The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (16 page)

In 2002 a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany showed that Rico, a Border collie, knew the meaning of hundreds of words. Not only was Rico able to go into another room and retrieve an object he had been asked for (choosing it from a selection of possibilities); he was able to infer the meaning of words he’d never heard before. For example, Rico was asked by the researchers, who used a word he didn’t know, to go and retrieve an unfamiliar item. When he went into the next room to look for it, only one object in the set of possible things to retrieve was one he had never seen before. Because Rico knew the words for all the other objects, he picked up the novel one, assuming it was what the experimenters were asking for. Rico, obviously, does not have human language. Instead he is using an ancient, more general skill that preceded language by millions of years. It’s at this level that humans and dogs communicate with each other, as with an animal like Alex, the African gray parrot.

Other animals appear to have built on the ability to make meaning from the connection between a sound and a referent, as with human words. Dolphins use echolocation clicks, “burst-pulse sounds,” and different types of whistles. “Signature whistles” are so named because it appears that dolphins name themselves.
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These beasts reproduce a distinct, individual sound that develops in their first year of life whenever they meet another dolphin. It’s always the same, and always distinct from any other dolphin’s whistle. There is even some evidence that dolphins will exchange their signature whistles when separating. In 2006 a team of researchers led by Vincent Janik at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found that wild dolphins recognized that a signature whistle referred to a particular dolphin even when its voice was completely distorted.
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Elephants also appear to use sounds like words. Katy Payne, lead researcher on the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program (now retired), and Joyce Poole, scientific director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya and another longtime elephant researcher, began an elephant dictionary study. The goal was to describe the way that individual elephants produce distinct sounds for various purposes, like greeting a fellow member of the clan they haven’t seen in a while. Dolphins and elephants don’t have words as we do, but both of these socially complex species have instead hit upon some of the same tactics to communicate.
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Chimpanzee pant hoots are another interesting wordlike call. The pant hoots are very loud cries that are most often used to communicate over distances. Their function seems at least in part to be to rally support and keep individuals in a group together. Pant hoots also differ between individuals and between different chimpanzee groups. Chimpanzees appear to be able to pick and choose which ones to use. They are somewhat like dolphin signature whistles because they seem to have an internal structure and are uttered in various situations, such as resting, feeding, and during travel and display. This suggests that chimpanzees have some ability to choose meaning, as well as use structure.

Klaus Zuberbühler and Katie Slocombe of the University of St. Andrews recently investigated the ability of chimpanzees to make humanlike reference in an experiment at Edinburgh Zoo. The researchers monitored the chimps and found that they issued distinctly different cries in response to finding different kinds of food. When the chimpanzees came across highly valued food, like bread, they made high-pitched grunts. When they came across food that was less appealing, like an apple, their grunts were low-pitched. Zuberbühler and Slocombe demonstrated not only that the chimpanzees were making distinctions in the way they vocalized about their food but that other chimpanzees seemed to understand the meaning of the different grunts. When they played recordings of the various food grunts to chimpanzees, the listeners would search for the given food in the place where it was usually found in their pen for a longer time and with more effort than in other spots where different food might be found. The chimpanzees also searched longer if the cry signaled a particularly prized piece of food.

These findings suggest that our closest relatives have built upon the sound-referent connection to communicate distinctions to one another in a similar way that we do. There is more than just genetics involved with pant hoots, as well as signature whistles, and time and more research will help tell us the ways in which these sounds and meanings resemble human words. Certainly, it looks as if the voluntary production of sounds that are meaningful to another creature is not a uniquely human ability.

Another question raised by the vervet studies is whether vervets intend in any conscious sense to communicate. Seyfarth and Cheney have carried out experiments on captive vervets in which they exposed adult females to a “predator” when they were either with a juvenile offspring or with an unrelated juvenile. The females gave many more alarm calls in the former case than in the latter. They also observed, in the field, one instance when an isolated vervet was being pursued in a tree by a leopard. The vervet gave no alarm calls, suggesting that the animals can withhold calls when no other monkey is around.

As for the interpretation of the alarm cries: the monkeys learn what each cry means only through experience. (Some researchers argue that the cries induce only an emotional, not a cognitive, response in other monkeys, and that’s why they run. But as Seyfarth and Cheney point out, the fact that the responses are obviously emotional does not rule out the possibility that information in them is interpreted as well. Wouldn’t you also feel panic if someone screamed, “Snake!”?)

The ability to interpret another’s animal utterance is so universal that even animals of different species can understand the cries that other creatures make. Seyfarth and Cheney have observed that predators that hear the alarm call of their prey often give up the hunt at the sound—they know they’ve been seen.

Said Fitch, “What I think is interesting and surprising and we didn’t know twenty years ago is that animals have an asymmetry between perception and production. This appears to be one of the key differences in being able to communicate with words and not.”

While other mammals appear to be very good at making meaning from sound-plus-reference combinations, they don’t necessarily produce new sounds in connection with new objects in the way we do. “The intuition is that if you can see something you must be able to produce a word for it,” Fitch explained, “but that’s where the data is completely clear—it’s not so. Dogs can bark, but they do not create new barks to correspond to new sounds, and chimps can scream, and they can even withhold their screams in certain contexts, but they can’t freely create new screams to correspond to new things.”

Clearly there are varied ways that ancient capacities are used by different species, but being able to both understand and produce words is one of our special talents. Over time, we have produced hundreds of thousands of words, and there is little evidence that animals naturally produce many wordlike tokens at all. Individually we learn tens of thousands of words in a lifetime, and if we want, we can make up as many as we like. Language is in constant flux, so regardless of our own individual contribution to language change, words do inevitably become altered over hundreds of years. Rico and Alex and many other animals are able to comprehend that new sounds can refer to new objects, but they are not even remotely as adept at inventing words themselves.

Human words are much more than just links between sound and reference in the world. Indeed, reference is not the half of it. A word is an arbitrary association between sound and meaning. There is nothing in the sound of a word that tells you what it means or what it does—you must learn this as a child.
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Whenever you hear a word, you know what (if anything) it refers to. You know that some words stand alone, like “hello,” “ouch,” and “yes,”
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and that others can join together to create larger words, like “heretofore” and “bedroom.”

You know that a word is a noun or a verb or another part of speech. If it’s a noun, you know how to make it plural or singular. If it’s a preposition, you understand that it relates two nouns together in space or time. If it’s a verb, you know how to render it in a handful of different tenses, and you know what nouns will make sense with it and which ones will be nonsense. You know that some verbs have to have agents, like “killed.” All of this information about a word is specific to language. Of course, you know that “table” refers to a table, and on this level learning a word and learning an object may not be dissimilar processes. But all of the information about the way a word combines with others in language is internal to the language that you learn.

You may not consider most of this consciously, but when you learned language, you internalized all of this information, and when you hear any word, you use this knowledge in the way you process it. You know all sorts of things about just the sound of the word. You know what other words will rhyme with it. You know which words start out with the same series of sounds, even though they end differently.

A child’s ability to learn many words is so completely different from anything observed in other species that many researchers propose that some neural mechanism must be especially dedicated to this acquisition of linguistic knowledge.

Beyond the basic link between an unanalyzed sound and a simple reference in the world, words are clusters of complex knowledge about sound, grammar, and meaning. Human words don’t exist by themselves. They are points in a series of intersecting systems, and when you hear or produce a word, all these systems come into play. Recent research has shown that when children acquire words, they are not just creating a multidimensional connection between different kinds of linguistic and nonlinguistic knowledge based on a platform of sound and meaning. The essential scaffold for word learning is more complicated than that. As well as a connection between two domains, such as the aural and the visual, there is a very important connection between speaking words and gesturing meaning.

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icture the house in which you grew up. Think about the rooms, the hallways, the stairs, visualize where they all are. Where was the front door? The back door? What color was the roof? Did you have wall-to-wall carpeting or were rugs spread all over the place? If you turned now and attempted to describe the house to someone nearby, it’s highly likely that you’d gesture as you spoke. In fact, even if you just imagine a person and then describe the house aloud to her, you’ll probably gesture as well. Gesture experts say that it is almost impossible to talk about space without gesturing. Gesture is spontaneous, and as integral to individual expression as it is to communication. Even though you probably won’t gesture as much if you are talking on the phone, you will still wave your arms about. Blind people gesture when they speak in the same way that seeing people do.

Gesture may be integral to human expression, but it is not uniquely human. At the Gestural Communication in Nonhuman and Human Primates conference in 2004, Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, and his associates presented a huge compilation of gestures that they had observed in monkeys, gibbons, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. Many of them had been observed at the spectacular ape exhibit at the Leipzig city zoo, where a leafy path leads to the center of a big ring. Radiating out from the central space are walks that divide all the great ape species from one another. In one section are the gorillas, sitting impassively. In another are the bonobos—only three of them, a reflection of their dwindling numbers worldwide. In the third section are the orangutans. The male sits near the viewing window looking profoundly deflated, while his orange cage mate hangs upside down from a tree stump and stretches. In the fourth section are the chimpanzees. There are more than a dozen chimps in the compound, and they make a lively community. Some recline sensuously, others fly through the air on ropes or trunks. Some busily work at boxes, inserting sticks into various holes. The exhibit is climate-controlled; it feels like a light summer day. Tomasello has a number of testing rooms installed at the zoo for his various experiments.

Gestures play a large role in primate communication, Tomasello explained, and as is the case with humans, these gestures are learned, flexible, and under voluntary control. Most primates, humans included, gesture communicatively with their right hands, suggesting that the dominance of one side of the brain for vocal and gestural communication could be as old as thirty million years. Just as with human gestures, ape gestures can involve touch, noise, or vision. Apes wait until they have the attention of another ape before making visual gestures, and often if their visual or auditory gestures are unacknowledged, they will go over to the ape they want to communicate with and make some kind of touching gesture instead. Apes also repeat gestures that don’t get the desired response. Like human gestures, ape gestures seem to be holistic: a series of gestures doesn’t break down cleanly into meaningful components. Moreover, a set of different gestures may mean just one thing, while a single gesture may be used to convey many meanings.

Tomasello and his group divide ape gestures into two types: attention getters and intention movements. Attention getters, said Tomasello, slapping the podium, do just what they say—they call attention to the ape making the gesture. Chimpanzees will hit the ground, clap their hands, and stamp their feet for this purpose. They also lay their arms on other chimps, tug on their hair, or poke them. Once the observer pays attention to the gesturing ape, said Tomasello, what is required becomes clear. To illustrate this, Tomasello showed a video of a chimpanzee who walks over to another chimp and starts jumping up and down on the spot. When the second chimp finally notices the display, the first one turns around and sits down. The message is obvious—groom me, and that’s what the second ape starts to do.

Intention movements are the beginnings of an actual movement, like a raised fist to indicate a threat in humans.

The process by which these gestures evolve in individuals, Tomasello explained, goes like this: “I’m really doing something, you come to anticipate it, I notice your anticipation so I only make the beginnings of the movement.” Male chimpanzees, for example, make a penis-offer gesture to propose sex. They sit back on their haunches and repeatedly thrust their pelvis, pushing their erect penis in the direction of another chimpanzee. “In papers we call it the penis offer,” Tomasello said. “Between ourselves, it’s called ‘dirty dancing.’”

Mimicking another intention movement, Tomasello rolled his arms over his head, like a chimp barrel-hitting a companion. The move is reminiscent of the way that humans feint at each other to make a point without actually following through. Cats and dogs make a similar movement when they raise their paws and bat them, as if they are about to strike another animal, so the gesture is not restricted to primates. “It’s typical mammalian play,” Tomasello explained. “Remember,” he said, invoking the tree of life, “it’s not a ladder; it’s a tree. It’s not a ladder; it’s a tree.”

Another gesture researcher, Joanna Blake at York University in Canada, directly compared the gestures that infants make when they are learning language with the gestures made by apes, which have a lot in common. Both apes and children make a lot of request gestures—begging for food, raising their arms to be picked up and carried—and they extend their whole hand to point. Children and apes likewise make the same gestures of protest, pushing someone away or turning away themselves while shaking their heads. They also emote in the same ways, stamping their feet, flapping their arms, and rocking, and when they want someone to do something, both take a person’s or an ape’s hand and place it on the object to be manipulated, or they proffer objects that they want someone to manipulate. Clearly there is a close family relationship between human and ape gesture, confirming that it is an ancient trait that precedes the existence of modern humans and of language.

Janette Wallis, who has been watching primates since she was an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma, is drawn to the more subtle aspects of primate communication. She used hidden cameras to capture evidence of a baboon gesture she calls the muzzle wipe—a quick pass across the bridge of the nose with the hand. The muzzle wipe typically occurs in situations in which a baboon may be nervous or conflicted for some reason. As with many human gestures, there’s no evidence that the wipe is intentional, but it’s likely that other animals read it as a signal that reveals information about the wiper.
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Wallis presented videos of the muzzle wipe at the Leipzig gesture conference. Although most early studies of baboons, she said, hardly mention the gesture, her films showed baboons doing it in captivity and in the wild. The gesture rarely lasts longer than a few seconds, so it is not easy to see, yet once Wallis told the audience what to look for, the muzzle wipe was clearly evident. Nervous baboons could be seen constantly putting their hands to their faces in difficult situations. She noted that monkeys make a similar move and that a chimpanzee will often put its wrist to its forehead in similar contexts. Could this overlooked gesture be some kind of precursor to comparable gestures in humans? asked Wallis. Humans do put their hand to their face when nervous, and indeed, as she pointed out, psychiatrists and law enforcement officials often interpret a hand-to-face gesture as evidence of uncertainty or even deception.

Once Wallis convinced the audience that the muzzle wipe existed, she showed a video of George H.W. Bush. The ex-president was speaking at a press conference about his son the president of the United States. He discussed what was at the time headline news—George W. Bush’s having been arrested in his youth on a drunk-driving charge. “Unlike some,” said the older Bush in a tone of complete confidence, “he accepts responsibility.” He then raised his hand to the bridge of his nose and scratched it.
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Only ten years ago researchers were unanimous in their agreement that pointing was unique to humans. Even now many stand by that claim. In fact, apes and many species of monkeys that are much more distantly related to humans do point as well, though they typically do so with their whole hand.
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(Scholars of gesture complain that pointing with the hand has been treated as a second-class kind of pointing, even though it is common in many human groups.) Usually, apes make this gesture only for humans, not between themselves. They point at objects and alternate their gaze between the object that is pointed at and the human they are pointing for. The animals learn how to point without explicit training, and simply pick it up from humans.

Although there is only one anecdotal report of a bonobo’s pointing with its index finger in the wild, some apes have been shown to do so in captivity. William D. Hopkins, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, and his colleague David Leavens, a professor of psychology at the University of Sussex, showed a videotape at the gesture conference of a chimpanzee pointing. In the video, Leavens is in a white lab coat and a surgical mask while a chimpanzee stands eating on the other side of a wall of wire mesh. When the ape drops some food through the mesh, it points its index finger through the wire to indicate the food and looks at Leavens, who picks it up and returns it. “I submit,” Leavens said, “that there is a well-trained primate in this video, but it is not the chimpanzee.”

At the Leipzig conference Tomasello was skeptical that apes could point and, if they did, that it actually meant anything. But he began to wonder about it and later said, “Many of the aspects of language that make it such a uniquely powerful form of human cognition and communication are already present in the humble act of pointing.”

Tomasello had already established in previous experiments that apes know what other apes are seeing, and it was clear that they gesture easily and creatively for one another. More recent experiments have shown that chimpanzees will cooperate with one another in situations where collective help is needed (in order to get food, for example), and in quite simple tasks they’ll also assist without the prospect of a reward—like picking up a dropped object and handing it to someone. While the Hopkins and Leavens video showed they are capable of pointing, why, Tomasello asked, do apes point only for humans and not one another? The answer he arrived at is both simple and far-reaching: it is because humans respond. Apes don’t point referentially for other apes, because they will be ignored.

Human children learn to point at a very young age. Tomasello and his colleagues have videotaped many instances of children spontaneously pointing in a helpful manner. In one experimental setup, a very young child was placed on her mother’s lap. Mother and child sat across a desk from a woman stapling papers together. The woman left the room for a moment, and while she was away a man entered, took the stapler, and placed it on a cupboard behind the desk. When the woman returned she made a great show of looking for the stapler. The infant watched her for a while, and then, unprompted, pointed to where the stapler had been moved so the woman could find it. In other examples, a child and adult played together until for some reason (the ball dropped, the toy fell) the game stopped. Without prompting, the child looked at the adult and pointed to the problem, clearly requesting that the game begin again. In other cases, the child pointed at an object or proffered it merely to show it to the adult in order to elicit a reaction.

Tomasello first started to consider how much this kind of shared, cooperative attention mattered at dinner in a restaurant one night. He was watching a mother and child play together. The mother blew a raspberry on the child’s arm, then the roles were reversed, and the baby followed suit. Why did it happen this way? wondered Tomasello. Why did the child reciprocate the gesture rather than simply imitating the action on himself?

The answer, he believes, is that humans are particularly cooperative in the way they communicate.
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Reciprocation is fundamental to the interactions of our species. Offering is not instinctive for humans, but is taught by parents to children, who learn it very easily. And crucially, we offer not only food and other objects but information and experiences as well. Children, says Tomasello, want you to look at what they are looking at and to emote in response. In many theories of evolution, human altruism is treated as an anomaly. But Tomasello thinks of it as an evolutionary strategy that has served us incredibly well.

Chimps don’t spontaneously point in this fashion, and Tomasello believes it is due to a fundamental difference in the balance of cooperation and competition within the species. Chimpanzees lack the set of skills and motivations that underlie our pointing. Tomasello conducted an experiment with Brian Hare, then a doctoral student, in which two barrels were set up in a room. Food was placed in one, while the other was left empty. Hare stood on one side of the barrels as a chimpanzee entered the room. In one run-through, Hare pointed helpfully at the barrel with the food in it. But, said Tomasello, the chimpanzee would look at the finger, and then look at the barrel, and then look at the other barrel, and then it would choose completely randomly between them. It did not comprehend that Hare was being helpful and telling it where the food was located. In another run-through of the experiment, the chimpanzee would come into the room, and instead of pointing to the food, Hare would reach for the barrel, as if to grab it and the food in it. The chimpanzee understood this gesture without any problem, and it would head for the appropriate barrel. The movement Hare made was essentially the same in each case—a basic arm extension—but his intention was clearly cooperative in the first instance and competitive in the second.
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Tomasello and his colleagues’ gesture work demonstrates both a continuum that connects human and ape communication and significant differences between them. In our evolutionary history some individuals must have been born with a greater inclination and ability to collaborate than our common ancestor with chimpanzees. These individuals were more successful and bred more offspring with those characteristics, Tomasello said. What we have evolved into now is a species for whom an experience means little if it’s not shared. Chimpanzees took a different path. In their communication, there is never just plain showing, where the goal is simply to share attention. While they do share and collaborate and understand different kinds of intentions, they don’t have communicative intentions. We do, said Tomasello, and it’s in this shared space that the symbolic communication of language lies.