The faculty of language: what's special about it?

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2004.08.004

Cognition

Volume 95, Issue 2, March 2005, Pages 201-236

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.08.004 Get rights and content

Abstract

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is “perfect,” non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.

Section snippets

The issue of what is special to language

The most fundamental question in the study of the human language faculty is its place in the natural world: what kind of biological system it is, and how it relates to other systems in our own species and others. This question embraces a number of more specific ones (Osherson & Wasow, 1976). The first is which aspects of the faculty are learned from environmental input and which aspects arise from the innate design of the brain (including the ability to learn the learned parts). To take a clear

What's special: a brief examination of the evidence

We organize our discussion in line with HCF, distinguishing the conceptual, sensorimotor, and specifically linguistic aspects of the language faculty in turn.

The minimalist program as a rationale for the recursion-only hypothesis

Given the disparity between the recursion-only hypothesis and the facts of language, together with its disparity from Chomsky's earlier commitment to complexity and modularity, one might wonder what motivated the hypothesis. We believe that it arises from Chomsky's current overall approach to the language faculty, the Minimalist Program (MP) (Chomsky, 1995, Chomsky, 2000a, Chomsky, 2000b, Lasnik, 2002). This is a decade-long attempt at a unified theory for language, based on the following

Language, communication, and evolution

The intuition that Minimalism reduces the amount of linguistic machinery that had to evolve is not HCF's only argument against the possibility that natural selection was a crucial cause of the evolution of the language faculty. They touch on three other themes that comprise an overall vision of what language is like. These are:

•
Language is not “for” communication and may even be badly designed for communication (thus “nullifying the argument from design”).
•
Language is an “optimal” or “perfect”

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^☆: We thank Stephen Anderson, Paul Bloom, Susan Carey, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Matt Cartmill, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Citko, Peter Culicover, Dan Dennett, Tecumseh Fitch, Randy Gallistel, David Geary, Tim German, Henry Gleitman, Lila Gleitman, Adele Goldberg, Marc Hauser, Greg Hickok, David Kemmerer, Patricia Kuhl, Shalom Lappin, Philip Lieberman, Alec Marantz, Martin Nowak, Paul Postal, Robert Provine, Robert Remez, Ben Shenoy, Elizabeth Spelke, Lynn Stein, J. D. Trout, Athena Vouloumanos, and Cognition referees for helpful comments and discussion. Supported by NIH grants HD 18381 (Pinker) and DC 03660 (Jackendoff).

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The faculty of language: what's special about it?☆

Abstract

Section snippets

The issue of what is special to language

What's special: a brief examination of the evidence

The minimalist program as a rationale for the recursion-only hypothesis

Language, communication, and evolution

Trends in Genetics

Cognition

Lingua

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Cognition

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Lingua

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Cognition

Cognition

Cognition

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Cognition

Dr. Dolittle's delusion: animal communication, linguistics, and the uniqueness of human language

The principle of mutual exclusivity in word learning: to honor or not to honor

Child Development

Dutch inflection: the rules that prove the exception

Parameterized action representation and natural instructions for dynamic behavior modification of embodied agents.

Beyond fast mapping: young children's extensions of novel words and novel facts

Developmental Psychology

Language and species

How children learn the meanings of words

Language

Auditory streaming and the building of timbre

Canadian Journal of Psychology

Articulatory phonology: an overview

Phonetica

An introduction to evolutionary musicology

Aspects of the theory of syntax

Studies on semantics in generative grammar

Reflections on language

Rules and representations

Lectures on government and binding

Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures

Linguistics and cognitive science: problems and mysteries

The minimalist program

New horizons in the study of language and mind

On nature and language

The lexicon in acquisition

Inferring nonneutral evolution from human-chimp-mouse orthologous gene trios

Science

Syntactic nuts: hard cases, syntactic theory, and language acquisition

Genetic influence on language delay in two-year-old children

Nature Neuroscience

The blind watchmaker: why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design

The symbolic species: the coevolution of language and the brain

The number sense: how the mind creates mathematics

Sources of mathematical thinking: behavioral and brain-imaging evidence

Science

Children's avoidance of lexical overlap: a pragmatic account

Developmental Psychology

On the definition of word

Speech perception by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus): spoken vowels

Perception and Psychophysics

Organization in the perception of speech by young infants

Psychological Science

Molecular evolution of FOXP2, a gene involved in speech and language

Nature