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Language and the Mind

Feb 24, 20245 min read

Language and the Mind

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Show notes > Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of our ideas about the formation of language. The psychologist George Miller worked out that in English there are potentially a hundred million trillion sentences of twenty words in length - that’s a hundred times the number of seconds since the birth of the universe. “Language”, as Chomsky put it, “makes infinite use of finite media”. “Language”, as Steven Pinker puts it, “comes so naturally to us that it’s easy to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is”. “All over the world”, he writes, “members of our species spend a good part of their lives fashioning their breath into hisses and hums and squeaks and pops and are listening to others do the same”. Jean Jacques Rousseau once said that we differ from the animal kingdom in two main ways - the use of language and the prohibition of incest. Language and our ability to learn it has been held up traditionally as our species’ most remarkable achievement, marking us apart from the animals. But in the 20th century, our ideas about how language is formed are being radically challenged and altered. With Dr Jonathan Miller, medical doctor, performer, broadcaster, author and film and opera director; Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California.

Episode AI notes

  1. Language acquisition requires analyzing language into recombining units for expressing new ideas
  2. Brain is optimized to extract words and grammatical rules from parental speech
  3. 6,000 languages globally follow a universal design
  4. Language in modern humans may have originated from ancestral calls related to fear or affiliation
  5. Brain regions controlling vocalizations in humans and animals differ
  6. Efforts to teach primates articulate speech have been unsuccessful
  7. Specific mechanism responsible for language in the brain remains mysterious

Snips

[02:52] Stephen Pinker on the Innateness of Language

🎧 Play snip - 2min️ (01:21 - 02:57)

✨ Summary

Language acquisition involves analyzing language units to express new ideas rather than just memorizing. Children listen for patterns like nouns and verbs to understand language. The brain develops circuitry optimized for extracting language rules from parental speech. The universal design of languages worldwide suggests a common innate plan for language structure.

📚 Transcript

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Speaker 3

Stephen Pinker, you claim that language is innate. Let's start with a basic building block, like your colleague at MIT, and Chomsky. How do you prove that it is innate?

Speaker 1

You have to establish it with many different kinds of evidence, because there isn't any single discovery that establishes it completely. For starters, one has to ask how particular languages are learned. Obviously, no individual language can be innate. English isn't innate. Japanese isn't innate. Nonetheless, in order for the child to acquire English or Japanese, they can't just repeat back sentences like a parrot. They have to analyze it into units that they can then recombine to express brand new ideas. And I think any attempt to simulate language acquisition, say as a computer program or as a mathematical model, always has to build in at least some assumptions about what are the units In language worth paying attention to. And that's how the child gets off the ground by listening to speech and looking for things like nouns and verbs and subjects and objects as the pattern's worth paying attention to.

Speaker 3

You're saying language is part of what we have, just as we have something in the brain which makes the muscles work. We have something in the brain which makes language work.

Speaker 1

That's right. I think there's the brain develops circuitry that's optimized for extracting words and grammatical rules from parental speech. I think you also see evidence for it in the universal design of language that the 6,000 languages spoken across the planet aren't just any old computational systems but they're built According to a common plan.

[09:26] The Origin of Language and Vocal Communication in Humans

🎧 Play snip - 1min️ (07:58 - 09:01)

✨ Summary

The concept that language is innate in modern humans does not conflict with the idea that it originated from the evolutionary ancestors. The origins of language could have stemmed from primitive calls related to fear, warning, and affiliation. Research indicates that animal calls and human articulate speech are controlled by distinct brain regions. Efforts to teach primates vocal communication have been unsuccessful. Despite the assumption that language evolved from primitive sounds, they are not linked in the modern human brain.

📚 Transcript

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Speaker 3

Is there any reason why that could not have been the start of it, rather than it being this word innate, which is a beguiling, almost magical word, almost sort of divine word?

Speaker 1

Well, those two ideas aren't incompatible because even if it's innate in modern homo sapiens, it must have had some kind of origin in our evolutionary ancestors, and that origin could Have been a conversion of calls such as for fear or warning and affiliation and so on. We certainly know now that the calls and equivalence of animal calls that we still have, moaning, sighing, laughing, shouting in pain and so on, are controlled by different parts of The brain than the ones that control voluntary articulate speech, and that even, that attempts to get primates to communicate have been quite unsuccessful in getting them to control The vocal apparatus. So it's reason to, at least be puzzled as to what the origin is, the obvious thing would be that language would come out of these calls and grunts, but they seem to be to have nothing to do With one another, at least in the modern human brain.

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