Human Cognition – Language

It was mid morning. The men had been out hunting for a while. The women, children and elders were going about the morning routines. Songbirds filled the air with their melodious love songs. Alph whistled with the birds as he and Mum prepared for the first of the season’s ceremonies. It was a beautiful morning until the birds abruptly stopped singing. Instinctively, everyone stopped what they were doing and the watchmen grabbed their spears. Hand gestures became frantic, pointing in one direction. There was something moving in the woods and it was coming closer. Alph’s heart pounded with fear.

Then they heard the whistles, the sounds used by another clan when they approach an unfamiliar camp to announce their arrival, and the fear turned instantly into joyous greetings. They were the members of the old clan, back from their travels after twelve years to join in the spring rituals. Mum screamed with excitement as she saw Zed coming through the trees. It had been so long since she had been with him. Alph had never seen her run so fast. She leaped into his arms.

Finally, the commotion settled and the tears of joy dried. They all sat down near the river, laughing, hugging and catching up on the years of being apart. There had been a disagreement which had caused the clan to split. It had been a lean time for the larger clan and several of the hunters wanted to move to find more food. Fourteen had left but only eight returned; five men, two older women, and a teenage girl named Nona.

The talking was so loud that they didn’t notice the clan’s men returning from the hunt. They had fresh meat for everyone. Laughter filled the air, the children played with their dogs and the men washed off the day’s hunt in the river. It wasn’t long before the campfires were stoked and the women began preparing for dinner. Mum suggested that Alpha and Nona gather berries. They walked out into the field picking fruit and talking about her past. She was in her 16th year. Her mother died in childbirth, and the years had been tough and dangerous. Alph couldn’t take his eyes off of her. People were already eating and one of the new arrivals was playing a flute when they returned to camp.

Late in the evening, after the fires had died down, the camp had paired off for bed. Alph was almost asleep when the tent flap lifted and Nona stepped inside. She was naked and didn’t say anything as she lay down next to the Shaman’s assistant.

Being human is communicative by its very nature. Our ability to symbolically express our thoughts implicitly defines awareness and the self while enriching our collective memories. We are afloat in an atmosphere of gestures, words, music, and song. We are eager to say something to each other, to learn or teach, to show or prove, to agree or reject, to show affection, and so on. From our beginning, humans have been involved in social interaction of different degrees of complexity. While all social animals communicate with each other, only humans have developed a language which is more than a set of prearranged signals. Our speech even differs in a physical way from the communication of other animals. It comes from a cortical speech center which does not respond instinctively, but organizes sound and meaning on a rational basis. This section of the brain is unique to humans.

Language is communication through words or symbols representing words. Words are an association between a sound and meaning. By six years of age, children understand about 13,000 words and by the end of high school, about 60,000 words. Thus, children connect a new sound to a meaning about every 90 waking minutes. Language develops in the following five phases:

Phase 1: 1-4 Months, cooing, vowel sounds.
Phase 2: 5-10 Months, babbling, strings of consonants-vowels.
Phase 3: 10-15 Months, first words, consistent object labels. 
Phase 4: 18-24 Months, two word utterances. 
Phase 5: > 25 months, meaningful speech.

The issue is whether language development is innate or learned. In support of innate development of language, all cultures learn language. Children, in a social environment, who are deprived of any developed language, will invent their own. In support of learned language, young children who have deaf and dumb parents acquire language fully if learning takes place before puberty. If after puberty, this learning becomes more difficult. Further, young children can acquire several languages perfectly. Later in life, it is much more difficult and has telltale signs of accents and grammatical errors. Thus, from the nurture standpoint, there appears to be a critical period for language acquisition. From a neurological standpoint, the developing brain is receptive to learning language for several years.

The origin of language in the humans has been the topic of scholarly discussions for several centuries. In spite of this, there is no consensus on the origin or age of human language due to the lack of direct evidence. Speech may have evolved as long ago as two million years. One of the characteristics of language is that it is lateralized to an area in the left hemisphere called Broca’s area (named after Pierre Broca, the physician, surgeon, anatomist and anthropologist who made this discovery in the mid 1800’s). Language functions such as grammar, vocabulary and literal meaning are typically found in this area, especially in right handed people. Even the skulls of Homo habilis, a distant ancestor who lived about three million years ago, show an enlargement in Broca’s area of the left hemisphere. We will never know for certain the time when our ancestors began to speak. However, the complex nature of early modern humans in southern Europe, some 35,000 years ago, leaves very little doubt that these people enjoyed a rich, vivid language.

The timing of humanity’s first spoken words will never be known. However, the transition from hominid communication to human language can be defined by the evolution of social interactions. As such, hominid communication produced reactive social behavior while human language allowed predictive decision based social behavior. The one unique characteristic which humans have over all other living things is language. It is fitting that its inclusion as the final step in the evolution of cognition moves the specie from hominid to modern human by changing the way we be behave with each other. The processes that produce these behaviors involve all of the components of human cognition which are reviewed below.

The cognitive process that leads to hominid reactive behavior starts at the same place that human decision making starts, external stimuli and sensory memory. Information is reduced to electrochemical signals and is coded. Attention increases as one integrated set of neural signals grows in strength and dwarfs other signals manifesting in an ultra-short-term sensory memory. It lasts for such a short time, typically 200 - 500 milliseconds (1/5 - 1/2 second), that it is often considered part of the process of perception. This ability to selectively direct attention to specific aspects of our external environment is the critical first step to survival.

The brain quickly decides if this increased attention warrants further focus. If so, the coded representation is “loaded” into short term memory, often called working memory. Typically, seven or so representations can be held in this active, readily-available state for a short period of time (10 to 15 seconds). These representations include memories and projections of inner body states (emotions) that are used to create a description, a rendering, of the focused attention. Awareness is this rendering; a simplified, useful description of the focused attention, its dynamics and its consequences. Typically, this awareness includes emotions or “feelings”. Short term memory is reciprocally-linked to long term memory (LTM). Awareness and associated “feelings” can be stored in LTM as patterns of enhanced or impaired transmission between nerve cells. The patterns in LTM may be recalled later in short term memory for further cycles of processing and elaboration.

The obvious need for such a system is to help a specie avoid danger, to fight or take flight. Further, this process evolved to deal with social situations. In other words, most stimuli that warrant attention come from our own specie. How an observer responds to overt behavior must be understood in the context of motivations, dispositions and intentions. The observer’s imagination will guide the response, dependent on reactive or decision based behavior. The evolved human will use the concepts of space and time (displacement) found in language to gage the appropriate behavior.

In his white paper, “Evolution and the cognitive neuroscience of awareness, consciousness and language”, Bruce G. Charlton proposed that there are no recently evolved specialized 'language centers' in the brain. Instead, displacement-language has been made possible by a quantitative expansion of short term memory. Displacement refers to the capacity of language to describe entities and events that are 'displaced' in time or space (not you or me, not here or now). Humans don’t just talk of the here and now, but of remembrances of the past and forecasts of the future. This stands in stark contrast with the social communication system based on facial expressions, gestures, and a range of sounds which was inherited from our hominid ancestors. As such, ancestral communication only deals with the present. It goes without saying, Charlton’s suggestion that there are no language centers in the brain, like the Broca area, is very radical. However, the idea, displacement turns communication into language, can be used as an evolutionary marker because it also increases the value of social intelligence and the complexity of social interactions.

A social communication system based on facial expressions, gestures, and a range of sounds produces a certain set of behaviors that are defined in the present moment. Specie interaction is limited to line of sight. As an example, modern chimpanzees exhibit extremely sophisticated 'here and now' tactical social communication. This communication begets reactive social behavior. Chimpanzees are self aware. They observe each other’s behavior and respond in kind. Imagined motivations, dispositions and intentions are limited to the present. There are no longer term strategies of interaction because there is no concept of the longer term. Therefore, learning is limited. The mother chimp that uses a tool to catch ants does so by repeating the process over and over for her own benefit, not for the benefit of her child. The chimp’s child reacts by mimicking the behavior and learns the process. Without the concept of displacement, learned behaviors aren’t deliberately passed on from generation to generation.

A social system that is based in displacement-language is the system that we currently enjoy. Language is rich with understanding that comes from remembering past interactions with others. Our current experience is couched in our prior experiences. Behavior isn’t reactive, for the most part, but instead is based on analysis. Observing each other’s behavior and imagining motivations, dispositions and intentions becomes both tactical and strategic. The brain reviews a new experience in light of prior associations and feelings, and then assesses the future impact of continuing the experience or attempting to change direction. Language becomes more abstract to explain why something happened in an attempt to assure that it will happen again or avoid its reoccurrence. Learning is organized and deliberate. Planning and the implementation of ideas serve the community. Cause and effect become important and the concept of time is created.

Displacement based language is the capstone to the human experience. It sets us apart from the other animals, even those that are self aware. With the inclusion of displacement, humans moved quickly past all other animals to take control of their future. Memory became very important as our prior experiences became the basis of our projections. The building blocks for this success became the basis of collective memory. In turn, collective memory became our most important tool.