Tag: journalism

Some Links #19: The Reality of a Universal Language Faculty?

I noticed it’s almost been a month since I last posted some links. What this means is that many of the links I planned on posting are terribly out of date and these last few days I haven’t really had the time to keep abreast of the latest developments in the blogosphere (new course + presentation at Edinburgh + current cold = a lethargic Wintz). I’m hoping next week will be a bit nicer to me.

The reality of a universal language faculty? Melodye offers up a thorough post on the whole Universal Grammar hypothesis, mostly drawing from the BBS issue dedicated Evans & Levinson (2009)’s paper on the myth of language universals, and why it is a weak position to take. Key paragraph:

When we get to language, then, it need not be surprising that many human languages have evolved similar means of efficiently communicating information. From an evolutionary perspective, this would simply suggest that various languages have, over time, ‘converged’ on many of the same solutions.  This is made even more plausible by the fact that every competent human speaker, regardless of language spoken, shares roughly the same physical and cognitive machinery, which dictates a shared set of drives, instincts, and sensory faculties, and a certain range of temperaments, response-patterns, learning facilities and so on.  In large part, we also share fairly similar environments — indeed, the languages that linguists have found hardest to document are typically those of societies at the farthest remove from our own (take the Piraha as a case in point).

My own position on the matter is fairly straightforward enough: I don’t think the UG perspective is useful. One attempt by Pinker and Bloom (1990) argued that this language module, in all its apparent complexity, could not have arisen by any other means than via natural selection – as did the eye and many other complex biological systems. Whilst I agree with the sentiment that natural selection, and more broadly, evolution, is a vital tool in discerning the origins of language, I think Pinker & Bloom initially overlooked the significance of cultural evolutionary and developmental processes. If anything, I think the debate surrounding UG has held back the field in some instances, even if some of the more intellectually vibrant research emerged as a product of arguing against its existence. This is not to say I don’t think our capacity for language has been honed via natural selection. It was probably a very powerful pressure in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of our cognitive capacities. What you won’t find, however, is a strongly constrained language acquisition device dedicated to the processing of arbitrary, domain-specific linguistic properties, such as X-bar theory and case marking.

Babel’s Dawn Turns Four. In the two and half years I’ve been reading Babel’s Dawn it has served as a port for informative articles, some fascinating ideas and, lest we forget, some great writing on the evolution of language. Edmund Blair Bolles highlights the blog’s fourth anniversary by referring to another, very important, birthday:

This blog’s fourth anniversary has rolled around. More notably, the 20th anniversary of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom‘s famous paper, “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” seems to be upon us. Like it or quarrel with it, Pinker-Bloom broke the dam that had barricaded serious inquiry since 1866 when the Paris Linguistic Society banned all papers on language’s beginnings. The Journal of Evolutionary Psychology is marking the Pinker-Bloom anniversary by devoting its December issue to the evolution of language. The introductory editorial, by Thomas Scott-Phillips, summarizes language origins in terms of interest to the evolutionary psychologist, making the editorial a handy guide to the differences between evolutionary psychology and evolutionary linguistics.

Hopefully I’ll have a post on Pinker and Bloom’s original paper, and how the field has developed over these last twenty years, at some point in the next couple of weeks. I think it’s historical importance will, to echo Bolles, be its value in opening up the field: with the questions of language origins and evolution turning into something worthy of serious intellectual investigation.

Other Links

Hypnosis reaches the parts brain scans and neurosurgery cannot.

Are Humans Still Evolving? (Part Two is here).

The Limits of Science.

On Language — Learning Language in Chunks.

Farmers, foragers, and us.

Tweet This.

On Music and The Brain.

Why I spoofed science journalism, and how to fix in.

The adaptive space of complexity.

Where does the myth of a gene for things like intelligence come from?

As a linguist I struggle with genetics, I am, however, as an evolution geek, very interested in it. This creates all sorts of problems and high levels of anxiety when talking about FOXP2 and other genes, due to fear that I misunderstand the very highly complex interactions which exist between genes, environmental effects or cascading effects which cannot be summed up in a simple “x gene causes x trait in humans” paradigm.

I would like to point everyone towards a new blog Dorothy Bishop’s written over at guardian science blogs:

Where does the myth of a gene for things like intelligence come from?

Which is about busting the widespread belief (for idiots like me) that individual genes determine traits such as intelligence, optimism, obesity and dyslexia. I find it interesting that this is presented in the blogs section and not as a mainstream article.

She points out on Twitter this morning that the Jedward pic was not her idea. (I add this point because I found it weirdly comforting)

And it’s also lovely to see that at the bottom of the pile of comments is a well articulated reply by Dorothy to individual users.

I love blogging, because there exists  the ability for individuals to reply to claims made about them, primary sources (papers &c.) are cited and checkable and there’s none of the unnecessary dumbing down found in mainstream media. Here’s an article by Ben Goldacre expanding on this subject (which incidentally includes work by Dorothy Bishop).

Here is a parable about how, as a blogger, my claims were checked, discussed and ultimately concluded to be bollocks. (I don’t have a contrastive parable about what would have happened if I’d instead made these claims in the mainstream media but many stories of this nature can be found here.)

If you read the blog post I wrote about links between Autism and SLI you would have seen me make this claim:

the CNTNAP2 gene has been found in independent samples to be associated with both ASD and SLI. This is interesting because it could show that gene mutations which cause improved social abilities could have also caused changes in our linguistic ability on a syntactic or phonological level.

This blog post cited the work of Dorothy Bishop quite heavily and she took the time out to come and tell me problems with it. Here’s what she said:

As you anticipated, I think there are some problems with the implications you draw from the work. There are two issues. The first is that the variants of CNTNAP2 associated with language level are not mutations. You would usually only use that term in the case where most people had the same DNA sequence in a gene, but rare individuals had a different DNA sequence. FOXP2 is a case in point: there is a family, the KE family, who have a mutation affecting around half the family members, where the DNA sequence is changed. For most people in the general population, and for most people with SLI, the FOXP2 sequence is the same.

The CNTNAP gene is very different. The DNA sequence has different versions in different people, and one version, which is pretty common in the general population, is associated with a small decrease in language abilities, but most people with this version would not be recognised as having any language impairment. Most researchers now think that SLI is probably the result of the combined effect of many genes, each of which may nudge language ability up or down a bit. In this regard, language ability is rather like height: there are rare mutations that may make a person drastically tall or short, but most variation in height arises from combined effect of many small influences of genes that show DNA variation in the normal population.

The second issue concerns the evidence for CNTNAP2 being involved in both SLI and autism. Many people in the field do think this means that the same gene that can cause SLI can also cause autism, and that the only difference is that people with autism have additional difficulties going beyond language – what I have termed the ‘autism as SLI plus’ model. I supported that model in the past, but there are some facts that are hard to square with it. First, although many people with autism have structural language problems (affecting grammar and phonology) similar to those in SLI, not all of them do. So people with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome may have well-developed skills in syntax and phonology, while still having difficulties with pragmatics. The second point, which is a big problem for a simple genetic account, is that whereas the relatives of people with SLI often have some difficulties with structural language, we don’t usually see that in relatives of people with autism, even if the person with autism has poor language skills. It was this latter point that I was particularly keen to try and explain in my paper. The bottom line is that to explain the pattern of data we need to think in terms of interactions between genes (technically known as epistasis). So there are genetic variants that increase risk of autism, and others that increase risk of SLI. Most of these will have an individually small effect. However, if you have a risk variant for a gene influencing SLI (such as CNTNAP2) in the context of having a genetic risk for autism, the effect on language will be much worse. According to this model CNTNAP2 doesn’t affect both social cognition and language; rather it affects language, but that effect will get multiplied if the person also has risk factors for autism.

Which is SOOOO interesting.

I’d really like to thank her for replying, it’s really lovely to know that high-flying academics are willing to help out when a sincere blogger tries to understand something and falls on their arse.