so perfect? It was a mystery, he said, one that was, for the time being, insoluble.

If it were true that language was perfect and that it simply emerged from our highly complex mental organization, Chomsky has also said, such a development does not make much sense with what we know about physical systems. Biology just doesn’t work like that. Indeed, biological evolution is a haphazard, junkyard kind of process where traits are not intelligently designed from scratch, but rather, new tools are built over old ones. This conundrum was, in Chomsky’s view, a problem for biology, not for linguistics. “What followed in theories of language acquisition,” said A. Charles Catania, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, “was closer to creationism than any other part of psychological research.”

So, while Chomsky did publicly discuss the utility of language, whenever he mentioned evolutionary theory, it was mostly to discourage its value as a solution to the origins of language. He said, reasonably enough, that you can’t assume that all traits are selected for. In one of his most concrete statements on the topic, he wondered aloud whether a genetic mutation might have been responsible for the property of discrete infinity, which he considered fundamental to language.

As far back as 1973 critics had complained that “the notion advanced by Chomsky among others, that a language system could have come into existence suddenly, as the result of a ‘mutation,’ seems simplistic and hardly more plausible than the idea that language is a gift of the gods.”
³⁴
Yet Chomsky in no sense advanced this argument; he merely suggested it. His most damning evaluation of the idea that language was an adaptation was that it was “hard to imagine a course of selection that could have resulted in language.”

Such was his eminence that when Chomsky said things like it’s “hard to imagine,” it was taken to be a truth about the intractable nature of the problem rather than the limits of imagination. It is a testament to his rhetorical skills and the depth of his influence that a strong case could be so widely inferred from his highly qualified statements on the topic.

Against the backdrop of Chomsky’s rather pointed lack of interest, the problem of language evolution remained for most of the twentieth century the domain of the occasional crackpot and a few brilliant and determined mavericks. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh belongs to the second group. While the consensus in linguistics and most of psychology was that language was a monolithic trait that only humans possessed, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh was busy trying to teach another species how to use it.

I
t’s no exaggeration to say that Chomsky entered the academic scene with a crash, announcing his interests in such a compelling way that generations of scholars fell into lockstep with him. Yet despite his dominance, islands of research have sprung up independent of his school of thought. For the last few decades, ape language research has been one such island.

Social, affectionate, emotional, and smart, apes need other apes, just as humans need other humans. This seems obvious enough in the twenty-first century, but it is relatively recent knowledge, the fruit of painstaking observation by primatologists like Jane Goodall.
¹
The notion that human intelligence was a unique phenomenon started to break down in a very small way with the birth of primatology. The field’s findings have become so ingrained in popular consciousness that it’s now very hard to believe that as recently as fifty years ago we knew virtually nothing about apes and other primates. The years that Goodall and her colleagues spent patiently watching them in the wild yielded powerful insights, not just into the lives of other primates but also into how like them we are.

Robert Sapolsky, a longtime observer of baboons (which are in the monkey family and therefore more distantly related to humans than apes are), draws attention to the similarity of our emotional and cognitive lives in his description of a mother baboon’s mishap:

 

One day, as she leapt from one branch to another in a tree with the kid in that precarious position, he lost his grip and dropped ten feet to the ground. We various primates observing proved our close kinship, proved how we probably utilized the exact same number of synapses in our brains in watching and responding to this event, by doing exactly the same thing in unison. Five female baboons in the tree and this one human all gasped as one. And then fell silent, eyes trained on the kid. A moment passed, he righted himself, looked up in the tree at his mother, and then scampered off after some nearby friends. And as a chorus, we all started clucking to each other in relief.
²

 

The intelligence, the shared attention, and the intense sociability that Sapolsky noted cannot help but remind us of our own species. Such similarities, according to Darwin, were likely inherited from a common ancestor. Indeed, he argued that the traits we have in common with a closely related species are a matter of shared inheritance rather than independent, parallel evolution. So if we want to look at early stages of linguistic development, it makes sense to examine our tree-dwelling and generally less-inhibited cousins.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s name may not be as familiar as Noam Chomsky’s, but her place in history is assured. She is the researcher who has most successfully bridged the species gap by teaching an ape to produce and understand aspects of language. She and her colleague Duane Rumbaugh take raw material like a chimpanzee or bonobo, with its familiar neural architecture, and see to what extent they can bypass a few million years of evolution.

Before Savage-Rumbaugh began work with Kanzi, a bonobo, other ape studies had successfully taught chimpanzees to comprehend language. The problem was, as Savage-Rumbaugh pointed out, that even though creatures like Washoe could successfully use language to request food or obtain other objects of desire, they weren’t any good at taking on the other role in the communication process. For Washoe, Sarah, and Lana, the first generation of language-trained apes, wrote Savage-Rumbaugh, language was a one-way street. It only functioned as a tool for getting what they wanted; there was no listening.

One of the first and most important discoveries for ape language research (ALR) was that trying to teach language directly was not the way to go about it. ALR, which began in the 1970s, made an evolutionary leap when Savage-Rumbaugh realized that apes were best taught indirectly rather than explicitly. Savage-Rumbaugh had been trying to teach language to Kanzi’s mother, Matata, for a number of years. During this time, Kanzi had simply observed the two in their lessons. On the first day that Savage-Rumbaugh turned her attention specifically to Kanzi, he spontaneously used the picture keyboard to combine symbols and communicate to her what he wanted her to do and what he wanted to do next. Kanzi had been learning language all along. “I was in a state of disbelief,” wrote Savage-Rumbaugh.
³
(The same process applies for human children. Even though they typically receive some explicit instruction, such as leafing through a picture book with a parent and associating animals with their names, children primarily acquire language by hearing it around them and by interacting with creatures who speak.)

Thereafter, instead of being formally instructed in the value and use of a language system (imagine trying to introduce the concept of verb tense to a classroom of apes), the bonobos were raised in a language-rich environment. While Washoe had never learned a sign without being taught with hundreds and hundreds of repetitions, Kanzi, and soon another bonobo called Panbanisha, picked up words by being regularly spoken to during feeding, playing, and grooming; having symbols on the picture keyboard pointed out to them with the spoken word; and even watching television. Such activities were all that was required to outfit Kanzi and Panbanisha with some language skills.

Over many years, these two apes learned how to manipulate keyboards that contained visual images, of milk or a dog, say, instead of letters. They also learned how to comprehend spoken English, coming to understand hundreds of single words and longer constructions. (Unlike other experiments in which monkeys perform for food rewards, these apes have free access to food all day.) Kanzi and Panbanisha are able to participate in two-, three-, and four-way conversations. They can converse about objects as well as intentions and actions, and state of mind. Testing has shown that Kanzi in particular is capable of correctly understanding hundreds of sentences that he’s never heard before, sentences like “Show me the ball,” “Get me the snake picture,” and “Can I tickle your butt?”

As well as developing comprehension abilities at the level of a three-to-four-year-old child, the bonobos demonstrate creativity in their manipulation of language. They spontaneously combine single words they already know to create new words, like linking “water” and “bird” as “waterbird” to mean a duck. They’ve also been known to make up sentences in response to novel situations. The ape Sherman, who was raised in a different experiment, once rushed into his lab in order to tell the scientists inside, “Scare outdoors.” Sherman had just seen a partially anesthetized ape being carried past in a stretcher.

Still, sometimes even the cleverest primates have difficulty with comprehension. At the March 2002 Evolution of Language conference at Harvard, Heidi Lyn, who was working at the time in the Language Research Center at Georgia State University, recounted what happened the day that Savage-Rumbaugh told Kanzi to put water on a carrot. The ape threw the carrot outdoors. Thinking he had misunderstood, Savage-Rumbaugh repeated the request. In response, Kanzi pointed vigorously outside. It was raining.

Lyn is now at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she is involved in a dolphin research project. She is also writing a book that brings together the findings from all of the animal language studies. She has worked with Kanzi, with language-trained dolphins under Lou Herman in Hawaii, and with Diana Reiss in New York on a dolphin keyboard project. The earliest animal language experiments, Lyn explained in an interview, began in the 1890s, with documented cases of people raising apes in human homes, and in some instances raising them side by side with human children. It wasn’t until the 1960s through the late 1970s, however, that scientific animal language research really boomed.

The early attempts to get apes to communicate like humans were failures, primarily because researchers were trying to induce apes to talk. This focus changed when Allan and Beatrix Gardner, a husband-and-wife team at the University of Nevada in Reno, perceived that apes seemed to find gesture easier than vocal communication. The Gardners reared Washoe, a female chimpanzee, in their home, teaching her a modified version of American Sign Language. Washoe was extremely successful and learned hundreds of different symbols. She was rigorously tested again and again, and her learning stood up. In 1972 Penny Patterson, a Stanford Ph.D. in developmental psychology, began her lifelong experiments teaching sign to Koko the gorilla. Duane Rumbaugh also began to work with the chimpanzees Lana, Sherman, and Austin, seeing how well they could communicate with picture symbols, called lexigrams. There was enormous interest in this work and many interesting results, said Lyn.

In the 1970s a young academic named Herb Terrace heard about the Washoe work. He was excited by the results and wanted to replicate them, so he obtained a chimpanzee and called him Nim Chimpsky. Terrace followed the Gardners’ work closely, although he had many more people interact with Nim than had ever interacted with Washoe. Initially, it looked as if he had successfully taught Nim to use words and some syntax. But when he did a frame-by-frame video analysis, he realized that what Nim was doing was less symbolic than imitative: Nim wasn’t using language independently but instead responding to cues that Terrace or other caretakers were giving him. At the same time Terrace also did a video analysis of Washoe and Koko and concluded they, too, were being inadvertently cued by their handlers and neither thinking nor communicating. He published the results of his investigation in the journal
Science
in 1979.

The damage from Terrace’s findings was immediate and devastating. His article was picked up by the press, and a popular and scientific consensus quickly developed that the apes weren’t doing anything their caretakers hadn’t cued them to do. Funding for animal language research very rapidly dried up. The Gardners were effectively shut down, and one of their graduate students, Roger Fouts, took over and was for a long time only able to maintain but not expand the Washoe project.

From that point on, said Lyn, it became very hard to get any animal language data published. After the Nim Chimpsky publication, Lou Herman started his studies with the dolphins Akeakamai and Phoenix, using an artificial language and focusing on comprehension (his funding for the project was secured before 1979). The fact that he was concerned with comprehension, rather than production of language, was probably what saved his work, said Lyn. People found it easier to consider the possibility of animals’ understanding versus producing language. Still, Herman didn’t publish his first paper until 1984. As soon as the paper came out, he was criticized intensely for using linguistic terms like “sentence,” and “noun,” and “verb” to describe what the dolphins were doing. That response was unjustified, said Lyn. In fact, she said, Herman has the best data on syntax for any animal, anywhere. Akeakamai and Phoenix have mastered a complex grammatical system. If Herman gives the dolphins nongrammatical sentences, they will either refuse them or make grammatical sentences out of them.

A year after Terrace’s
Science
article was published, Martin Gardner reviewed a number of books about animal language training in the
New York Review of Books
. He began by tracing a direct line from crackpot claims that dolphins communicated through ESP to ape language research. His first pass at evaluating Penny Patterson’s work with Koko and the attention it received had more to do with Patterson herself than with her science. “It is not hard to understand why Penny—young, pretty, with long blond hair—has received such enormous publicity,” he wrote. “What could be more dramatic than color photographs of Beauty and the Beast, heads together, raptly chattering to one another?”

It is hard to understand how comments like Gardner’s become part of the debate: the same would never have happened had the scholar in question been, say, Chomsky, who has likely never had his physical appearance assessed in reference to his work and its public appeal or been called “Noam” in similar circumstances.

Apes might have a “feeble talent” for putting together signs in meaningful ways, but it was more likely, Gardner concluded, that ape language research amounted to little more than an unconscious collusion between a cooperative animal and a hopeful human. As he wrote: “There is no solid evidence that an ape has ever invented a composite sign by understanding its parts. In the course of several years an ape will put together signs in thousands of random ways. It would be surprising if it did not frequently hit on happy combinations that would elicit an immediate Clever Hans response.” (Clever Hans was a famous horse who could allegedly perform mathematical computation. He would indicate the answer to a problem by pawing at the ground the correct number of times. A 1907 study showed that Hans’s owner gave him subtle and unconscious cues when to stop pawing at the ground.)
⁴

Terrace did make some important contributions, explained Lyn, by pointing out that there had been no scientific controls in the studies assessing the apes’ syntactic ability. Mostly, the claims for syntax were based on naturalistic observations and had not been rigorously tested. But because Terrace found instances of cuing, the scientific community and the public decided that all of the behavior was cued. There were, in fact, numerous examples of solid, double-blind experiments, such as one where Washoe was placed alone in a room. A camera was trained on her, and pictures were flashed up on a screen before her. The chimpanzee made the signs for every object in the pictures, and because she was by herself, cuing was impossible.

Luckily for Savage-Rumbaugh, her funding had been renewed for five years just before the Terrace article appeared. She spent those years producing valuable findings. For example, Kanzi and Panbanisha have spent time with other apes in different experimental situations. For a while, they were raised with another bonobo, Tamuli. But while Kanzi and Panbanisha were exposed to language from the time they were just a few weeks old, Tamuli’s exposure began much later in life. She was initially reared by her mother, but at three and a half years of age she was allowed to accompany Kanzi and Panbanisha in their daily activities, like taking trips to the forest. Kanzi and Panbanisha’s human caretakers also spoke to Tamuli while pointing at the picture keyboard and describing their daily activities.