Slashdot Mirror
Spoken Language Could Tap Into "Universal Code"
sciencehabit writes: While we know a lot about language but we know relatively little about how speech developed. Most linguists agree that a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing probably got us started, but how we decided which sounds to use for different words remains a mystery. Now, an experimental game has shown that speakers of English might use qualities like the pitch and volume of sounds to describe concepts like size and distance when they invent new words. If true, some of our modern words may have originated from so-called iconic, rather than arbitrary, expression—a finding that would overturn a key theory of language evolution.
TFA seems to imply that they had to choose one word from eighteen, so yes, 35.6% is considerably better than chance.
The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't.
Yeah, the thing is -- the actual study doesn't make any claims about anything being "universal." The only person who used the word "universal" was in the news story linked in TFS, and that person quoted in the news story was "not involved in the study."
In sum, the authors of this study don't make ANY claims that this is uncovering some sort of "universal code."
(Which, I might note, you'd be able to discover easily if Slashdot actually linked to the bloody study directly, as I did above, rather than a crappy news summary.)
Instead, the authors' conclusion is much more subtle and intended to take a "middle ground" approach beyond the two extreme positions in language formation. One extremist position (a kind of Platonic Chomskian ideal) is that meaning is universal and ultimately derived from sort of inherent connection between word and object. The other extremist position (classically associated with Saussure) is that the connection between word and object is completely arbitrary, i.e., that we can choose any name for any concept and it would all work just as well. It's hard to believe, but there are actually plenty of linguists who subscribe to something close to this latter view.
Anyhow, if you truly believe connections between words and meanings are arbitrary (in technical language, the "sign is arbitrary," that is, the connection between signifier and signified is completely determined by linguistic convention), then you run into historical problems concerning the origin of language. You make up weird myths where people went around grunting and pointing and only able to use body language for a while. But then some hominid would vocalize an arbitrary sound and point, resulting in the "arbitrary" connection between sound and meaning.
While this undoubtedly happens, I think anyone with any common sense realizes that actual language conveys a lot of subtle meaning by the SOUND of words, some of which may actually echo the sound of an actual thing, and some of which may be much more subtle, with certain phonemes (e.g., "sn" in English often equals something stealthy or something having to do with the nose), word length, etc. conveying a very general sense of meaning.
Anyhow, that's where this study comes in. The authors (who actually did more than the "charades" study which was clearly uncontrolled; read the link above) try to make a claim that meaning can be conveyed by fairly non-specific verbal cues. That means that the "sign is NOT arbitrary" requiring bootstrapping by having the hominid point at things and grunt first, but rather than language and gestural meaning can develop concurrently, with the expressiveness of possible verbal utterances (shaping the tone of a word, length of a word, etc.) able to carry associations.
In basic terms, what they're saying is quite simple: basic sounds can convey meaning, and thus it's possible to create novel meanings in new words due to associations of those sounds. This may seem to be a really obvious thing, but to people in linguistics who are wed to the "arbitrary sign" theory, it's important research. The study itself summarizes what I've said at the end:
Given the traditional linguistic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, many scholars have maintained that, in these systems, the vocal channel primarily functions to carry the arbitrary linguistic components of a message, while the visible gestural channel conveys the iconic, non-linguistic components. Stemming from this idea, some have proposed that spoken languages must have originated as iconically grounded systems of manual and other visible bodily gestures, and at some point in human history, arbitrary vocalizations w