9. Evolution of Language

Question 1

how to language and communication differ?

Answer 1

Language is different to communication. Communication is imparting information to another individual language is doing this in very specific ways.

Question 2

what does language have that communication doesn’t?

Answer 2

• Language has structure and recursivity it should be obvious that if you have a brother that they have a sister recursivity is the idea of going from one point to another and switching how you think, again brings in TOM. Language can do that and it is something that is a critical part of language.
• Intentionality- use language to intentionally communicate information to another
• Level of abstraction

Question 3

what are the three levels of abstraction?

Answer 3

Iconic

Indexical and Symbolic

Question 4

give e.g. of iconic abstraction

Answer 4

using a visual representation to communicate info (e.g. a road sign)

Question 5

give e.g. of indexical abstraction

Answer 5

e.g. waggle dance of bees where movements convey something about distance and direction to find flowers.

Question 6

give an e.g. of symbolic abstraction and what is special about it

Answer 6

writing saying ‘stop’ nothing about the shapes of words that indicates anything to do with cease of movement. This is what language can do it can communicate things in a way that has no direct baring on the things that are being communicated.

it is argued that only humans are capable of this level of abstraction

Question 7

evidence of communication in non-humans alarm calls

Answer 7

• Cheney & Seyfarth (1990)- vervet monkeys
o Alarm calls- give acoustically different alarm calls for different predators (leopards/ snakes/ eagles). If play back different calls e.g. play leopard they look down and eagle look up- they are interpreted differently and correctly by members of the species.

Question 8

evidence of communication in non-humans- food calls

Answer 8

• Slocombe and Zuberbuhler (2005)- Chimps
o Different calls depending on food found
o In Edinburgh zoo- Essentially created two ‘trees’ dropped bread at one end of a wall and apples at the other. Recorded the sounds of individuals who found bread or found apples and found that individuals produced different sounds depending on the food that they found- apples had greater volume and pitch and they were more likely to produce these calls when others were around.
o Then played back the sounds of others finding either apples or bread- if they hear grunts to the apple there was a bias to going to and spending time looking at the apple tree and if hear bread call then sig more likely to go to bread tree.
o Sounds a bit like language- isn’t language because no syntax but is being produced socially and interpreted meaningfully by individuals. Is basically proto non-language. Producing sounds that other individuals are able to then use and doing it more when others are around.

Question 9

what can we say about animals that have been ‘taught language’

Answer 9

Non-human apes can learn and use some abstract symbolic cues whether its natural behaviours (e..g apple and bread) or sign language or phonetic board. They can use it in order to communicate important info about wants and needs and alarm calls and predators but not using it in the social way that we do and learning syntaxial structure naturally as humans do. Don’t have the complex and tactical language that humans have.

Question 10

why have people argued that language/ hunting/ tool use may have driven language

Answer 10

If you have language it is easier to plan and coordinate group activities for hunting and thus increase nutritional intake of individuals.

Conventionally, language can be seen as typified by either of two utterances. “there are bison down by the lake right now” or “this is how you make a handaxe”. Both are inevitably predicated on the view that the most important information exchange problems faced by our ancestors had something to do with hunting (or even gathering). Language’s functions were thus either the exchange of ecological information or instructional.

Question 11

arguments against the fact that hunting/ tools drove language

Answer 11

• Studies of what people actually talk about both in modern industrial societies (Dunbar et al., 1997) and traditional societies (Haviland, 1991) suggest that most conversations are in fact dominated by social topics (gossip). We use instructional forms of language only occasionally and then in rather specialised contexts.
• Hunters commonly prefer to hunt in very small froups and often do so in silence (Smith, 1991)
• Teaching someone how to make an object (e.g. handaxe) is best done by demonstration rather than verbal instructions (normally just used in the sense of do you see what I’m doing)
• There appears to be little or no correlation in the archaeological record between changes in hominid brain size (on which language must ultimately depend) and changes in tool complexity (Wynn, 1988) which would be expected if the two went hand in hand.

Question 12

what did Dunbar say language evolved for?

Answer 12

Dunbar 1993, 1996: Languages principle function is a social one, irrespective of what the particular function might be.

argued that the principle function of language (and hence speech) is the exchange of social information (‘gossip’) in a broad sense and that language evolved to support cohesion within large social groups.

(focus on speech as a general capacity rather than what people specifically spoke about)

Question 13

what evidence supports Dunbar’s ideas on language?

Answer 13

1) group size correlates closely with relative neocortex size in primates as a whole, with humans seeming to fit nearly into this pattern with group sizes matching what would be expected of our cognition.
2) suggestion that Old World monkeys and apes, at least, use social grooming as the principal mechanism for bonding their groups.

Question 14

talk about grooming and bonding

Answer 14

We do not understand exactly how grooming achieves this though it seems likely that it has something to do with the fact that grooming is particularly good at releasing endogenous opiates (Keverne et al., 1989). The feelings of pleasure and contentment that seem to well over an animal as a result of being groomed may create a sense of trust and contentment in the partner and this in turn may facilitate alliance formation and the reciprocation of many other social and reproductive benefits.

Question 15

what is the issue with group size and grooming?

Answer 15

The problem, however, is that the time devoted to social grooming by Old World monkeys and apes is more or less a linear function of group size (Dunbar, 1999)
As hominid group size began to creep up above that found in the most social of the primates, so the demands on time budgets for social grooming time must have become more intense.

Question 16

how much is the max time non-human primates will spend grooming?

Answer 16

No species of non-human primate devotes more than 20% of its total daily time budget to social interaction; this in itself represents a phenomenal amount of time.

Question 17

from human group size if we were to groom how much of the day would be spent doing this?

Answer 17

Indeed, if we extrapolate grooming time to the group size of humans it would mean that they would have to spend 40-45% of their waking day grooming one another (Dunbar, 1993). Ultimately the biological demands of feeding, travel and resting mean that there will inevitably be an upper limit to the amount of time available to be devoted to social bonding.

Question 18

what do the constraints on grooming effectively mean for humans?

Answer 18

Some mechanism mush have been necessary to enable modern humans (and our hominid ancestors) to bond larger groups in the same amount of time, otherwise we simply would not be able to maintain cohesive social groups of the size that we do now. – the answer seems to be the capacity to speak.

Question 19

what supports the idea that humans replaced grooming with speaking?

Answer 19

Mean amount of time actually spent in social interaction (principally conversation) modern human societies is 20% of waking time (the upper limit observed in other primates).

Question 20

why is language more effective than grooming

Answer 20

Human language allows us to use social time more effectively to bond larger groups in at least 3 ways.
1) it allows us to interact with more individuals at the same time (increase broadcast network)
• Dunbar argued that the core problem for language was to raise the size of the bonded group up from the max seen in non-human primates to the 150 in modern humans.
• In effect, Speech allows us to engage in grooming at a distance, thus making it possible for the groomer to interact simultaneously with several other individuals at the same time.
2) allows us to acquire or exchange information that we otherwise never find out about
3) it allows us to police freeriders

Question 21

what does the social gossip hypothesis posit?

Answer 21

Language offers humans a unique mechanism for circumventing the issue of freeriding. We can seek out information on the behaviour of our friends, or others can tell us what happened whilst we were elsewhere. The exchange of information allows us to keep tabs on the dynamic state of relationships within our social network

Question 22

what does gossip allow?

Answer 22

Allows individuals not only to denounce freeriders but also to monitor ones own reputation. Can advertise own qualities. Serves a purpose both in maintaining and forming sexual and social relations.

Although knowledge via third parties is never as accurate as direct personal knowledge, there is clearly significant advantage in being able to monitor changes within a social network when you are not present.

Question 23

evidence supporting the social gossip hypothesis

Answer 23

Studies of what it is that people actually do talk about in relaxed and informal settings suggest that around 2/3rd of conversational time is devotes to social topics (Dunbar et al., 1997)

Question 24

evidence against social gossip hypothesis

Answer 24

Although policing functions seem intuitively important, content analysis of conversations suggests that at least in public venus people talk most about their own or other’s relationships and little about the social misdemeanours of others (Dunbar et al., 1997). That the policing function of language should be so rare is surprising given the apparent importance of its effet on controlling free-riders.

So maybe freeriding isn’t as much of a serious problem as suggested, or maybe that whilst policing is important it is not a daily occurrence; it may be crucial in the handful of times that it does occur, but this seems infrequent

Question 25

what overall is the issue with the social gossip hypothesis

Answer 25

Given the costs of growing and maintaining such large brains, it therefore seems illogical that such an expensive faculty could have evolved to support such a rare occurrence. Hence it seems that language may not have evolved to support a rare (albeit important) function; rather this is probably a function that became available once a) large groups were formed and b) freeriders has actually become a serious problem.

Question 26

what would have been the key issue long before freeriders?

Answer 26

Long before freeriders became an issue the bonding of large groups would have been an issue.

Question 27

what can we conclude on the social gossip hypothesis?

Answer 27

Given this, the most parsimonious conclusion is that language (in the form of social gossip) evolved to facilitate the bonding of large groups (themselves required to solve a specific ecological problem); large groups facilitates the spread of freeriders and as a result, the basic function of language as a device for exchanging information was exploits to control freeriders.

Question 28

who developed the social contract hypothesis?

Answer 28

Deacon (1977)

Question 29

what does the social contract hypothesis posit

Answer 29

in human social systems, martial units (monogampus or polygymous families) live in close association within a larger group. The problem is that, in the classic hunter-gatherer set-up in which we evolved, males who went hunting to provide meat for their females left their mates at risk of being mated by rivals; equally their own mates were exposed to the risk that their husbands might themselves mate with other females in neighbouring groups.

This Deacon (1977) argues placed intolerable strains on the relationships involved. Marriage contracts whereby mates declare to each other- and perhaps publicly to the rest of the group- their marital obligations and agree not to mate with other individuals was the solution to this problem.

Question 30

what are verbal contracts at their core?

Answer 30

symbolism -

transmute the constellation of events, feelings and intentions that make up these concerns and prohibitions about mating fidelity into abstract symbolic form, these complex living arrangements would not be possible and human social systems would fall apart as unworkable.

Question 31

what are the key issues with social contract hypothesis

Answer 31

• doesn’t give an explanation as to how large groups came about to begin with
• other species have overcome this without language
• verbal contracts are not always effective at enforcing fidelity

Question 32

talk about social contract hypothesis and lack of explanation for large groups

Answer 32

Seems plausible but does not provide us with a mechanism for bonding large groups and deacon takes the existence of these for granted. Since the contractual function of language depends on the existence of large groups, it is difficult to see how the large groups could evolve as coherent social units in the first place. Marriage contracts are not in themselves enough to bond large groups together in the face of the intense pressures that act to disperse individuals in groups (Dunbar 1988)

Question 33

example of other species overcoming issues of fidelity without language

Answer 33

Second issue with this is that other species have been able to solve the same issue without the advent of language. E.g. the little bee-eater (bird, African Savannah) (Emlen and Were, 1986). The colony consists of a number of small breeding units (essentially families) each of which has its own breeding burrow in the sandbank occupied by a large colony. Bee-eaters face the same problem as humans do because both males and females head out to feed during the day at sites far from the colony. During the breeding season the birds depend on their mates to bring back food for the young, so successful; breeding depends on the reliability of the mate and its willingness to forgo opportunities to mate with individuals elsewhere in the colony or encountered on the plains while foraging. IN addition, the females suffer high levels of harassment from other males whenever the leave or return to the roost of their own. Bee-eaters overcame these problems without language. So one wonders why our ancestors were so pressured in this respect.

Question 34

talk about verbal contracts and fidelity

Answer 34

Third issue… verbal contracts are not always effective at enforcing fidelity. Even under strict religious codes people still commit infidelity.
If fidelity really was the fundamental problem faced by our ancestors (it is likely it was a very serious problem), it is not at all obvious that language would have been the best solution. Costly courtship rituals and a more intense form of emotional bonding would seem to be a safer option. And this is surely exactly what we do see in humans: we persistently demand evidence of commitment and we engage in that deeply irrational yet irresistible behaviour known as ‘falling in love’.

Question 35

who developed the Scheherazade

effect?

Answer 35

Miller (1999, 2000)

Question 36

what does the Scheherazade effect posit?

Answer 36

suggestion is that one of the functions of language may be to enable humans to attract s and maintain the interests of mates.

Miller’s argument stems from his suggestion that the human brain is a sexually selected organ designed to support sophisticated cognitive and verbal skills as part of the mate-searching strategies peculiar to humans.

Question 37

where does the Scheherazade effect name come from

Answer 37

Like Scheherazade in Tales of Arabian Nights- Keeping our mates entertained by witty story-telling ensures that they continue to focus their interest on us. If verbal skills are honest signals of gene quality, then this has all the hallmarks of the Handicap Principle (the evolution of exaggerated traits that demonstrate superior fitness precisely because they are costly to evolve and maintain)

Question 38

what evidence supposedly supports the Scheherazade effect (dubious)

Answer 38

Evidence to support this in creations of art and lit ect of men and omen. Although, in the social sciences and humanities, such sex differences in productivity have invariably been explained in terms of men’s domination of women, Miller (1999) points out that an equally plausible explanation is that it reflects a difference in the two sexes’ interests in these forms of public display. Males have an overriding interest in displaying their competences as publicly and as widely as possible in order to attract mates, whereas women’s interests in this respect tend to be more focused on attracting specific mates.

Question 39

what does miller say humans are in terms of a species?

Answer 39

Miller’s hypothesis in effect is that humans are a lekking species in which females choose mates from a setoff males who display their genetic qualities rather in the way peacocks do through displays that are difficult to cheat precisely because they are costly and demanding.

Question 40

support for Scheherazade effect (better)

Answer 40

Males tend to outscore women in both vocab size and verbal flamboyance (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1996)- Miller interprets this as ales preoccupation with flamboyance in the mating arena.

Question 41

what is the issue of the Scheherazade effect?

Answer 41

Although Miller does not explicitly discuss group size in the context of his hypothesis, there is an implicit assumption that large social groups are already present: the hypothesis would prove most useful when there are a large number of mates to chose from, which occurs when groups are large. Hence, like the social contract hypothesis, we face the issue of trying to account for the existence of large social groups to begin with

Question 42

what is a solution to the Scheherazade effect but then again what is an issue with this?

Answer 42

One solution, is that language evolved to bond groups and that this then provided a window of opportunity that sexual selection exploited.
However, Miller presents his argument as an explicit hypothesis to the evolution of the super-large human brain and this makes it difficult to splice the two hypotheses together.

Question 43

what can be done overall to different social explanations for language?

Answer 43

A synthesis

Grounds for arguing these hypotheses are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

If we downplay the relevance of the Scheherazade effect as an explanation for the initial evolution of the large brain, then it may be possible to integrate the gossip and Scheherazade effect hypotheses into a single theory (with or without social contract hypothesis). Indeed the Scheherazade effect may remain as a key factor influencing the escalation of brain size in humans once this process has been kicked of by the need to bond large social groups.

Question 44

why may neither Scheherazade nor social gossip theories explain were large social groups came from?

Answer 44

This may be because neither author is familiar with the extensive primatological literature on group living (e.g. Dunbar 1988) the burden of this literature is that groups represent a balance between the selective advantages of group living (in most cases either protection against predators or the defence of communal resources) and the dispersive forces created by the presence of other individuals (the ecological costs of increased travel and resource competition and the reproductive costs) these costs are all the more intrusive in super-large groups characteristic of modern humans and some mechanism must exist to neutralise them, otherwise the advantages of group living would be insufficient to persuade humans to live together.

Question 45

what can we say overall about the three theories of social language?

Answer 45

Indeed all of the three theories could be correct in that they simply may represent sequential or parallel developments out of a more general form of social language designed to solve the particular problems of group bonding encountered by early humans. This solution seems most plausible given the deficits of each theory alone.

Question 46

what is there an overemphasis on in the development of lang literature?

Answer 46

Lots of focus on the speaker but the listener is not passive in this, they too have to devote huge amount of cognitive time and effort into understanding what the speaker is saying. ToM is crucial in this.

Question 47

who argued for ToM importance in speech?

Answer 47

Worden (1998) has argued that ToM may be both the most crucial and computationally most expensive part of speech

Question 48

support for ToM in speech?

Answer 48

Worden (1998)

points out that the so-called language areas in the brain (Broca’s and Wernike’s areas, long assumed to be responsible for the production of speech and meaning) are very small, especially when compared to the large volume of the frontal cortex devoted to higher cognitive function (particularly social cognition).

Question 49

what is it possible that Broca’s area does

Answer 49

It is possible that all Broca’s area really does is manage the fine control of breathing for speech production

Question 50

what is the job that needs a huge about of computing power?

Answer 50

the big job that needs a great deal of computing power is the mindreading that has to go on in order to give language any of its familiar depth. Without mindreading, conversations would be dull factual exchanges. There would not be the literature, poetry, religion that we see in humanity as we wouldn’t be able to divorce ourselves from simply our world view at a moment in time.

Question 51

what highlights the role of ToM in language comprehension?

Answer 51

The role of ToM in language comprehension is highlighted by the fact that when we speak, we rarely say exactly what we mean. Metaphor is a major component of word use during normal conversation. Without metaphor language would lose most of its richness. Most conversational exchanges consist of oblique references and half-completed phrases often with a you know what I mean at the end.
Without ToM people would mostly not know what others mean.
Typically in human conversations we sketch out the key details just enough for the listener to know what utterance is all about.

Question 52

key point to make in conclusion

Answer 52

Idea that Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny- the order in which abilities evolve over phylogenetic time is about how one capacity builds on another and a common argument has been that we see the same pattern developmentally that you have to be able to do one thing before you can elaborate on it doing it in another way. So potentially what we have got is that chimps and great apes have reached a level of abstract representation that is seen in young humans and what we then did phylogenetically just as we do developmentally is go beyond that and develop these more advanced forms of cognition.

Question 53

language and sexual selection dead poets society keating

Answer 53

“language was invented for one reason boys- to woo women- and, in that endeavour laziness will not do” Dead Poets society, Keating

Question 54

empirical findings for males using language to entertain females more than vice versa

Answer 54

Greengross and Miller (2011):
- Gave people little vignettes of something that could be funny and asked participants to generate captions for them.
- Found that men generated more captions on average than women and that these captions on average were rated as funnier
- Then looked to see if the intelligence of the individual as measured by their verbal IQ and raven’s progressive matricies predicted their capacity to produce verbal humour. And that then predicted their mating success which was indexed by self-reported number of sexual partners.
- Argued a model that IQ drives humour production which drives mating success.
- See that verbal particularly more than spatial IQ contributes to intelligence there’s then a reasonable associated between IQ and humour. But if we look at humour relating to sexual success it is actually quite small. Verbal humour predicts sexual behaviour more strongly than it does in men which isn’t quite what they were predicting. Intelligence predicts verbal humour is slightly stronger than in men than in women.
What they said in study “For the mating success factor, the final (simple) model was significant, with only the humour ability variable in the final model. Participants who had higher humour production scores were more likely to reported having more short-term uncommited sex”

Question 55

what is the issue with the study on males humour

Answer 55

But men’s mating success does not correlate with verbal IQ, ravens matrices or verbal humour. And for the women mating success does correlate with vocab IQ but not with anything else.
It is almost as if this model he argues is about men being able to show humour to men the success of this model seems to be being driven by women and not by men which seems to be the opposite to this theory.
People are potentially using humour to show their mating quality but if they are it is women not men.
Also is self reported and people do not tell truth.

Question 56

evidence that IQ is linked to mate quality?

Answer 56

• Arden et al. (2009)- found that sperm count and sperm motility were linked with IQ- those more intelligent had more and more viable sperm.
• Batty et al (2007) – more intelligent people live longer and have longer periods of good health in old age.
• Furlow et al. (1997)- People who have a higher IQ tend to have lower levels of asymmetry.

Question 57

what can we say overall about sexual selection and language

Answer 57

evidence for it is quite weak

you can’t engage in humour without having symbolic though to begin also. Language as a form of display is something that could come out of being intelligent and having language but is hard to argue that it is the driving force behind brain growth.

Question 58

why is language so important?

Answer 58

Language may be the single most important feature that distinguishes humans from other animals. This is not necessarily because language, of itself, influences the way we think and se the world, but rather because it allows us to exchange information and opinions, thereby making it possible for one individual to influence how another sees the world.
It may be essential in allowing humans to engage in some of the more advanced forms of social cognition.

Question 59

stats on humans possessing language

Answer 59

Among the 4000 or so species of mammals and 10,000- odd species of birds currently alive, we are the only species that possess true language in this sense.

Question 60

what can other species do in terms of language?

Answer 60

Other species communicate with each other, and their systems of communication may indeed be able to transmit information about the world, but none does so with the degree of sophistication seen in even the simplest human languages.

Question 61

what calls for an explanation in terms of humans and language

Answer 61

That humans are the only species to engage in such a sophisticated a form of communication calls for an explanation.

Question 62

what is not a good enough explanation for language?

Answer 62

To suggest, as some have, that language is a mere by-product of having a large brain or some kind of accidental macro-mutation is not good enough. Language and its principle modus operandi (grammar) is simply too complex a phenomenon to have evolved by pure accident.