Roughly 7,000 languages are used around the world, and many
thousands more have cycled in and out of existence throughout human
history. Where did these languages come from, and how did our ancestors
create the very first ones? One basic unanswered question is whether
the first languages began
as gestures, like modern-day signed languages of the deaf, or
as
vocalizations, like most extant human languages, which are spoken.
Unfortunately for scientists interested in these questions,
languages don’t leave fossils. So instead, experimental psychologists
like me try to understand how language evolved by conducting communication
studies with modern human beings.
Recently, my colleagues
and I ran a series of experiments to examine how effectively
people are able to communicate vocally without the use of speech.
Can they use vocalizations to express their thoughts, without using
words – and what can their efforts tell us about how the very first
languages may have arisen?
‘Iconic’ clues from signed languages' recent roots
Estimates of when
the first spoken languages arose are highly uncertain, spanning
tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago or more.
They are far too ancient for us to detect any evidence of an original
“proto” language in what people speak today.
However, signed languages may offer a clue. These gestural languages
created by the deaf typically have much more recent roots, being
on the order of just tens or hundreds of years old.
What they find is that people in these circumstances first invent
“iconic” gestures – that is, gestures that somehow depict or
enact their meaning. For instance, think of scribbling your signature
in the air to ask the server for the bill at a restaurant, or pointing
and tracing a route to give someone directions. These gestures show
what you are trying to express.
Iconic gestures, which can be understood even when communicators
lack a common language, can then be molded into a system of signs
and grammatical rules that are shared between members of a community.
Over time and generations, they can develop into a fully complex
and expressive language.
Can voices make the same leap?
But can this same process work with the vocalizations of speech?
Can people similarly use their voice to depict their meaning and
bootstrap the creation of a spoken language without gestures?
On the face of it, many scholars have argued “no.” They reason
that it is much easier to show a concept with a visible gesture
than to represent it with some kind of noise. This intuition is
illustrated
by an example from psychologist Michael Tomasello – trying to
request Parmesan in an Italian restaurant by twiddling your fingers
over your pasta as if sprinkling grated cheese. But what kind of
vocalization would you produce to express this?
When a representation of some four-dimensional hunk of life
has to be compressed into the single dimension of speech, most
iconicity is necessarily squeezed out. In one-dimensional projection,
an elephant is indistinguishable from a woodshed.
Was Hockett right about the limited potential for people to
create iconic vocalizations? To what extent can people create vocalizations
with acoustic properties that somehow resemble their meaning in
the same way they are able to create iconic gestures that do?
Creating new ‘words’ in the lab
Of course, our research participants come to the lab already
knowing a spoken language – this is unavoidable. Yet, we have found
that just by asking people to vocalize without speaking, we are
able to learn a lot about their ability to communicate with iconic
vocalizations, and also about their ability to use these vocalizations
to create simple systems of vocal “words.”
For example, in our most recent study, published
in the journal Royal Society Open Science, we asked university students
to communicate with each other in a 10-round game of vocal charades.
Their task was to communicate a set of various meanings – such as
smooth, slow, big, up or down – to their partner with vocalizations,
without using words.
We found that participants shared similar ideas of how certain
properties of their voice – such as pitch, loudness, timbre and
duration – translated to particular meanings. With few exceptions,
each meaning was expressed with characteristic properties that distinguished
it from each other meaning.
For example, vocalizations meant to convey “rough” were aperiodic
and noisy.
A vocalization for ‘rough.’
Marcus Perlman,
CC
BY17.2 KB(download)
“Fast” was conveyed with high-pitched and loud sounds.
Would you guess this vocalization
stands for ‘fast?’ Marcus
Perlman, CC
BY12.7 KB(download)
And “small” with high-pitched and soft sounds.
Does it sound teeny tiny to
you? Marcus Perlman,
CC
BY10.6 KB(download)
The fact that people consistently made vocalizations with particular
acoustic properties for each particular meaning suggests that the
vocalizations were iconic, somehow depicting or resembling their
meaning. (We were also able to show that the vocalizations did not
resemble the acoustic properties of the actual spoken words to which
they referred; participants truly were generating vocalizations
that were independent from their knowledge of English words.)
So participants were able to create iconic vocalizations that
in some way embodied their meanings for a range of concepts.
Putting it all together
Were participants able to take the next step and mold these
vocalizations into more language-like symbols? To answer this question,
we examined what happened to vocalizations and partners’ ability
to understand them over the course of the game.
Over the 10 rounds, the vocalizations participants produced
became more and more word-like. What began as highly variable, improvised
vocalizations became shorter and more stable in form as participants
repeated the interaction across rounds. At the same time, their
vocalizations became more readily understandable, with partners
guessing their meaning faster and with greater accuracy. Thus, it
appeared that participants were using iconic vocalizations to establish
an initial understanding between each other, and then with repetition,
they were turning these vocalizations into more efficient symbols
– not unlike words.
We then asked whether third-party listeners who had not participated
in the charades game would be able to guess the meanings of the
vocalizations. If so, it would bolster the argument that they were
iconic and understandable without prior convention.
To test this, we played the vocalizations produced by our charades
participants to listeners recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk
– a web service where workers can perform online tasks for payment.
We paid participants to listen to the vocalizations and guess their
meanings in a multiple-choice format. These naïve listeners were
able to understand the vocalizations with a level of accuracy that
was much higher than chance – on average, about 36% correct compared
to the expected 10% by chance – further indicating that they were
iconic in some way.
A glimpse of how language could have evolved
But what do these findings say about the bigger question of
how the first languages originated? Certainly great caution is warranted
in generalizing to the evolution of language from experiments conducted
in the laboratory with English-speaking undergraduates or online
with Mechanical Turk workers.
But our experiments do show that the human potential to create
iconic vocalizations is quite impressive, far exceeding many previous
estimates that have influenced scientific
theories of language
evolution. We also demonstrate an important proof of principle
that people can use iconic vocalizations as source material to develop
conventional symbols – comparable to how people might create conventional
signs.
Importantly, our claim is not that spoken languages must then
have evolved exclusively from vocalizations. Rather, our argument
is that there is considerable potential for vocalizations to support
the evolution of a spoken symbol system. Of course when people are
free to communicate “in the wild,” they draw spontaneously on both
vocalizations and gestures of all kinds. Therefore, when facing
a naturally occurring challenge to devise a communication system,
people are likely to take advantage of the strengths of iconic representation
in each modality.
Yet even if language has multimodal origins, our study hints
at the intriguing possibility that many of the spoken words of modern
languages may have long ago been uttered by our ancestors as iconic
vocalizations.
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