
Hola, Gallileo
One of the two most complex systems known to science
The other being matter and the universe. It seems to be no coincidence that Gallileo, as one of the first modern scientists of the then known universe, was also one of the first to recognise what an extraordinary thing human language is.
Despite the complexity, speech and language are effortlessly acquired by the overwhelming majority of children without any external intervention in the form of overt teaching in about ten years. There seems to be a highly evolved faculty which allows humans to reliably navigate the necesary pathway from random experiences. On this fragile basis, the child constructs an extraordinarily intricate grammar. By the biolinguistic assumptions here, this capacity has to be specified as part of the human genome. But any capacity specified by the genome can be misspecified to any degree.
This pathway would not be navigable unless speech and language were built as hierarchical structures, with syllables built from different sorts of speech sound or ‘phoneme’, both consonants and vowels, from what are now known as ‘features’. The syllable combine with each other to form structures known as ‘feet’. Feet and parts of feet combine to form words. Words combine form phrases. Phrases combine to form sentences. These are the elements of grammar.
By a point originally due to William Holder (arguably the first speech and language therapist) in 1669, the features are thus a minimal defining property, not phonemes, as sometimes suggested.
All languages define their grammar on phrases, rather than words. So in English we say “the rightful head of the commonwealth’s responsibilities” with the ‘S at the end of the phrase the rightful head of the commonwealth rather than after the word head.
By these aspects of the widely agreed framework here, the contrasts are universal, between vowels and consonants, between pronounced and unpronounced structure, between content and non-content words and elements like yes and no which are neither one nor the other, but vestiges of a system, by the proposal here, predating grammar. This primordial system may have been defined exclusively on discourse, rather than any more abstract system. But the way grammatical elements are organised varies from language to language, and thus have to be learnt along with the words. And children can have problems with any one or more of these elements.
The babel of languages
One thing that is seemingly obvious about languages is how different they all are – especially to any adult trying to learn a new language, unrelated to the language(s) they already know. Reflecting a general consensus at the time on this point, Martin Joos (1957) propounded that “languages can differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways”. It might seem that it is this apparently limitless variability in language which gives some children the problems they evidently have. But the same year Noam Chomsky (1957) made an exactly opposite proposal, intrinsically stronger because it is falsifiable. So it is the weaker claim by Joos which needs defending, if indeed it can be defended against the now substantial evidence that there are significant language universals.
Two questions naturally arise:
- What defines the Faculty of Language or FL?
- How did humans evolve the capacity to learn FL in the way they plainly do, implicitly solving the logical problem of language acquisition?
The biolinguistics assumed here directly descends from Chomsky’s 1957 proposal, successively modified over the years in the light of different sorts of evidence. So it now makes sense to speak of what Noam Chomsky (1995) calls ‘Computation for Human Language’.
Even in severe disorder, like speech disorders in which the speaker is almost entirely incomprehensible even to the speaker’s parents, the hierarchy still holds. Obviously this has to be scrutinised, case by case. But with a narrowly defined hierarchy of structures, binary branching structures, scrutiny is possible, at least in principle.
But by the proposal here, there was never any inevitability. Evolution happens by small steps which happen to contribute to the organism’s survival to the point of reproduction. And in the case of speech and language, these small steps took the form they did partly because they were useful for communication and partly because they were formatted in such a way that they could be encoded by the genome. The evolutionary history could have been quite different. As artificial languages have been developed for particular purposes, in all cases very narrowly defined, to express principles of logic, to facilitate financial accounts, to teach basic programming, they have taken quite different characters. Given that there is evidence that some cetaceans identify particular members of the pod by uniquely identifying call signs, it would be unsurprising if the same thing had happened in human speech and language evolution. Plainly, this referential property was and is important. All human languages have nouns. But this property of referentiality, expressed in the category of nouns, could have become the central defining property of grammatical structure. By such a grammar, all words could vary only in their degree of referentiality. The simple command “Go” would be either totally non-referential or uninterpretable. Human language happened not to follow this particular direction. But it could have done.
A language with a grammar defined exclusively on degrees of referentiality would fall outside the terms of the proposal here. It would not be a possible human language. But it does seem possible to me in principle that a child might consider such an analysis of his or her target language. Such an analysis would not get the child very far. It would not parse even the simplest sentence. But a child could make this profound, though very unlikely, mistake.
Or the child could make any correspondingly profound mistake such as trying to analyse the whole of language on the basis of one of its components, such as topicalisation, as by “Snails, I absolutely refuse to even try” where snails is a topic and the rest of the structure is a comment, or the marking of respect on the one hand and familiarity on the other in accordingly different pronouns for you, or the definition of time-scale or evidentiality, or any of the other semantically and pragmatically crucial properties expressed in various ways in the grammar of English and many other languages. But none of these properties are universal. Rather they are part of an apparatus by which they can be expressed in a number of language-specific ways.
With any child. with any degree of impairment in speech or language, it is a matter of investigation whether the impairment falls outside the terms of the universal hierarchy. For some linguists this may seem like an impossibility. But it seems to me that it should not be disallowed in principle, no matter how rare and unlikely it may happen to be.
For children
At first the complexity may be quite daunting for the child. But gradually over the first ten or so years of life, the child learns to talk, and if he or she goes to school, learns to read and write. At least most children do. But some have difficulties of one sort or another. These are what I refer to here as issues of ‘learnability‘. The normal acquisition process continues until the child reaches puberty. And then it gradually stops. Remarkably, in a way quite unlike other areas of human skill, in art, music, sport, learnability with respect to speech and language is finite. So we can speak of a speech defect or a foreign accent. If learnability was not finite, these terms would be meaningless.
There is a crucial distinction here between delay and disorder. In principle there is natural pathway of acquisition. First children can say one word, then two. Children’s first syllables are mostly built from single vowels or consonants. Then they start to string the consonants together at the beginnings and ends of words in words like black, blue and vest, and to assemble syllables into more complex structures, as in names like Damian and Deborah, and words like yellow and soldier. Obviously, this pathway is not a simple thing. Just as children start to walk at different ages, so it is with talking. So one five year old may be saying soldier in the adult way (and this is the only word in English with this sequence of sounds in the middle), and another may be saying it as SHOULDER, with the right edge of the J sound in the middle of the word hopping left into the first sound. This may be still happening at seven or eight. If there are a lot of seemingly simple words similarly mispronounced at this age, the development of the pronunciation patterns would seem to be at least delayed. The child is late in navigating at least this part of the pathway.
There are various factors which can obstruct the natural tempo here. Some children have little or no opportunity to discuss with an adult whatever happens to interest them. Or they may never see a children’s book. But there is also the sense of family security. In the limit, it may be dangerous to go outside the front door. A four year old in this kind of situation once said to me sadly, but accurately: “We all be in a jail”. Such insecurity can massivlely delay speech and language.
This contrasts with disorder. If a five year old is saying soldier as HOHWOOV, his or her speech may be almost or completely incomprehensible. Such speech is clearly disordered. The development is not following the normal pathway. Such a child needs professional help.
If the development is just delayed, as the delay increases, so does the case for intervention. Only one word at two is just late. Only one word at three is significantly abnormal.
But the distinction between delay and disorder is fuzzy. As the degree of either increases, so does the possibility that the issue will not resolve spontaneously. Some individuals go through life with speech and language issues. If the issues are severe, they are mostly made aware of this, by failing exams, by not getting jobs, or just by self-awareness. For the speech and language clinician, the goal is to try and prevent any such outcome.
Developmentally
The child learning English has to work out that there is a difference between a word, with a rhythmic series of feet, and syllables within the feet, and the domain over which stress is computed, consisting of a vowel, and one or two syllables to the right. Crucially the consonant or consonants before the stress domain have nothing to do with the stress. And there may be a whole syllable before this which is not counted either. The complexity here is easily missed. Hence banana as NAHNA or BAHNA, and later on monopoly as OPOLI or NOPOLI.
But signficantly the opposite seems to be unattested. Children learning English seem to have little difficulty learning the right-to-left the direction of what is known as the ‘scansion’. We do not hear children saying banana as BANAH, 0r monopoly as MONOPOL – leaving out the final syllable or final vowel. There may be a child doing this, but I have yet to come across or hear of one. In modern Scottish Gaelic and many other languages, stress is computed from left to right. The direction of the scansion is something which has to be learnt – within the learnability space.
No privileged information
By the tradition assumed here, human language is universal, a single system. Although most speech sounds in most languages fit into a recognisable common schema of features, a more complete schema represents an ongoing challenge. Morris Halle (1995) reversioned the feature set from his 1968 work with Noam Chomsky with this consideration in mind . But one of the greatest challenges is represented by phonemes characteristic of many African languages and some Asian languages in which the airstream is simultaneously stopped at two points. Although this does not happen in English, such an articulation is sometimes heard from children with no obvious contact with any relevant language when they try to say the word monopoly with a double articulation instead of the P – as MONOKPOLI. Various analyses are possible. But the mere fact that such forms are heard is robust evidence for a universal analysis of the feature system and for applying such a system in speech pathology. The fact that this is not part of English should not, in my view, be an impediment.
In the case of words like me and no, beginning with what are known as ‘nasal stops, the first articulation is to open a flap known as the ‘velopharyjngeal sphinter’ at the back of the mouth and close the mouth – with the lips for M and with the tongue tip for N – allowing the airstream to resonate in the open chamber of the nose and the closed chamber of the mouth as the tongue and the vocal chords are positioned for the vowel.
The sphincter can be felt by running the thumb backwards along the roof of the mouth until it becomes soft and squidgy. The sphincter is effectively a valve.
As an English vowel is articulated, the sphincter is closed. In words like me and no, the sphincter is not completely closed when the vowel articulation starts. In words like own and aim, this sequence is reversed, with the sphincter starting to open while the vowels are being ariculated. In words like name and main and gnomeand moan, the sphincter barely closes between the articulation of the iniitial and final consonants. The two vowels are heavily nasalised as a result, though English speakers hardly notice this. In none of these cases is there are clear point at which the consonant ends and the vowel begins, or the other way round.
There is a different sort of variation with respect to the action of the tongue tip. Russian contrasts phonemes equivalent to T and D in Tomsk and Don, but with the tongue tip contacting the roof of the mouth significantly further forward than in Western European languages.
There is a treatment method, known as PROMPT, for Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets, which focuses on the physical aspects of speech production by movements of the lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx). PROMPT assumes that there are single targets in each case which the therapist tries to get the child to implement by touching or presssing on the appropriate part of the face. But this ignores the natural variation across the speech of competent speakers, including phoneticians.
Novelty
The novelty of the framework here, largely thanks to the work of Noam Chomsky, is in the reasoning which gives a critical role to the contrast between what is generated and what is not generated, each as important as the other, in a way parallel to the contrast between zero and one in mathematics.
Leaving things unsaid
For example, all languages allow elements to go unpronounced, first evidenced by first language learners of English in the first one-word answers to questions with who, what, or where, as by “Pocket” as an answer to the question “Where’s your pencil?” These unpronounced elements are critical for the way these sentences are understood.
Humans have thus evolved a mental structure which makes it possible for learners, even small learners, to ‘understand’ elements which are not where they are pronounced.
By the proposal of Shigeru Miyagawa (2010), aspects of both of these seemingly universal phenomena are at the dictates of discourse, and thus such that they could have evolved to be the way they are. That does not alter the fact that there is a significant learnability issue here. If one term in a genomic Universal Grammar is disrupted there may be wide-ranging negative consequences for language development.
Everett’s counter claim
There is a claim by Daniel Everett (2005) that he has found a language, Pirahã, which does not offer this infinite capacity. There are less than a thousand of the Pirahã, living on a remote tributary of the Amazon. Until Everett found them, the Pirahã had taken good care to remain uncontacted. But Everett’s claims are shown to be wanting by Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues (2007). And the notion of univerality is simpler than the claim of near universality with one exception. I adopt the simpler claim here, rather than the more complex claim by Everett.
Other human exceptionalities
Speech and language are not the only capacities which separate humans from non-humans. Humans can interpret a line enclosing an area as the shape of the face or the body, a straight line as a limb or a finger, a curved line as a fissure or a mouth, a dot as a feature within the face or sn eye – or the same idea drawn in the air with a finger. Humans can sing and dance, devise rules for competitive sports and play them, reason logically and mathematically, invent, design and manufacture new sorts of tools. Even the simplest stone tool involves a special sort of cognition not involved in stripping buds off twigs or any non-human tool-making, involving the computation of at least one angle inside the flint. In all of these domains, there are wide variations of skill. All of these skills take skilled instruction and years to learn to any high level.
Not behaviour
Although practise and familiarity are obviously relevant, by the framework here, speech and language are plainly not behaviour in the ordinary sense of this word.