Horizon: Why Do We Talk?
Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 4:32 am
Did anybody else see this documentary? What did you think of it?
I suppose the most interesting bit was the mad Germanic scientist rearing male chicks (IIRC some sort of finch) in isolation, so that they never heard their fathers' song(s); the resulting generation had a very impoverished and seemingly ugly song (to the females then introduced), but the biological imperative to mate eventually got the better of the "desperate" females and a further generation was thus born. The "surprising" thing is that all these experimental male chicks were still somehow able to chirp and cheep (albeit badly) even though they'd never heard a song, and even though the wonky first new dads' song(s?) to copy were comparatively bad, the birdsong slowly improved itself somehow until, in the space of just a few new generations, it was apparently very similar if not identical to the beautiful song that was heard before the start of the somewhat deranged experiment.
So because birds are wont to chirrup (and certainly didn't have their beaks and vocal apparatus completely removed), that means that the biological nature of human language (surely a far more complex thing than "invariable" birdsong) is incontrovertible. I suppose if you locked away some baby chimps, it would then be amazing if they were to scream, cry, "laugh", hoop or holler at all at any point in their life. (Not a peep from your vocal appartus because you've never seen let alone heard an adult use theirs! Well, alright, you can make some noise then, but only if you first have an innate linguistic ability installed almost by fiat to get your lips quivering at all).
Oh but wait, there was some new advanced X-ray device that allowed scientists to see in continuous, fine detail the movement of the vocal apparatus as animals swallow and vocalize, and the hitherto unexpected manoeuvrability of this apparatus means that it isn't physiological limitations that are holding other animals back from making the leap into language of a human level.
Ah, and so before the birds there must've been that bit about feral kid (singular - some girl in the Ukraine, apparently raised by dogs but who it turned out had actually been reared by humans until the age of 3 or so). "Good" to hear about a newer/less well-known case, but there are surely "better" ones, and with more research done and attached.
Although I obviously can't remember the exact order of the bits of the doumentary, it opened with a longitudinal "Big Brother"-style monitoring of a newborn's linguistic development over just over two years (an early developer it would seem!), some footage of a guy who'd had a stroke following a broken shoulder bike-riding (he could slowly name nouns in action pictures, but not the verbs, and thus was incapable of relating the arguments at a clausal level/in any sentence-like way; his listening comprehension seemed fine/unaffected), a savant who could learn dozens of new words/"a complete new language" per session (with 1-to-1 instruction almost), fancy that! Chomsky of course (blink and you'll miss him; yawn and you won't hear what he had to repeat himself), and Simon Kirby at Edinburgh on "language evolution" ('Here's a load of invented fruits - pics and names - and you've got to somehow learn them all in the space of a half-hour or so, after which your recall will be tested. We'll then see if there are patterns emerging in the average approximations!'. I was waiting for the English speakers involved - basically everybody, I guess - to start calling the "qwertysfws", that is, the e.g. sickly yellowy-green spiky-looking things with red fronds at the top, "mutant punk pineapples" instead, but unfortunately they were too polite and "linguistically-savvy" to completely scupper the experiment that way! (And there I was thinking that Kirby enjoyed plenty of tea and biscuits while his department's super-computers did all the work fizzing and whirring away to calculate, maybe in a way similar to the computer program in Carpenter's The Thing, the evolution and spread of the, er, thing (in this case, language - arrggghhhh! (Do a search for 'Pontypool' here on Dave's TDFs to understand what the hell I'm jabbering on about now!
)))).
And of course there were plenty of "amazing" (interminable bridging filling) close-ups of mouths working away with Arabic, Chinese, Xhosa or whatever else, right after they'd all been eating salted peanuts and spinach.
I suppose the most interesting bit was the mad Germanic scientist rearing male chicks (IIRC some sort of finch) in isolation, so that they never heard their fathers' song(s); the resulting generation had a very impoverished and seemingly ugly song (to the females then introduced), but the biological imperative to mate eventually got the better of the "desperate" females and a further generation was thus born. The "surprising" thing is that all these experimental male chicks were still somehow able to chirp and cheep (albeit badly) even though they'd never heard a song, and even though the wonky first new dads' song(s?) to copy were comparatively bad, the birdsong slowly improved itself somehow until, in the space of just a few new generations, it was apparently very similar if not identical to the beautiful song that was heard before the start of the somewhat deranged experiment.
So because birds are wont to chirrup (and certainly didn't have their beaks and vocal apparatus completely removed), that means that the biological nature of human language (surely a far more complex thing than "invariable" birdsong) is incontrovertible. I suppose if you locked away some baby chimps, it would then be amazing if they were to scream, cry, "laugh", hoop or holler at all at any point in their life. (Not a peep from your vocal appartus because you've never seen let alone heard an adult use theirs! Well, alright, you can make some noise then, but only if you first have an innate linguistic ability installed almost by fiat to get your lips quivering at all).
Oh but wait, there was some new advanced X-ray device that allowed scientists to see in continuous, fine detail the movement of the vocal apparatus as animals swallow and vocalize, and the hitherto unexpected manoeuvrability of this apparatus means that it isn't physiological limitations that are holding other animals back from making the leap into language of a human level.
Ah, and so before the birds there must've been that bit about feral kid (singular - some girl in the Ukraine, apparently raised by dogs but who it turned out had actually been reared by humans until the age of 3 or so). "Good" to hear about a newer/less well-known case, but there are surely "better" ones, and with more research done and attached.
Although I obviously can't remember the exact order of the bits of the doumentary, it opened with a longitudinal "Big Brother"-style monitoring of a newborn's linguistic development over just over two years (an early developer it would seem!), some footage of a guy who'd had a stroke following a broken shoulder bike-riding (he could slowly name nouns in action pictures, but not the verbs, and thus was incapable of relating the arguments at a clausal level/in any sentence-like way; his listening comprehension seemed fine/unaffected), a savant who could learn dozens of new words/"a complete new language" per session (with 1-to-1 instruction almost), fancy that! Chomsky of course (blink and you'll miss him; yawn and you won't hear what he had to repeat himself), and Simon Kirby at Edinburgh on "language evolution" ('Here's a load of invented fruits - pics and names - and you've got to somehow learn them all in the space of a half-hour or so, after which your recall will be tested. We'll then see if there are patterns emerging in the average approximations!'. I was waiting for the English speakers involved - basically everybody, I guess - to start calling the "qwertysfws", that is, the e.g. sickly yellowy-green spiky-looking things with red fronds at the top, "mutant punk pineapples" instead, but unfortunately they were too polite and "linguistically-savvy" to completely scupper the experiment that way! (And there I was thinking that Kirby enjoyed plenty of tea and biscuits while his department's super-computers did all the work fizzing and whirring away to calculate, maybe in a way similar to the computer program in Carpenter's The Thing, the evolution and spread of the, er, thing (in this case, language - arrggghhhh! (Do a search for 'Pontypool' here on Dave's TDFs to understand what the hell I'm jabbering on about now!
)))).And of course there were plenty of "amazing" (interminable bridging filling) close-ups of mouths working away with Arabic, Chinese, Xhosa or whatever else, right after they'd all been eating salted peanuts and spinach.