The paradox

The paradox

The ‘Continuity Hypothesis’

Running in the family

A linguistic approach

 

The paradox

Order in disorder is a paradox. By the second law of thermodynamics, applying to systems of all sorts from galaxies to molecules, order is naturally lost rather than gained. The law explains why saltwater and fresh water, once mixed cannot be unmixed. Mahommed, the first religious leader to think in a modern scientific way, was rightly curious about this. He paved the way for the study of mathematics, science, linguistics, and more, which continued long after his death. The answer to Mahommed’s question came more than a thousand years later, at the end of the 18th century. By this law, speech errors of all sorts should vary randomly. But they don’t. Where the natural process of language acquistion goes awry, patterns emerge in the resulting disorder. Why should this be?

The question here bears crucially on the most severe disorders, which tend to vary hugely from one to the next, which don’t fit into tidy little boxes, which are like exceptions to exceptions.

The ‘Continuity Hypothesis’

Nunes (2002) proposed an answer on the basis of a proposal originally due to Martin Atkinson (1982), then popularised by Steven Pinker (1984) under the name of ‘Continuity’. No funtionality can be postulated in acquisition which is not evidenced in competent language. I postulated a dedicated acquisition functionality. But I now reject that proposal, and propose instead that the ‘Continuity Hypothesis’ should be extended:

• By a human-specific adaptation, the evolution of language was linear and continuous from the start, imposing increasingly tight restrictions on the set of elements in play at any given moment as evolution progressed.

In support of the continuity principle as extended here, there is evidence that the first phonemes are themselves defined on constituent features. This is not to say that the first phonemes were like modern phonemes, but only that they were constituents. The evidence is from disorder. By one severe disorder, the features are treated as properties of words rather than their constituent phonemes. For instance, one child at the age of two had very little speech; but of the few words he had, he could say more with a lip articulation in the M and corresponding lip rounding in the vowel and knee with a tongue tip articulation in the N and a corresponding high front articulation in the vowel, but in me and gnaw the M and N sounds could not be pronounced.

The various patterns in children’s speech disorders are commonly grouped together as ‘processes‘.

Running in the family

In a  way that has been intensely studied for almost a century, in roughly a third of all developmental issues with speech and language, there is a closely related family member with a similar issue. On some counts the percentage of family involvement is even higher. But the effect seems to hold at least five times more often than it would if there was no significant connection. In such cases, of course, it is hard to disentangle the social and the genetic aspects. Family members have contact with one another as well as sharing some of the same DNA. But in the case of one child I was treating, half the family lived on the far side of Europe. They only got together for weddings and funerals. So there was no plausible for any social factor to play any role in a speech disorder. But exactly the same speech issue was observed in several members of the family on both sides of Europe.  On the basis of more robust statistical data, most researchers conclude that there has to be a significant genetic effect.

A linguistic approach

By my proposal here, what is characteristically happening in child speech is by misuses or over-simplifications (usually slight) of a highly evolved architecture which operates in a necessary ‘learnability space‘. The apparent order in disorder is a function of the way speech evolved.