Language Universals

Morten H. Christiansen (ed.) et al.

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195305432.001.0001
Published: 2009 Online ISBN: 9780199866953 Print ISBN: 9780195305432

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CHAPTER

7 7 The Components of Language: What's Speci c to

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195305432.003.0007 Pages 126–151

Abstract
Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (HCF) proposed that recursion is the only thing that distinguishes
language (a) from other human capacities, and (b) from the capacities of animals. These factors are
independent. The narrow faculty of language might include more than recursion, falsifying (a). Or it
might consist only of recursion, although parts of the broad faculty might be uniquely human as well,
falsifying (b). This chapter presents a view that is contrasted with HCF's above. It shows that there is
considerably more of language that is special, though still a plausible product of the processes of
evolution. It assesses the key bodies of evidence, coming to a di erent reading from HCF's. The chapter
organizes the discussion by distinguishing the conceptual, sensorimotor, and speci cally linguistic
aspects of the broad language faculty in turn.

Keywords: language universal, recursion, linguistics, language faculty, speech perception, speech
production, phonology, syntax, Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch
Subject: Cognitive Psychology
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

7.1. The Issue of What Is Special to Language

In the context of contemporary mentalist study of language, one way of couching the question of language
universals is in terms of language acquisition: What components are universally available in the brains of
language learners that make possible the relatively rapid acquisition of language? The present chapter
addresses this question—the character of the human language capacity. We should be clear, however, that
the answer to this question may not yield characteristics common to all human languages—a more
traditional interpretation of “language universals”—in that some components of the universal brain
capacity may not be universally deployed.
 Here we are more concerned with the question of what kind of biological system language is, and how it
relates to other systems in our own species and others. This question embraces a number of more speci c
ones. The rst is which aspects of the faculty are learned from environmental input and which aspects arise
from the design of the brain (including the ability to learn the learned parts)—the language capacity in our
sense. To take a clear example, the fact that a canine pet is called dog in English but chien in French is
learned, but the fact that words can be learned at all hinges on the predisposition of children to interpret the
noises made by others as meaningful signals.

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A second question is what parts of a person's language ability (learned or built-in) are speci c to language
and what parts belong to more general abilities. Words, for example, are speci cally a part of language, but
the use of the lungs and the vocal cords, although necessary for spoken language, are not limited to
p. 127 language. The answers to this question will often not be dichotomous. The vocal tract, for example, is
clearly not exclusively used for language, yet in the course of human evolution it may have been tuned to
subserve language at the expense of other functions, such as breathing and swallowing.

A third question is which aspects of the language capacity are uniquely human, and which are shared with
other groups of animals, either homologously, by inheritance from a common ancestor, or analogously, by
adaptation to a common function. This dimension cuts across the others. The system of sound distinctions
found in human languages is both speci c to language and uniquely human (partly because of the unique
anatomy of the human vocal tract). The sensitive period for learning language may be speci c to certain
aspects of language, but it has analogues in developmental phenomena throughout the animal kingdom,
most notably bird song. The capacity for forming concepts is necessary for language, as it provides the
system of meaning that language expresses, but it is not speci c to language: it is also used in reasoning
about the world. And because other primates engage in such reasoning, it is not uniquely human (though
parts of it may be). As with the rst two questions, answers will seldom be dichotomous. There will often be
mixtures of shared and unique attributes, re ecting the evolutionary process in which an ancestral primate
design was retained, modi ed, augmented, or lost in the human lineage. Answers to this question have clear
implications for the evolution of language. If the language faculty has many features that are speci c to
language itself, it suggests that the faculty was a target of natural selection. If, on the other hand, it
represents a minor extension of capacities that existed in the ancestral primate lineage, it could be the
result of a chance mutation that became xed in the species through drift or other nonadaptive evolutionary
mechanisms (Pinker & Bloom, 1990).

One hypothesis about what is special about language is proposed by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002)
(henceforth HCF). They di erentiate (as we do) between aspects of language that are special to language
(narrow language faculty) and the faculty of language in its entirety, including parts that are shared with
other psychological abilities (broad language faculty). They propose that “the narrow language faculty
comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the
mappings to the interfaces” (i.e., the interfaces with mechanisms of speech perception, speech production,
conceptual knowledge, and intentions). They further suggest that “most, if not all, of the broad language
faculty is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals” and that the narrow language faculty—
the computational mechanism of recursion—is recently evolved and unique to our species” (p. 1573). They
go on to speculate that recursion may not even have evolved for language itself but for other cognitive
abilities such as navigation, number, or social relationships. In other words, HCF propose that recursion is
the only thing that distinguishes language (a) from other human capacities and (b) from the capacities of
p. 128 animals. These factors are independent. The narrow faculty of language might include more than
recursion, falsifying (a). Or it might consist only of recursion, although parts of the broad faculty might be
uniquely human as well, falsifying (b).

As HCF note (p. 1572), the two of us have both advanced a position rather di erent from theirs, namely that
the language faculty, like other biological systems showing signs of complex adaptive design (Dawkins,
 1986; Williams, 1966), is a system of coadapted traits that evolved by natural selection (Jackendo , 1992,
1994, 2002; Pinker, 1994b, 2003; Pinker & Bloom, 1990). Speci cally, the language faculty evolved in the
human lineage for the communication of complex propositions. HCF contrast this idea with their recursion-
only hypothesis, which “has the interesting e ect of nullifying the argument from design, and thus
rendering the status of the narrow language faculty as an adaptation open to question” (p. 1573).

In this chapter we contrast our view with HCF’s. We will show that there is considerably more of language

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that is special, though still a plausible product of the processes of evolution. We will assess the key bodies of
evidence, coming to a di erent reading from HCF’s. We organize our discussion by distinguishing the
conceptual, sensorimotor, and speci cally linguistic aspects of the broad language faculty in turn.

7.2. Conceptual Structure

Let us begin with the messages that language expresses: mental representations in the form of conceptual
structure (what HCF call the “conceptual-intentional system”). The primate literature, incisively analyzed
in HCF, gives us good reason to believe that primates possess some of the foundations of the human
conceptual system, such as the major subsystems dealing with spatial, causal, and social reasoning. If
chimpanzees could talk, they would have things to talk about that we would recognize. For instance, Cheney
and Seyfarth (1990, 2006) develop detailed arguments that vervet monkeys and baboons make use of
combinatorial concepts such as x is kin of y, x is dominant to y, and x is an ally of y in understanding the
relationships among others with whom they interact. These can be seen as precursors of the far more
elaborate human versions of these concepts.

Some aspects of the human conceptual system, such as Theory of Mind (intuitive psychology) and parts of
intuitive physics, are absent in monkeys and questionable or at best rudimentary in chimpanzees (HCF;
Povinelli, 2000; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). They are special to humans, though not
special to language. We add that many other conceptual systems, though not yet systematically studied in
nonhuman primates, are conspicuous in human verbal interactions, but are hard to discern in any aspect of
p. 129 primates’ naturalistic behavior. They include essences (a major component of intuitive biology and
2
chemistry), ownership, multipart tools, fatherhood, romantic love, and most moral and deontic concepts.
We suspect that these abilities, like Theory of Mind, are absent or discernable only in rudimentary form in
other primates. These too would be uniquely human aspects of the broad language faculty, serving also as
part of a system for nonlinguistic reasoning about the world.

In addition, there are domains of human concepts that are probably unlearnable without language
(Jackendo , 1996). For example, the notion of a week depends on counting time periods that cannot all be
perceived at once; we doubt that such a concept could be developed or learned without the mediation of
language. More striking is the possibility that numbers themselves (beyond those that can be subitized) are
parasitic on language—that they depend on learning the sequence of number words, the syntax of number
phrases, or both (Bloom, 1994a; Wiese, 2004). Vast domains of human understanding, including the
supernatural and sacred, the speci cs of folk and formal science, human-speci c kinship systems (such as
the distinction between cross-cousins and parallel cousins), and formal social roles (such as “justice of the
3
peace” and “treasurer”), can be acquired only with the help of language. The overall picture is that there is
a substrate of combinatorial conceptual structure in chimps, overlain by some uniquely human but not
necessarily language-based subsystems, in turn overlain by subsystems that depend on the preexistence of
linguistic expression. Thus, it is impossible to say that conceptual structure as a whole is uniquely human,
or uniquely linguistic, or neither; the system is the result of a mixture of evolutionary old and new factors.
 7.3. Speech Perception

Turning to the sensorimotor end of language, a longstanding proposal about the narrow language faculty is
Alvin Liberman's hypothesis that “Speech is Special” (SiS): speech recognition is a mode of perception
distinct from our inherited primate auditory analyzers, in being adapted to recover the articulatory
intentions of a human speaker (Liberman, 1985, 1991; Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-

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Kennedy, 1967; Liberman & Mattingly, 1989).

One of the rst kinds of evidence adduced for SiS, dating to the 1950s, was the existence of categorical
phoneme perception, in which pairs of phonemes di ering in, say, voicing (e.g., p and b) are discriminated
more accurately than pairs of stimuli separated by the same physical di erence (in this case, in voice-onset
time) but falling into the same phonemic category (both voiced, or both unvoiced). This particular bit of
evidence for human uniqueness was de ated in the 1970s by ndings that chinchillas make similar
p. 130 discriminations (Kuhl & Miller, 1975). HCF cite this as evidence against SiS, together with three other
ndings: that certain animals can make auditory distinctions based on formant frequency, that tamarin
monkeys can learn to discriminate the gross rhythms of di erent languages, and that monkeys can perceive
formants in their own species’ vocalizations. These phenomena suggest that at least some aspects of the
ability to perceive speech were present long before the advent of language. Of course, some version of this
conclusion is unavoidable: human ancestors began with a primate auditory system, adapted to perform
complex analyses of the auditory world, and it is inconceivable that a system for speech perception in
humans could have begun de novo.

How much of the human capacity for phonetic perception is present in other species? Most experiments
testing the perception of human speech by nonhuman animals have them discriminate pairs of speech
sounds, often after extensive operant conditioning (supervised learning). It is not surprising that some
animals can do so, or even that their perceptual boundaries resemble those of humans, because auditory
analyzers suited for nonspeech distinctions might su ce to discriminate among speech sounds—even if
the analyzers humans use are di erent (Trout, 2001, 2003b). For example, a mammalian circuit that uses
onset asynchrony to distinguish two overlapping auditory events from one event with a complex timbre
might be su cient to discriminate voiced from unvoiced consonants (Bregman & Pinker, 1978). But
humans do not just make one-bit discriminations between pairs of phonemes. Rather, they can process a
continuous, information-rich stream of speech. In doing so, they rapidly distinguish individual words from
tens of thousands of distracters despite the absence of acoustic cues for phoneme and word boundaries,
while compensating in real time for the distortions introduced by coarticulation and by variations in the
age, sex, accent, identity, and emotional state of the speaker. And all of this is accomplished by children as a
product of unsupervised learning. A monkey's ability to be trained to discriminate pairs of phonemes
provides little evidence that its auditory system would be up to the task accomplished by humans. It would
be extraordinarily di cult at present to conduct experiments that fairly compared a primate's ability to a
human’s, fully testing the null hypothesis.

Moreover, there is considerable evidence which suggests that speech is indeed special (Anderson, 2004;
Liberman, 1985, 1991; Remez, 1989, 1994; Trout, 2001, 2003b). First, speech and sound are
phenomenologically di erent: under certain conditions, a given sound can be perceived simultaneously as
part of a syllable and as a nonspeech-like chirp (Liberman & Mattingly, 1989), or a stretch of sound can be
heard to ip qualitatively between speech and nonspeech (Remez, Pardo, Piorkowski, & Rubin, 2001).

Second, in humans the perception of speech dissociates in a number of ways from the perception of auditory
p. 131 events (the latter presumably using the analyzers we share with other primates). Neuroimaging and
brain-damage studies suggest that partly distinct sets of brain areas subserve speech and nonspeech sounds
(Hickok & Poeppel, 2000; Poeppel, 2001; Trout, 2001; Vouloumanos, Kiehl, Werker, & Liddle, 2001). A clear
 example is pure word deafness, in which a patient loses the ability to analyze speech while recognizing
other environmental sounds (Hickok & Poeppel, 2000; Poeppel, 2001). Cases of amusia and auditory
agnosia, in which patients can understand speech yet fail to appreciate music or recognize environmental
sounds (Peretz, Gagnon, & Bouchard, 1998; Poeppel, 2001), show that speech and nonspeech perception in
fact doubly dissociate.

Third, many of the complex hallmarks of speech perception appear early in infancy (Eimas & Miller, 1992;

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Miller & Eimas, 1983). Recent studies suggest that young infants, including neonates, prefer speech sounds
to nonspeech sounds with similar spectral and temporal properties. These include sounds that would have
been indistinguishable in the womb, hence the preference cannot be explained by learning in utero
(Vouloumanos & Werker, 2004a, 2004b).

Fourth, comparisons among primates turn up signi cant di erences between their abilities to perceive
speech and our abilities. For example, monkeys fail to categorize consonants according to place of
articulation using formant transitions alone (Sinnott & Williamson, 1999). They discriminate /ra/ from /la/
at a di erent boundary from the one salient to humans (Sinnott & Brown, 1997). They fail to segregate the
initial consonant from the vowel when compensating for syllable length in discriminating phonemes
(Sinnott, Brown, & Borneman, 1998). They fail to trade o the duration of the silent gap with the formant
transition in perceiving stop consonants within consonant clusters (Sinnott & Saporita, 2000). They fail to
show the asymmetrical “magnet e ect” that characterizes infants’ discrimination of speech sounds varying
in acoustic similarity to prototype vowels (Kuhl, 1991). And their subjective similarity space among vowels
(measured by discrimination reaction times analyzed by multidimensional scaling) is very di erent from
that of humans (Sinnott, Brown, Malik, & Kressley, 1997). Chimpanzees, too, have a subjective similarity
space for vowels that di ers from humans’ and, like macaques, have di culty discriminating vowel pairs
4
di ering in advancement or frontness (Kojima & Kiritani, 1989). Quail (Trout, 2003a) and budgerigars
(Dooling & Brown, 1990) that have been trained to discriminate human speech sounds also show patterns of
discrimination and generalization that di er from those of humans. A recent review of research on speech
perception in humans, chinchillas, budgerigars, and quail showed that the phoneme boundaries for humans
and animals di ered in more than a third of the studies (Sinnott, 1998). These ndings must be quali ed by
the fact that (a) some of them may be matters of quantitative auditory tuning rather than qualitative
di erences in the auditory system, and (b) that human speech perception necessarily re ects the e ects of
p. 132 extensive experience listening to a speci c language. Nonetheless, if ndings of similarities between
humans and animals trained on human speech contrasts are taken as evidence that primate audition is a
su cient basis for human speech perception, ndings of di erences following such training must be taken
as weakening such a conclusion. We conclude that SiS stands, and phonetic perception should be taken as
part of the narrow language faculty.
 7.4. Speech Production

On the articulatory side of speech, HCF cite two arguments against evolutionary adaptation in the human
lineage. One is the discovery that the descended human larynx (which allows a large space of discriminable
vowels, while compromising other functions) can be found in certain other mammalian species, where it
may have evolved to exaggerate perceived size. HCF note that although a descended larynx “undoubtedly

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plays an important role in speech production in modern humans, it need not have rst evolved for this
function,” but may be an example of “preadaptation” (in which a trait originally was selected for some
function other than the one it currently serves). But this suggestion, even if correct, does not speak to the
issue of whether the human vocal tract (and not just recursion) was evolutionarily shaped to subserve
human language. Modi cations of function are ubiquitous in natural selection (e.g., primate hands, bear
paws, and bat wings are adaptations that evolved by natural selection from the ns of sh), so the fact that a
trait was initially shaped by selection for one function does not imply that it was not subsequently shaped by
selection for another function. Thus, even if the larynx originally descended to exaggerate size, that says
nothing about whether its current anatomical position was subsequently maintained, extended, or altered
by selection pressures to enhance speech.

Moreover, the argument that the larynx's position was adapted for size exaggeration is weak. The human
larynx is permanently descended in women, children, and infants past the age of 3 months (Lieberman,
1984), all of whom speak or are learning to speak and none of whom, in comparison with adult males
engaged in intrasexual competition, had much evolutionary incentive to exaggerate size if doing so would
incur costs in other functions. Compare this with a related trait that is clearly adapted to size exaggeration
in intrasexual competition, namely, lowered vocal fundamental frequency. This trait, as expected, is
speci cally found in males of reproductive age. Moreover, even with its descended larynx, the human
supralaryngeal vocal tract is no longer than what would be expected for a primate of our size, because the
human oral cavity has shortened in evolution: humans, unlike chimpanzees, don’t have snouts (Lieberman,
p. 133 2003). Finally, the descended larynx is only part of a suite of vocal-tract modi cations in human
evolution, including changes in the shape of the tongue and jaw, that expand the space of discriminable
speech sounds despite compromises in other organic functions, such as breathing, chewing, and swallowing
(Lieberman, 1984, 2003), and none of these have to do with size exaggeration.

HCF's second argument against human adaptations for speech production is the discovery that not only
humans, but also some birds and primates produce formants (time-varying acoustic energy bands) in their
vocalizations by manipulating the supralaryngeal vocal tract, a talent formerly thought to be uniquely
human. Still, by all accounts such manipulations represent only a fraction of the intricate gestures of lips,
velum, larynx, and tip, body, and root of the tongue executed by speakers of all human languages (Browman
& Goldstein, 1992; Hauser, 1996). Other evidence also suggests a human adaptation for vocal production. In
comparison with extant apes and pre-sapiens hominids, modern humans have an enlarged region of the
spinal cord responsible for the voluntary control over breathing required for speech production (MacLarnon
5
& Hewitt, 1999). Humans also display greater cortical control over articulation and breathing, compared
with the largely subcortical control found in other primates (Deacon, 1997). And as Darwin noted, the innate
vocal babbling of human infants is one of the clearest signs that “man has an instinctive tendency to
speak.”

Nonhuman primates are also notoriously resistant to training of their vocalizations (Hauser, 1996), and as
HCF themselves note, they show no ability to learn vocalizations through imitation. HCF try to downplay the
di erence between humans and primates by pointing out that vocal imitation is not uniquely human. But
this is irrelevant to the question of whether vocal imitation evolved for language in the human lineage. The
other species that evolved comparable talents, namely certain birds and porpoises, are not ancestral to
humans, and must have evolved their talents independently of the course of human evolution.
 Moreover, the human capacity for vocal imitation is rather eccentric. Humans can more or less imitate
animal noises and car horns and buzz saws, but not as well as some birds; and people can imitate melodies,
with a great deal of interindividual variation. Even the ability to convincingly imitate a foreign or regional
accent is the exception rather than the rule among human adults, and adults are notoriously poor at
imitating the phonetics of a second language. On the other hand, all normal children can imitate the speech
pattern of the adults around them in extremely ne and accurate detail. At a crude level this is all “vocal
imitation,” but there is something particularly ne grained, adept, and species ubiquitous about the child's

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imitation of the sound pattern of a language, arguing for an imitative specialization for speech, another
aspect of the narrow language faculty.

p. 134
7.5. Phonology

Having the potential to articulate speech sounds—that is, having a vocal tract of the right shape, and
controllable in the right ways—is not the same as being able to produce the sounds of a language. The
articulatory commands sent to the vocal tract to produce speech are organized in terms of a concatenation
of discrete speech segments. Speech segments are drawn from a nite structured repertoire of phonemes,
each de ned by a set of discrete articulatory or acoustic feature values such as voicing, place of articulation,
and mode of onset and release. The concatenation of speech segments is structured into patterned rhythmic
constituents, such as syllables, feet, and prosodic phrases, upon which are superimposed systematic
patterns of stress and pitch. The composition of the segments can be modi ed in rule-governed ways
according to their contexts (as in the three pronunciations of the past tense su x in walked, jogged, and
patted). Languages di er in their repertoire of speech segments, their repertoire of syllable and intonation
patterns, and in constraints, local and nonlocal, on how one sound can a ect the pronunciation of others.
This system of patterns and constraints is couched in terms of phonological structure.

The set of phonological structures of a language forms a “discrete in nity” (to use Chomsky's term), in that
any language has an unlimited number of phonological structures, built from a nite number of discrete
units. One can always concatenate segments into longer and longer well-formed phonological sequences
(whether meaningful or not). Although the segmental/syllabic aspect of phonological structure is discretely
in nite and hierarchically structured, it is not technically recursive: for instance, a syllable cannot be
embedded in another syllable. Full syllables can only be concatenated, an operation that does not require
6
true recursion.

Is phonological structure speci c to language, or does it serve other more general purposes? Hierarchically
and featurally organized gestures characterize other domains of motor control, such as manual
manipulation. However, the kinds of constituents, the principles of combination, and the nature of the
adjustment processes in phonology appear to be speci c to language. And unlike motor programs,
7
phonological structure is a level of representation that is crucially used both in perception and production.
Moreover, every language contains phonological rules, a set of partly arbitrary, learned conventions for
assigning stress and prosody and for adjusting the form of various segments to their context. These are not
just general-purpose real-time adjustments to ease articulation or clarity.

Rhythmic organization similar to that of phonology appears in music, but with somewhat di erent
implementation. The two rhythmic components might be homologous the way ngers and toes are; hybrids
p. 135 of the two appear in poetry, song, and chant (Jackendo , 1989; Jackendo & Lerdahl, 2006; Lerdahl &
Jackendo , 1983). We do not know of other human capacities that have been shown to re ect this formal
organization, though it is an interesting open question.

Is phonological structure uniquely human? It appears that some combinatorial properties of phonology
have analogues in some species of birdsong, and perhaps in some cetacean song, but not in any primates,
 suggesting that these properties evolved separately in humans. The rhythmic properties of language and
music may well be unique to humans: informal observations suggest that no other primate can easily be
trained to move to an auditory beat, as in marching, dancing, tapping the feet, or clapping the hands
(Brown, Merker, & Wallin, 2000, p. 12). This is surely one of the most elementary characteristics of the
human rhythmic response, displayed spontaneously by young children. And the rule-governed
recombination of a repertoire of tones, which appears in di erent guises in music, tone languages, and
more subtly in intonation contours of language, is as far as we know unparalleled elsewhere. So overall,

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major characteristics of phonology are speci c to language (or to language and music), uniquely human,
discretely in nite, and not recursive. Thus phonology represents a major counterexample to both parts of
the recursion-only hypothesis.

There are good adaptive reasons for a distinct level of combinatorial phonological structure to have evolved
as part of the language faculty. As noted as early as Hockett (1960), “duality of patterning”—the existence
of two levels of rule-governed combinatorial structure, one combining meaningless sounds into
morphemes, the other combining meaningful morphemes into words and phrases—is a universal design
feature of human language. A combinatorial sound system is a solution to the problem of encoding a large
number of concepts (tens of thousands) into a far smaller number of discriminable speech sounds (dozens).
A xed inventory of sounds, when combined into strings, can encode a large number of words without
requiring listeners to make ner and ner analogue discriminations among physically similar sounds. This
observation has been borne out in computer simulations of language evolution (Nowak & Krakauer, 1999).

Phonological adjustment rules also have an intelligible rationale. Phonologists have long noted that many of
them act to smooth out articulation or enhance discriminability. Because these two requirements are often
at cross-purposes (slurred speech is easy to produce but hard to discriminate; exaggerated enunciation
vice-versa), a xed set of rules delineating which adjustments are mandated within a speech community
may act in service of the “parity” requirement of language (Liberman & Mattingly, 1989; Slobin, 1977),
namely, that the code be usable both by speakers and hearers.

Whether or not these hypotheses about the adaptive function of phonology are correct, it is undeniable that
p. 136 phonology constitutes a distinct level of organization of all human languages, in many respects special to
language, and with only very partial analogues at best in other species.

7.6. Words

We now come to an aspect of language that is utterly essential to it: the word. In the minimal case, a word is
an arbitrary association of a chunk of phonology and a chunk of conceptual structure, stored in speakers’
long-term memory (the lexicon). Some words, such as hello, ouch, yes, and allakazam, do not combine with
other words (other than trivially, as in direct quotes). But most words (as well as smaller morphemes such
as a xes) can combine into syntactic phrases, as well as into complex words such as compounds (e.g.,
armchair) and other derived forms (e.g., squeezability) according to principles of morphology. Morphology
and syntax constitute the classical domain of recursion.

Words have several properties that appear to be uniquely human. The rst is that there are so many of them
—50,000 in a garden-variety speaker's lexicon, more than 100 times the most extravagant claims for
vocabulary in language-trained apes or in natural primate call systems (Wallman, 1992). The second is the
range and precision of concepts that words express, from concrete to abstract (lily, joist, telephone, bargain,
glacial, abstract, from, any). Third, they all have to be learned. This certainly requires pro ciency at vocal
imitation (see section 7.4). But it also requires a prodigious ability to construct the proper meaning on the
basis of linguistic and nonlinguistic contexts. Children come into their second year of life expecting the
 noises other people make to be used symbolically; much of the job of learning language is guring out what
concepts (or sets of things in the world, depending on your view of semantics) these noises are symbols for.

HCF observe that “the rate at which children build the lexicon is so massively di erent from nonhuman
primates that one must entertain the possibility of an independently evolved mechanism.” They also note
that “unlike the best animal examples of putatively referential signals, most of the words of human
language are not associated with speci c functions” (1576) and may be “detached from the here and now,”

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another feature of words that may be “uniquely human.” These observations threaten their claim that
recursion is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. They attempt to deal with this
apparent problem by suggesting that word learning is not speci c to language, citing a hypothesis, which
they attribute to Bloom (1999) and Markson and Bloom (1997) that “human children may use domain-
general mechanisms to acquire and recall words.” Actually, although Bloom and Markson did argue against
p. 137 a dedicated system for learning words, they did not conclude that words are acquired by a domain-general
mechanism. Rather, they argued that word learning is accomplished by the child's Theory of Mind, a
mechanism speci c to the domain of intuitive psychology, possibly unique to humans.

In any case, the conclusion that there are no mechanisms of learning or representation speci c to words
may be premature. The experiment by Bloom and Markson cited by HCF showed that children display
similar levels of recognition memory after a single exposure to either a new word or a new fact (e.g., “My
uncle gave it to me”). But on any reasonable account, words and facts are stored using the same kinds of
neural mechanisms responsible for storage, retention, and forgetting. A demonstration that word learning
and fact learning have this property in common does not prove they have all their properties in common.

Markson and Bloom's case that word learning can be reduced to a Theory of Mind mechanism is most
tenable for the basic act of learning that a noun is the label for a perceptible object. But words are not just
names for things (see Bloom, 1999). They also are marked for a syntactic category (verb, preposition, and so
on), for obligatory grammatically encoded arguments (agent, theme, path, and so on), and for restrictions
on the syntactic properties of their complements (e.g., whether each one is headed by a preposition, a nite
verb, or a non nite verb) (Gentner, 1981; Jackendo , 2002; Pinker, 1989). This information is partly
idiosyncratic to each word and therefore must be stored in the lexicon. It cannot be identi ed with the
conceptual database that makes up general world knowledge. It has close linguistic, psychological, and
neurological ties to syntax (Caramazza & Shapiro, 2004; Gentner, 1981; Pinker, 1989; Shapiro, Pascual-
Leone, Mottaghy, Gangitano, & Caramazza, 2001), and requires, at least in part, syntactic analysis in order
to be acquired (Gleitman, 1990; Pinker, 1994a).

Moreover, functional morphemes such as articles, auxiliaries, and a xes are also part of the lexicon (as
each involves a pairing between a sound and some other information, both speci c to the particular
language), yet the information they encode (case, agreement, niteness, voice, and so on) is continuous
with the information encoded by syntax. Such words are not used, and presumably could not be acquired, in
isolation from syntactic context. So, although Theory of Mind is undoubtedly involved in word learning, it is
hard to see how words can be carved away from the narrow language faculty altogether.

Even in the case of learning nouns, there is some reason to believe that children treat facts and words in
di erent ways, re ecting the hallmarks of words that distinguish them from other kinds of factual
knowledge. One is that words are bidirectional and arbitrary (“Saussurean”) signs: a child, upon hearing a
word used by a speaker, can conclude that other speakers in the community, and the child himself or
herself, may use the word with the same meaning and expect to be understood (Hurford, 1989). This is one
p. 138 of the assumptions that allows babies to use words upon exposure to them, as opposed to having to have
their vocal output shaped or reinforced by parental feedback. Diesendruck and Markson (2001) (see also Au
& Glusman, 1990) show that young children tacitly assume that speakers share a code. If one speaker labels
a novel object as a mep out of earshot of a second speaker, and the second speaker then asks about a jop, the
 children interpret the second speaker as referring to a di erent object. Presumably this is because they
attribute common knowledge of a name (mep) to that speaker, even though they had never witnessed that
speaker learning the name. In contrast, if one speaker mentions a fact about an object (e.g., “my sister gave
it to me”) out of earshot of a second speaker, and the second speaker then asks about an object
characterized by another fact (e.g., “dogs like to play with it”), they do not interpret the second speaker as
referring to a di erent object. Presumably this is because they do not attribute common knowledge of facts
to the members of a speech community in the way they do with words. Somewhat to their surprise,

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Diesendruck and Markson conclude, “Interestingly, the present ndings lend indirect support to the idea
that in some respects, word learning is special” (p. 639).

Another hallmark of words is that their meanings are de ned not just by the relation of the word to a
concept but by the relation of the word to other words, forming organized sets such as superordinates,
antonyms, meronyms (parts), and avoiding true synonyms (Clark, 1993; Deacon, 1997; Miller, 1991; Miller &
Fellbaum, 1991). Behrend and collaborators (Behrend, Sco eld, & Kleinknecht, 2001; Sco eld & Behrend,
2003), re ning a phenomenon discovered by Markman (1989), showed that 2-year-old children assign a
novel word to an object they are unfamiliar with rather than to one they are familiar with (presumably a
consequence of an avoidance of synonymy), but they show no such e ect for novel facts.

Another distinctive feature about words is that (with the exception of proper names, which in many regards
are more like phrases than words; see Bloom, 1994b) they are generic, referring to kinds of objects and
events rather than speci c objects and events (di Sciullo & Williams, 1987). Waxman and Booth (2001) and
Behrend, Sco eld, and Kleinknecht (2001) showed that children generalize a newly learned noun to other
objects of the same kind, but do not generalize a newly learned fact (e.g., “my uncle gave it to me”) to other
objects of the same kind. Similarly, Gelman and Heyman (1999) showed that children assume that a person
labeled with the word carrot-eater has a taste for carrots, whereas one described as eating carrots (a fact
about the person) merely ate them at least once.

Our assessment of the situation is therefore that words, as shared, organized linkages of phonological,
conceptual, and (morpho-)syntactic structures, are a distinctive language-speci c part of human
knowledge. The child appears to come to social situations anticipating that the noises made by other
p. 139 humans are made up of words, and this makes the learning of words di erent in several regards from the
learning of facts. Moreover, a good portion of people's knowledge of words (especially verbs and
functional morphemes) consists of exactly the kind of information that is manipulated by recursive syntax,
the component held to make up the narrow language faculty, and therefore cannot be segregated from it
and the process of the evolution of language in general.
 7.7. Syntax

We nally turn to syntactic structure, the principles by which words and morphemes are concatenated into
sentences. In our view, the function of syntax is to help determine how the meanings of words are combined
into the meanings of phrases and sentences. Every linguist recognizes that (on the surface, at least) syntax
employs at least four combinatorial devices. The rst is collecting words hierarchically into syntactic

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phrases, where syntactic phrases correspond (in prototypical cases) to constituents of meaning. (For
example, word strings such as Dr. Ruth discussed sex with Dick Cavett are ambiguous because their words can
be grouped into phrases in two di erent ways.) This is the recursive component emphasized by HCF. The
second is the ordering of words or phrases within a phrase, for example, requiring that the verb of a
sentence fall in a certain position, such as second, or that the phrase serving as topic come rst. Many
languages of the world are not as strict about word order as English, and often the operative principles of
phrase order concern topic and focus, a fairly marginal issue in English grammar. A third major syntactic
device is agreement, whereby verbs or adjectives are marked with in ections that correspond to the
number, person, grammatical gender, or other classi catory features of syntactically related nouns. The
fourth is case-marking, whereby noun phrases are marked with in ections (nominative, accusative, etc.)
depending on the grammatical and/or semantic role of the phrase with respect to a verb, preposition, or
another noun.

Di erent languages rely on these mechanisms to di erent extents to convey who did what to whom, what is
where, and other semantic relations. English relies heavily on order and constituency, but has vestigial
agreement and no case, except on pronouns. The Australian language Warlpiri has virtually free word order
and an exuberant system of case and agreement; Russian and Classical Latin are not far behind. Many
languages use the systems redundantly, for instance German, with its rich gender and case systems,
moderate use of agreement, and fairly strong constraints on phrase order.

And this barely scratches the surface. Languages are full of devices like pronouns and articles, which help
signal information the speaker expects to be old or new to the hearer; quanti ers, tense and aspect markers,
p. 140 complementizers, and auxiliaries, which express temporal and logical relations, and restrictive or
appositive modi cation (as in relative clauses); and grammatical distinctions among questions,
imperatives, statements, and other kinds of illocutionary force, signaled by phrase order, morphology, or
intonation. A nal important device is long-distance dependency, which can relate a question word or
relative pronoun to a distant verb, as in Which theory did you expect Fred to think Melvin had disproven last
week?, where which theory is understood as the object of disprove.

Is all this speci c to language? It seems likely, given that it is special-purpose machinery for regulating the
relation of sound and meaning. What other human or nonhuman ability could it serve? Yet, aside from
phrase structure (in which a noun phrase, e.g., can contain a noun phrase, or a sentence can contain a
8
sentence) and perhaps long-distance dependencies, none of it involves recursion per se. A case marker may
not contain another instance of a case marker; an article may not contain an article; a pronoun may not
contain a pronoun, and so on for auxiliaries, tense features, and so on. Although these devices often depend
on phrase structure for their implementation, their existence is not predictable from the existence of
recursion, so they weaken the hypothesis that the narrow language faculty consists only of recursion.
 7.8. The Status of Recursion

Let us turn more directly to HCF's hypothesis that recursion is uniquely human and speci c to the language
faculty. They speculate that recursion may have “evolved for reasons other than language,” for instance,
“to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quanti cation, or social relations,” in a
module that was “impenetrable with respect to other systems. During evolution, the modular and highly

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domain-speci c system of recursion may have become penetrable and domain-general. This opened the
way for humans, perhaps uniquely, to apply the power of recursion to other problems” (Hauser et al., 2002,
9
p. 1578).

We agree with HCF that recursion is not unique to language (although language is the only recursive natural
communication system). Indeed, the only reason language needs to be recursive is because its function is to
express recursive thoughts. If there were no recursive thoughts, the means of expression would not need
recursion either. Along with HCF, we invite detailed formal study of animal cognition and other human
capacities, to ascertain which abilities require recursive mental representations and which do not. Plausible
candidates include music (Lerdahl & Jackendo , 1983), social cognition (Jackendo , 2007), and the
formulation of complex action sequences (Badler et al., 2000; Jackendo , 2007; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram,
1960; Schank & Abelson, 1975).

p. 141 A very clear example comes from visual cognition. Consider Figure 7.1. This display is perceived as being
built recursively out of discrete elements that combine to form larger discrete constituents: pairs of x’s,
rows of four pairs, rectangles of four rows, arrays of four rectangles, and so on. One could further combine
Figure 7.1 with three more copies to form a still larger array, and continue the process inde nitely. So we
have here a domain of “discrete in nity” with hierarchical structure of unlimited depth, its organization in
this case governed by gestalt principles. Presumably, the principles that organize Figure 7.1 play a role in
perceiving objects in terms of larger groupings, and in segregating objects into parts. Similar principles of
grouping apply in music (Lerdahl & Jackendo , 1983). This shows that recursion per se is not part of the
narrow faculty of language.

Figure 7.1.

Recursion in visual grouping.

What is distinctive about recursion in syntax is that (a) each constituent belongs to a speci cally syntactic
category such as N or VP, and (b) one member of each constituent has a distinguished status as head.
 Headed hierarchies are found elsewhere in cognition, for instance, in syllabic structure (which is not
recursive), in conceptual structure, and in certain aspects of musical structures (Jackendo , 1987, pp. 249–
251). Thus, like many other aspects of language, syntactic recursion may be a novel combination of newly
retuned capacities found elsewhere in cognition, with the addition of certain sui generis elements such as the
repertoire of syntactic categories.

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p. 142
7.9. Some Genetic Evidence

Recent ndings from genetics also cast doubt on the recursion-only hypothesis. There is a rare inherited
impairment of language and speech caused by a dominant allele of a single gene, FOXP2 (Lai, Fisher, Hurst,
Vargha-Khadem, & Monaco, 2001). The gene has been sequenced and subjected to comparative analyses,
which show that the normal version of the gene is universal in the human population, that it diverged from
the primate homologue subsequent to the evolutionary split between humans and chimpanzees, and that it
was a target of natural selection rather than a product of genetic drift or other stochastic evolutionary
processes (Enard et al., 2002). The phenotype is complex and not completely characterized, but it is
generally agreed that su erers have de cits in articulation, production, comprehension, and judgments in a
variety of domains of grammar, together with di culties in producing sequences of orofacial movements
(Bishop, 2002; Gopnik & Crago, 1991; Ullman & Gopnik, 1999; Vargha-Khadem, Watkins, Alcock, Fletcher, &
Passingham, 1995). The possibility that the a ected people are impaired only in recursion is a nonstarter.
These ndings refute the hypothesis that the only evolutionary change for language in the human lineage
was one that grafted syntactic recursion onto unchanged primate input–output abilities and enhanced
learning of facts. Instead, they support the notion that language evolved piecemeal in the human lineage
under the in uence of natural selection, with the selected genes having pleiotropic e ects that
incrementally improved multiple components.

Moreover, FOXP2 is just the most clearly identi ed one of a number of genetic loci that cause impairments
of language or related impairments, such as stuttering and dyslexia (Dale et al., 1998; Stromswold, 2001;
The SLI Consortium, 2002; van der Lely, Rosen, & McClelland, 1998). None of these impairments eliminate
or compromise recursion alone. Even in the realm of speech perception, genetic evidence may point to
adaptation for language. A recent comparison of the genomes of mice, chimpanzees, and humans turned up
a number of genes that are expressed in the development of the auditory system and that have undergone
positive selection in the human lineage (Clark et al., 2003). As speech is the main feature that di erentiates
the auditory environments of humans and of chimpanzees in nature, the authors speculate that these
evolutionary changes were in the service of enhanced perception of speech.

As more genes with e ects on speech and language are identi ed, sequenced, and compared across
individuals and species, additional tests contrasting the language-as-adaptation hypothesis with the
recursion-only hypothesis will be available. The latter predicts heritable impairments that completely or
p. 143 partially knock out recursion but leave the people with abilities in speech perception and speech
production comparable to those of chimpanzees. Our reading of the literature on language impairment is
that this prediction is unlikely to be true.

7.10. Summary of Evidence

Let us summarize the state of the evidence for the content and provenance of the language capacity, as
revealed by the larger design of language.

• A typical word is an association of a piece of phonological structure, a piece of syntactic structure, and
 a piece of conceptual structure. Words appear to be tailored to language; besides including grammatical
information, they are bidirectional, shared, organized, and generic in reference. The existence of words
is a language universal in the traditional sense.

• Conceptual structure, which captures the algebraic aspects of meaning relevant to linguistic expression
(e.g., excluding sensory and motor imagery), is a combinatorial and potentially recursive mental
representation that supports formal inference and is present in simpler form in nonlinguistic

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organisms such as apes and babies (Jackendo , 1983, 2002; Pinker, 1989, 1994b). Most of the semantic
information associated with utterances comes from the conceptual structures of the words themselves.
All languages are built to express conceptual structure.

• What distinguishes true language from just collections of uttered words is that the semantic relations
among the words are conveyed by recursive syntactic and morphological structures, which are largely
unique to humans and to language (though recursion per se is considerably more general). In
particular, the division of words into syntactic categories, and the role of syntactic and morphological
structures in case, agreement, pronouns, argument structure, topic, focus, auxiliaries, question
markers, and the like is speci cally linguistic, though many of the categories in question are not
present in all languages.

• At the other end of the architecture of language, despite early setbacks, the current evidence is strong
that there is a human specialization for speech perception, going beyond the general auditory
capacities of other primates.

• In speech production, control of the supralaryngeal vocal tract is incomparably more complex in
human language than in other primate vocalizations. Vocal imitation and vocal learning are uniquely
human among primates (talents that are consistently manifested only in speech). And syllabic babbling
emerges spontaneously in human infants.

• Speech perception and production are in the service of phonology, which encodes sound patterns in
terms of a discretized and patterned sequence of phonological segments, chosen from a discretized and
p. 144 structured repertoire of speech sounds. The patterns in the sequence of sounds involve rhythmic
and prosodic structure, as well as interactions among the featural contents of segments. The patterns
form a discrete in nity and a headed hierarchy, but are not recursive. To the extent that patterned
sound exists in other species, it arguably has an independent evolutionary source, as there is nothing
comparable in other primates. Certain aspects of phonology, in particular rhythmic organization and
certain tendencies of pitch contour, are shared with music, but much appears unique to human
language, though again the exact realization of phonological structure shows considerable
crosslinguistic variation.

We conclude that the narrow language faculty contains several components other than recursion. Indeed,
recursion itself does not belong to the narrow language faculty, as it is actually not unique to language. We
have also seen that much of the narrow faculty is overlaid on previously existing capacities such as the
capacity for combinatoriality, which in some cases but not others gives rise to recursion. This makes it
di cult to peel o just those aspects of language that are unique to human and unique to language. But this
is what we should expect of a capacity arising through natural selection.
 Key Further Readings

This chapter is based on Pinker and Jackendo (2005) and Jackendo and Pinker (2005), which are
commentaries on Hauser et al. (2002) and Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky (2005). Additional issues in the
debate over whether language is a product of natural selection may be found in the target article,
commentaries, and reply in Pinker and Bloom (1990). Good overviews of natural selection and adaptation

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include Dawkins (1986, 1996), Maynard Smith (1986, 1989), Ridley (1986), Weiner (1994), and Williams
(1966). Speci c language impairment is explained in Leonard (1998) and van der Lely, Rosen, and
McClelland, (1998). An overview of the genetics of language can be found in Stromswold (2001). Methods for
detecting natural selection in molecular genetic data are reviewed in Aquadro (1999), Kreitman (2000), and
Przeworski, Hudson, and Di Rienzo (2000). For a broader perspective of our vision of the language capacity,
see Jackendo (2002).

Notes
1 This article is adapted from Pinker and Jackendo (2005) and Jackendo and Pinker (2005), and appears here with the
permission of the publisher of Cognition. Supported by NIH grants HD-18381 (Pinker) and DC 03660 (Jackendo ). We
p. 145 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.

2 One finds a rough parallel in animalsʼ territoriality, but the human notion of ownership, involving rights and obligations
and the possibility of trade (Jackendo , 2007) appears unique.

3 We leave open whether such concepts are simply impossible without language or whether they are within the expressive
power of the conceptual system but require language as a crutch to attain them. They certainly cannot be shared via
ostension, so language is in any event necessary for their cultural transmission.

4 R. Remez, commenting in this reference on the work of (Kluender, 1994), notes that Kluender's trained quail failed to
distinguish labial and palatal phonemes. He also suggests that the quail's ability to distinguish other place-of-articulation
distinctions may hinge on their detecting the salient apical bursts that initiate stop consonants rather than the formant
transitions that su ice for such discriminations in humans.

5 The fact that Homo erectus had a spinal cord like that of other primates rules out an alternative hypothesis in which the
change was an adaptation to bipedal locomotion.

6 Syllables can sometimes be expanded by limited addition of nonsyllabic material; the word lengths, for example, may
have a syllabic structure along the line of [Syl [Syl length ] s]. But there are no syllables built out of the combination of two
or more full syllables, which is the crucial case for true unlimited recursion.

7 The existence in monkeys of mirror-neurons (Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996), which are active both in the
execution and the sight of particular actions, suggests that some kind of representation shared by perception and
production antedates the evolution of language in humans. However, the information coded by such neurons appears to
be di erent from phonological representations in two ways. First, they are specific to the semantic goal of an action (e.g.,
reaching), rather than its physical topography, whereas phonology is concerned with details of articulation. Second, as
noted by HCF, they do not support transfer from perception to production, since the ability to imitate is rudimentary or
absent in monkeys, whereas humans learn to articulate speech sounds based on what they hear.

8 Long-distance dependency can involve dependencies extending into recursively embedded structures, and on some
accounts involves recursive movement of the fronted phrase up through the phrase structure tree.

9 HCF argue that the ability to learn linearly ordered recursive phrase structure is uniquely human. In a clever experiment,
 n n
Fitch and Hauser (2004) showed that humans but not tamarins can learn the simple recursive language A B (all
sequences consisting of n instances of the symbol A followed by n instances of the symbol B; such a language can be
generated by the recursive rule S → A(S)B). But the relevance of this result is unclear. Although human languages are
n n n n
recursive, and A B is recursive, A B is not a possible human language. No natural language construction has such
p. 146 phrases, which violate the principles of syntactic headedness (X-bar theory) that are central to syntactic structure. Also
n n
unclear is whether the human subjects who learned these artificial languages did so in terms of an A B grammar. Each
stimulus consisted of a sequence of nonsense syllables spoken by a female voice followed by an equal number of syllables
spoken by a male voice. Phonological content was irrelevant, and the learning could have been accomplished by counting

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from the first syllable of each subsequence (high:1–2-3; low:1–2-3). This di ers from the kind of analysis mandated by a
grammar of recursively embedded phrases, namely (high-[high- [high-low]-low]-low). Similar questions can be asked
about claims by Gentner, Fenn, Margoliash, and Nusbaum (2006) regarding the learning by starlings of allegedly recursive
n n
A B patterns. If HCF's conclusion is that human syntactic competence consists only of an ability to learn recursive
languages (which embrace all kinds of formal systems, including computer programming languages, mathematical
notation, the set of all palindromes, and an infinity of others), the fact that actual human languages are a minuscule and
well-defined subset of recursive languages is unexplained.
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