Language and the science of man

SYMPOSIUM XI

L A N G U A G E A N D THE SCIENCE OF M A N Chairm.an: RICHARD M E I L I r University o] J~ern, Switzerland Organizer: ERIC H. LE?,'NEBERG, Harcard Medical School and Children's Hospital, Boston, USA THE EARLY DEVELOPM[NT OF L A N G U A G E MECHANISMS IN TI~.~EINDIVIDUAL LEONARD CARMICHAEL Smithsonian Institution, USA From a biological point of view, the mechanisms that make possible the intersthxmlation and response of socially effective human speech depend upon th~ growth in each individual of specialized anatomical structures, The vocal apparatus of man Las been compared to a wind instrument in which the bellows are the lungs and in which the larynx and windpipe form a reed-like instrument. The pharynx, the mouth and the nose provide resonating chambers. The embryology and later develol?ment of these structures have been studied in prenatal and postnatal life. "Ihe long period of maturation of these organs in the individual is attested by the changes that take place in voice production in the male during adolescence. In early life specific stages in this growth mus'.t be reached before the individual can prod'ace vocal patterns of airborn sound of any sort o~r respond to patterns of sound produced by himself or by others. Doro~thea McCarthy has summarized the scientific studies of the emergence of true meaningfu~ speech. The postnatal first step in this sequence is the "birth cry". In spite of nonscientific efforts tc endow this cry with Jr.eaning it must now be regarded merely as an indication that a certain level of functional maturity has been reached. In cases of difficult birth, vagitus uterinus or fetal crying has been reported. Minowski and others have noted crying in operatively removed fetuses of approximately six rnortths postinsemination age. Some components cf the mechanisms of crying .are functional at an even earlier fetal age. In operatively removed fetu.,;es between four and five months of age the opening and closing of the mouth and rhythmic chest contractions of the sort often described as Ahlfeld's ~reathing movements have been observed. Air breathing itselt has been reported in human fetuses "in fits and starts" before the sixth month. Hiuman hearing in most normal infants becomes truly effective only in the earily hours of postnatal life. The fact that the newbern baby does not 148

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hear well is probably dt~e to meclaanical factors. It has been asserted that breathing, yawning ~ 1 crying are required to open the Eustacian tube and thus allow the gelatinous liquid c,f the midcfle ear to drain out. The Lrue sense recepto~,~ of tt-c ear are ~robably functionel well before normal birth time. Respon:,e :~o loud sounds in the unborn fetuses have been reported. The visual, touch and muscle receptors r~hat play some part in fully established adult linguistic beha~ ior are all functional before birth. The Law of Anticipatory Ft~nckioa states that structures are generally sttfficiently mature anatomically to be activated by experimental mean,-at a temporal period before that at which ~hey a:'e required te play a functional role in the adaptive biological economy of the organism. This law is well illustrated in the development of the spe~:ch mechanism, The gradual maturation of vocalizing capacity observed at least during the first two postnatal years can be seen at every step to be in a continuum with prenatal maturational development. A study of these stages makes it clear that the perfection of the sensory and the neurom,~scular mechanisms that make meaningful speech possible in early postnatal life depend primarily on the maturation ot' essential brain mechanisms. T~is is true because the necessary receptors and the motor mechanisms required in such vocalizations are functional before the stage of growth is reached when full linguistic capacity can develop. These considerations su~,gest that maturation which is largely determined by heredity 1:ather than b~ learning is responsible for many of the essential changes in the early development of ',he human language mechanisms and this growth which continues for many months of postnatal life is required before the individual can acquire through his own activity the linguistic patterns chatacleristic of the adult social group into membership in which he is growini~;. A clear understanding of this linguistic maturational sequence and especially the ro!e of functional brain growth in its observed stages i,~ basic in und,:rstanding both normal and abr~ormal linguistic behavior.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE: kNIMAL CATEGORIES AND VF_RBAL ABUSE EDMUND LEACH Universit?' o] Cambridge, England

In aEy cl2,1tl~ral setting complex correspondences exist between linguistic structmes and social structure,~. The interdependences of ~,er~'-I ............. social tabo~ exemplify this. The language of obscenity falls into three categories: "'dirty wo~d,,,"

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SYMPOSIUM XI

"profanity," "animal abuse." Animal abuse implies that the rel~ ~ant animal names have. potency, animal abuse thus links ~,~ ,vim two traditional anthropological topics: animal sacrifice, totemism. It is post'~alated that such ritual values are linked with the rules concerning the killing and eating of the animals in question. The nature of food taboos in general is considered. An outline of a general theory of taboo is presented. The English language classification of animal species, more particularly familiar mammals is ~ e n examined iJa detail. It is shown how this classification implies t.hat cer~aka animals are closer to and more like man than others and that this social closeness affects the way the species is treated for purposes of killing and eating. It i,,; pointed out that the classification of animal'.s for purposes of eating parallels a classification of women with respect to k:gitimacy of sexual intercourse and marriage. It is show~ how the species which are loaded with: "taboo"~as indicated by their use in verbal abuse, .~exual euphemism,, etc.~are species which are "ambiguous" in terms of the major category system. This is in accord with the general theory of taboo outlined pre;"eus~y. In a subsidiary section of the paper which will not be read on this occasion the same kind of analysis is applied to the animal categories of Kachin, a Tibeto-Burman language. From this a strikin[gly similar pattern of tabooed and taboo-free categories emerges which suggests that a general principle may be involvet:l. In any event the anthropologist's field of interest is the structure of relationships within society, the relations ef man to man, and of ma~ to his eaviror~ment. Language provides the set of categories through which such relations are ordered and manipulated and no study of the one is possible wi:thout consideration of the other.

A BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE OF LANGUAGE ERIC H. LENNEBERG Har~rd Medical School and Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, USA A caref:al study of language, and the circumstance~ under which it is or is riot aeq~tfired, r~lakes it clear that there must be cer;:ain bio~,ogieal requirements tha'~ enable the organism to learn to unders!and a~ad to speak a natural language. Recent r~search on language acquisition in normal and in grossly retarded children has shown that there is a constant and universal sequence of stages of language development. In order to acquire (a firs0 language the organism goes through highly characteristic first stages. The description o:f these stages gives an empirical foundation to the notion of primitivity in language.

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The fact that man communicates with men is not a unique zoologies'. phenomenon. Most vertebrates have inter- and intraspecics communication systems and among mammals there is often vocal communication. However, animal communication canr~ot be ordered like a genetic tree and the phylogenetic relations among vertebrates, derived from comparative m o r p h o l o ~ ~, is not rcdected in any taxonomy of their communication behavior. Many s p e e - have evolved highly specialized communication systems, such as the honey bee, many bird species, and dolphins. Neither of these s~stcms nor a dog's or a horse's response to human commands represent primitive stages of human commtmication. The empirically determined p:timitivity of language in man is behaviorally very different from the signals that animals emit for each other. Animal communication systems are special offshoots, as is man's, and cross-species comparison mus~ be carried out with great caution. The ethological mechanism,~ of animal noises have only been studied in a very few species. We are still ignorant about the biological significance, the releasing mechanisms, and the vital fum:tions of even the most common animal noises such as those of dogs and cats. The assertion is made that all natural languages a e based on certain universal feature,; and that man is endowed with peculiar psychological. morphological, and physiological prc, pensities which are responsible for the universali:ty of such features; also the ease of language acquisition in the infant is due to biological propensities. tt is showrt that the relative uniqueness of verbal behavior follows directly from evolutionary processes and can easily be reconciled with a biological perspective of animal behavior. Some concepts of genetics are reviewed and evidence is cited that propensity for language-acquisition is an inherited trait. Empirical data are vresented which indicate that the ability to learn a natural larguage does not simply follow from a general increase in nonspecific intellectu-d endowment (i.e. is not a function of intelligence) and that it is not dependent upon either a relative or absolute minimum brain weight and vo!ume. The latter point is based on observations on nanceephalic (hirdheaded) dwarfs.

LANGUAGE AND PSYCHOIDGY GEORGE A. MILLER Harvard Univemi~., USA "1ne fonfffiar division of semiotie~ into three parts--syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics~-.-assigns all psychol~gical investigations of language to the

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SYMPOSIUM X/

domain of pragmatics. The psycholinguist deals with ~ e ways people aaquire, understand, and exploit the properties of linguis,~e systems, In a broader i~terpretation, however, it is ob,~ious that the syntactic and semantic aspects of l~nguage do not exist in a psychological vacuum; there is much of psychological interest that arises when we try to understand how the users of signs cope with their syntactic and semantic propertie.~. It is necessary, therefore, to delineate subtopics concerned with syntax and semantics within the broader field of pragmatic studies. Semantic properties have long been of interest to psychologists, of course. especially those concerned with ~erbal learning and thinking, but it is probably fair to say that until receltly most of the studies have considered word,: (or even strings of letters) more or less in isolation. WRhin the past few years, however, experimental studies involving whole sentences have become increasingly popular, until today it i~ pt,~;sible to envision a weltdefin,M area of research ou ~h¢ psychology of syntactic and semantic properties of. language. (Some of these experimental studies will be briefly described.) The fruitful formulation of problems worthy of psychologica~ ~nvestigation owes much to the recent advance,.; in the formal ch~r~tcter,~ ization of grammar and meaning. Any serious consideration of these problems quickly leads one to a linguistic property that is usually called "productivity". That ~s to say, on the basis of a finite exposure to the language, we learn to deal with-..~o understand and to p r o d u c e ~ a n infinite variety of noxel sentences who~c meanings a~3d syntax we have never encountered before. It is not easy t~ explain this property in terms of the simpler kinds of ,%R associations th::'~ psychologists have studied so intensively; the difficulty is usually ~-urmounted by assuming that the language user has learwed gencrai ~tdc~, i~ addition to specific associations. This distinction between reproductive and productive habits n~ises s,~me importar~t questions whose implications extend beyond ti~c 1;mits of psycS~o linguistics. What is the statl~s of a rule as an expkw,atory princip},~." in psychology? if a person can offer an explicit statement o¢ ~.he rt~le, they. we might reasonably assume that he can use this statemc,~t to g*~dde h~s beha'v$or accordingly. But for the vast majority of language users d~c lingui,,,tic rules are implicit and unstated. Moreover, the fact that, on ~cca~ sion, :hose rules can be violated implies that there are hnportant ps)~cho~ logical processes involved that are l~ot usually t~tken into ,~ccount i,~ ~ purely syntactic analysis of a language. Such questions can only be s.~:~dicd w;th the c~osest collaboration between linguists and psyebotogi.~, A better understanding of what it is a person knows when hc k,,~,,~,.~ ~, language must remain the central problem for psycholinguistic rcsc~ch