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Neurobiology's account of language emergence

Deacon [18] offers a point of view in which language is adjusting to architectural constraints associated with children's brains. The general process of language acquisition is attributed to a co-evolution between the capacity of the brain to produce language and a kind of competition between different types of parts of speech that are more readily available to the human brain. The present state of syntactic structures still undergoes constant transformation, the major influence being the child's brain. Deacon suggests that children do not have an amazing gift for learning language, more to the point, language adapts to behaviors and brain development already present with children. This process is analogous to what learning psychologists call shaping of an operant behavior. A spontaneous behavior is reinforced and modeled to be reproduced on demand. So particular syntactic features that stay in the language have likely emerged from spontaneous behavior or noises inherent to the child. This kind of approach to tool development is not alien to our everyday understanding. For example: User friendly is a term that has filtered into natural language from computer developers. Computer interfaces have been made to copy office environment so that gestures that are performed in that context would not need to be learned as they are already part of a routine. Similarly these behaviors can be shaped in such a way that intuitive guesses as what to do in a user friendly environment will more often be right than wrong thereby significantly reducing learning time and effort. Similar assumptions apply to the process of learning language. This approach is not only relevant in the context of children. As highlighted in the computer example, adults use this approach in tool development frequently, mostly because complying with brain functions will yield expected results better than forcing millions of years of biological evolution to stir rapidly. It is a known fact that the time scale of organisms is slower in generating mutation and quite stable compared to the time scale in which language mutations are shown to occur. A more interesting fact is that, as adults, we retain the ability to make novel associations hence we are able to shape new behavior throughout our lives.


next up previous
Next: Psychological parallels Up: Efficiency in Other Language Previous: Efficiency in Other Language
Thalie Prevost
2003-12-24