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.

Comments

TSA-Speak!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing

That exactly describes how the TSA agent communicated with me, as he instructed me to walk into the ball fryer scanner in the Philadelphia airport a while back.

Doubt there's much universal here...

[NicBenjamin]

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. There's some small things (many words for mother start with 'm'), but after years of research Chomsky's got a tiny and ever-shrinking list of large universal things. What seems to be going on is that a big part of what we use language for is identifying group membership (ie: ebonics, in the UK you can frequently identify both someone's home county and their class from their accent, etc.), which means that almost anything goes.

This particular study is somewhat interesting, they put a bunch of college students in a room and had them make up new words for for concepts like big vs. small, and their partners were able to guess whether it was big or small at greater then 50%. It does not say how much greater. They were also able to find some commonalities in the new words vs. their opposites. Then they repeated with Mandarin-speakers in China, and got a slightly different set of commonalities.

So I suspect that non-verbal cues had a part to play, and they'll have a devil of a time proving that their vague commonalities between big vs. small were not simply a reflection of English usage.

Re:Doubt there's much universal here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a point of order: ebonics refers to black language, or is abused to mean the study of black culture (ebony + ics). It doesn't relate to group membership of just any group, particularly not pasty white British people :)

Also, your theory that group membership determination is anything but an accidental feature of language is fairly weak, I'm not sure Chomsky has ever claimed anything like that? The reason it does so can easily be pinned on co-evolution in separated communities before the invention of rapid transit, same as the evolution of any things that are isolated from each other (e.g. Darwin's study).

BTW the Indo-European thing is still a fairly huge mystery. Many languages do indeed share a common root, and it's not "some small things". But it's not, as you say, universal, and this universality hypothesis is also pretty weak.

Re:Doubt there's much universal here...

[AthanasiusKircher]

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

Movements and grunts?

[Viol8]

"Most linguists agree that a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing probably got us started"

Presumably these linquists work at universities and are simply observing students on a sunday morning after a night out.

Ob

[Hognoxious]

Article is a glorty kleed of pweb. Summary is blonty, unwerreled and in parts totally baylous.

Language is a mystery, Tom said mysteriously

[TheRealHocusLocus]

We gathered in a large conference room lit with fluorescent lights. You know, the kind that always has one light in the corner flickering, and it seems to draw your whole attention. Fidgeting in chairs, a rustle of paper, forms to fill out, name and gender blah blah and it's like --- hello! --- we're broke and we're 'day labor' students just selling our blood and our souls and bodies for research for a quick buck, and we've got to move on to the next indignity! The ad on the website said 'sociological research project' so we were reasonably sure there would be no picking and prodding.

It was bizarre even for us lab rats. The organizers seemed to be conducting a game of 'charades' and broke us into groups, assigning words printed on cards like up, down, rough and stuff. We were supposed to invent new words for these things and try to communicate them to the others with a combination of vocalizations (yes they used the silly term, it sounds ridiculous when you 'vocalize' it don't you think?) and gestures and (as it turns out) giggles and nervous smiles.

This went on for a couple of hours, they kept re-forming the groups and repeating the experiment, scoring the success of our guesses as to which test word was being used... it was fun. I noted early on that the more attracted you are to the the person doing the charade, the more likely you were to guess the correct answer. I wonder if the researchers noted this and I used it as a pickup line, leaning close to this foxy lady and whispering, "Do you think they've controlled for the fact that your voice sounds so sexy when you make that low rumble in your throat that means, 'rough'?" Of course, I used her made-up word, which sounded like 'blaaaargh' Her laugh was surprised and sudden, and if they had a card that said promise it would have lit up the board. With a nod offered her my number on a card, and she wrote hers. Promise indeed.

As we passed behind the conference table between each round to be assigned new groups with one of the 'test words' I glanced at the laptop computers. It seemed they were recording the sounds we made and plotted them out in some sort of dot-language. So this is some kind of language research, I guessed, to examine the brain wiring of money-hungry research lab rats. Then a real lunch (not just donuts and coffee, what a surprise!) and the final round began.

The last round was one-to-all where each person got up in front and charaded the whole room. By now we realized there were only a few words being tested and we had gotten pretty good at guessing which one. I had taken a seat next to blaaaargh-girl and touched her knee briefly as I sat. She had smiled. Life is good. When she was called up to charade the room I muttered 'blaaargh' and she giggled.

She stood at the front of the room and took the card which indicated which 'primordial' word she was to communicate. Her eyes widened for a moment, and I'd swear her eyes darted from side to side, as if scanning for some adversary. It was a bit odd and no one else seemed to pick up on it, but it was clearly... fear? I guess she and I were so in tune at that moment I felt what ever she was feeling. I felt a sudden tingle in my spine and my heart raced. What was written on that card? She seemed to gather herself and faced the group. There was a certain helplessness in her expression, as if she was being compelled to do something. I felt a surge of protective instinct and was rising from my seat... as

She flung her arms wide, spun her head until the long straight hair swung around and for a moment, wrapped around her face. The flickering light finally gave up and the room dimmed a little. She took a long intake of breath and shouted, long and shrill,

"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

The lights went out. The Universe became noise and chaos. I felt as if I was falling.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifte