The Truth about Language by Michael Corballis

Author:Michael Corballis [Corballis, Michael C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77558-918-1
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2017-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

8

Finding Voice

He thought he saw a Rattlesnake

That questioned him in Greek:

He looked again, and found it was

The Middle of Next Week.

“The one thing I regret,” he said,

“Is that it cannot speak!”

Lewis Carroll, “The Gardener’s Song”1

Not everyone agrees that language evolved from manual gestures, and indeed it somehow seems more natural to suppose that it evolved from animal calls. After all, as I noted in the previous chapter, nonhuman animals are indeed noisy creatures, as we humans are. So why, one might ask, should we suppose that it all began with waving of the hands? Conversely, one might even wonder why it is that we talk at all rather than use our eloquent hands to communicate. It’s talk that clearly dominates our discourse, except perhaps for the generation that now transmit text messages on their cell phones, reverting to gesture.

The linguist Robbins Burling wrote, “The gestural theory has one nearly fatal flaw. Its sticking point has always been the switch that would have been needed to move from a visual language to an audible one.”2 So how am I to answer?

For a start, control of hand and mouth are integrally connected, even originating from a common brain region that can be traced back to our common ancestry with fish!3 More to the point, though, throughout primate evolution the hands and mouth are connected through the process of eating. People and monkeys bring food to the mouth in exquisitely coordinated fashion. Such coupling may well carry over to language. In a classic article published in 1985, David McNeill demonstrated the tight synchrony between speech and the gestures that accompany it, concluding that “gestures and speech share a computational stage.”4 And speech is itself a system of gestures, made up of movements of the lips, the velum, the larynx, and the blade, body, and root of the tongue. One might suppose, then, that the production of language shifted from one set of gestures to another. Indeed there was probably overlap; manual gestures may well have been punctuated by grunts, and vocal gestures are generally accompanied by a good deal of hand waving, especially in Italy. Of course we perceive manual gestures visually and vocal gestures through the sounds they produce, but there are reasons to believe that we even tend to understand vocal gestures as gestures rather than as patterns of sound.

A strong version of this idea is what has been termed the motor theory of speech perception, which arose from the work of the late Alvin Liberman and others at the Haskins Laboratories in the United States.5 They started out in the 1950s by trying to find characteristics of the sound waves that define the basic elements of speech, hoping to be able to devise an instrument that would automatically decode speech. The idea was that you could simply talk to this instrument and it would pick out these elements and then print out what you say. This would eliminate the need for typists or even keyboards.

The hopes of producing such a device were soon dashed.

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