THE

LANGUAGE INSTINCT
Cognitive Sciences – 1st year – 2nd group
Students: Ileana Vereșteanu, Lia Zamfir, Cezarina Zorilă
 QUESTIONS

1. Is speech special? What supportive evidence is there for the speech is special
view?
2. Has vocal production been adapted for speech in humans?
3. Is phonology unique to humans?
4. Is word learning specific to human language?
5. Do we find non-recursive aspects of grammar?
6. Is language a primary adaptation for communication?
 SYNTHESIS The article from Science written by Hauser,Chomsky, and Fitch(HCF) states
Article presents us with an that the uniquely human and uniquely linguistic aspect is syntactic recursion.
opportunity to reexamine the Pinker and Jackendoff advances a position rather different from theirs,
question of what is special about namely that the language faculty, like other biological systems showing signs
language? of complex adaptive design is a system of co-adapted traits that evolved by
Analyze HCF’s recursion-only natural selection.
That the language faculty evolved in the human lineage for the
hypothesis, and conclude that it is
communication of complex propositions.
hard to sustain. Hauser,Chomsky, and Fitch(HCF) contrast this idea with their recursion-
only hypothesis.
 Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (HCF) differentiate between:
 
Aspects of language that are special to language - the “Narrow Language Faculty” or FLN - “only includes recursion
and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.”

 
And the faculty of language in its entirety, including parts that are shared with other psychological abilities - the
“Broad Language Faculty” or FLB
 
Are suggesting that recursion is the mechanism responsible for everything that distinguishes language both from other
human capacities and from the capacities of animals.

In contrast to them:
Pinker and Jackendoff suggest that ’’ FLN(narrow)—the computational mechanism of recursion—is:
- recently evolved and unique to our species
- comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to
the interfaces” (i.e. the interfaces with mechanisms of speech perception, speech production, conceptual knowledge, and
intentions)
 Recursion is proposed to be a core property of human language / Universal
Grammar

(A) self-embedding of a syntactic category, thus allowing for an infinite

number of sentences (Everett, 2005)

(B) “Merge”: effectively compositionality of any two syntactic elements

(Nevins, Pesetsky & Rodrigues, 2009): • ' “In a model with category-neutral
Merge, however, a language that lacks recursion would be considerably
more exotic. No sentence in such a language could contain more than two
words. Pirahã is manifestly not such a language.” (p. 366)

Recursion is a property of language.

So, what is Recursion?
From a Linguistics viewpoint, recursion can also be called nesting. "is a
phenomenon where a linguistic rule can be applied to the result of the
application of the same rule."

Let's see an example of this. Consider the sentence:

Alex has a red car.

An application of recursion would give:

Alex, whom you know very well, has a red car.

And then:
Alex, whom you know very well, has a red car which is parked there.
And so on
As per Hauser,Chomsky, and Fitch(HCF) we distinguish:
the conceptual, sensorimotor, and specifically linguistic aspects of the language faculty in turn.

Conceptual structure

Language expresses: mental representations in the form of conceptual structure (or, as HCF put it, outputs of the
“conceptual–intentional system”).
Some of the foundations of the human conceptual system are present in other primates, such as the major subsystems
dealing with spatial, causal, and social reasoning but other aspect of conceptual system as intuitive psychology are absent
in monkeys, and questionable or at best rudimentary in chimpanzees.
Conceptual systems like ownership, multi-part tools, fatherhood, romantic love, and most moral concepts though not yet
systematically studied in non-human primates, are obvious in human verbal interactions while being hard to discern in
any aspect of primates’ naturalistic behavior.
Speech perception
 
In regards to the speech perception studies have shown complex hallmarks of speech perception that appear early in
infancy and as well recent studies suggest that young infants, including neonates, prefer speech sounds to non-speech
sounds with similar spectral and temporal properties.
A monkey’s ability to be trained to discriminate pairs of phonemes provides little evidence that its auditory system would
be up to the task accomplished by humans.
And humans do not just make one-bit discriminations between pairs of phonemes but they can process a continuous,
information-rich stream of speech.

In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only
one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme,[1] and have distinct meanings. They are used to
demonstrate that two phones are two separate phonemes in the language.
Example: buzz / bus – the only difference is [s] vs. [z]
Speech production

Has vocal production been adapted for speech in humans?

 Hauser,Chomsky, and Fitch(HCF) argue against evolutionary adaptation for language in the human lineage.

HCF refer to a “capacity for vocal imitation” and assign it to the “broad language faculty” which subsumes non-language
specific abilities. But this is questionable. Humans are not notably talented at vocal imitation in general, only at imitating
speech sounds (and perhaps melodies). For example, most humans lack the ability (found in some birds) to convincingly
reproduce environmental sounds. Even the ability to convincingly imitate a foreign or regional accent is the exception
rather than the rule among human adults, and adults are notoriously poor at imitating the phonetics of a second language.
Thus “capacity for vocal imitation” in humans might better be described as a capacity to learn to produce speech,
contradicting the idea that grammatical recursion is the only human-specific and language-specific component of the
language faculty.

Evidence, not mentioned by HCF suggests that vocal production has been adapted for speech in humans. In comparison
with extant apes and pre-sapiens hominids, modern humans have an enlarged region of the spinal cord responsible for the
voluntary control over breathing required by speech production (MacLarnon & Hewitt, 1999).
Humans also display greater cortical control over articulation and breathing, compared with the largely subcortical
control found in other primates (Deacon, 1997).
And as Darwin noted, the innate vocal babbling of human infants is one of the clearest signs that “man has an instinctive
tendency to speak.”
 ALTERNATIVE questions

● Studying the human language faculty there are arising questions like:
● what kind of biological system it is, and how it relates to other systems in our own species
and others?
● which aspects of the faculty are learned from environmental input and which aspects arise
from the innate design of the brain?
●  
● Exemplu: To take a clear example, the fact that a canine pet is called dog in English but
chien in French is learned, but the fact that words can be learned at all hinges on the
predisposition of children to interpret the noises made by others as meaningful signals.
●  
● what parts of a person’s language ability (learned or built-in) are specific to language and
what parts belong to more general abilities?
● which aspects of the language capacity are uniquely human, and which are shared with
other groups of animals, either homologously, by inheritance from a common ancestor, or
analogously, by adaptation to a common function?
 Project Schedule
1.1.

Project Timeline
2.2.

Status Report
3.3.
ABOUT THE PROJECT

MARS NEPTUNE

Despite being red, Neptune is the farthest

Mars is a cold place planet from the Sun

JUPITER SATURN

Jupiter is a gas giant Saturn is composed

and the biggest one mostly of hydrogen
Studying the human language faculty there are arising questions like:

MERCURY JUPITER VENUS

Mercury is the closest planet Jupiter is a gas giant and the Venus has a beautiful name
to the Sun biggest planet

MARS SATURN NEPTUNE

Despite being red, Mars is a Saturn is composed mostly Neptune is the farthest
cold place of hydrogen planet from the Sun
 PROJECT SCHEDULE

JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN

PHASE 1
Jan. 1 - Feb. 28

Task 1
Jan. 1 - Jan. 31
Task 2
Feb. 1 - Mar. 31
CHECKLIST

OPTION A OPTION B OPTION C OPTION D

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

Task 4
 PROJECT TIMELINE

1 2 3 4

MERCURY MARS JUPITER VENUS

Mercury is the closest Despite being red, Jupiter is the biggest Venus has a beautiful
planet to the Sun Mars is actually a cold planet in the Solar name, but it’s terribly
place System hot
FEATURED PROJECTS

NEPTUNE VENUS
Neptune is the farthest planet Venus has a beautiful name, but
from the Sun it’s terribly hot
HCF, distinguishing the conceptual, sensorimotor, and specifically linguistic aspects of the language faculty in
turn.
A Picture Is Worth a
Thousand Words
KPI DASHBOARD

TASK 1

TASK 2

TASK 3

If you want to modify this graph, click on it, follow the link, change the
data and replace it
OUR NUMBERS

50% 25%
MARS VENUS
Despite being red, Mars Venus has a beautiful
is a cold place name

35% 65%
JUPITER NEPTUNE
Jupiter is a gas giant and Neptune is the farthest
the biggest one planet
STATUS REPORT

SCHEDULE The project schedule is on track

RESOURCING Resourcing is adequate

BUDGET Project is within budget

RISKS All project risks are under control

ISSUES Project issues need to be solved

BENEFITS Project benefits do not meet the expectations

RAID SUMMARY

RISK ASSUMPTIONS
Despite being red, Mars is a cold Mercury is the closest planet to the
place Sun

ISSUES DEPENDENCIES
Venus has a beautiful name, but it’s Jupiter is the biggest planet in the
terribly hot Solar System
 WHERE WE ARE WHERE WE WANT TO BE
Venus has a beautiful name, but it’s very Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun
hot and the smallest one
BUDGET

MARS
Despite being red, Mars
is a cold place

VENUS
Venus has a beautiful
name

If you want to modify this graph, click on it, follow the link, change the
data and replace it
SNEAK PEEK

Neptune is the farthest planet in the

Solar System. It’s the fourth-largest
by diameter and the densest
 UPCOMING
EVENTS
MARS
14
Despite being red, Mars
FEB
is actually a cold place

VENUS
23
Venus has a beautiful APR
name, but it’s terribly hot
 PLACES WHERE WE ARE

Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
THANKS
Do you have any questions?
[email protected]
+91 620 421 838
yourcompany.com

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