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Like Hand, Like Mouth: On the Role of Gesture-Linked Mouth Actions in the Evolution of Language

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Abstract

A number of language evolution researchers have argued that while language as we now know it is a predominately vocal affair, early language plausibly made extensive use of gesture. Relatedly, these same researchers often claim that while modern language in general uses arbitrary symbols, it is very likely that early language made extensive use of iconicity. Anyone accepting an account of early language along these lines must therefore explain how language shifted over time from a heavily gestural and iconic communication system to a predominately vocal and highly arbitrary one. This article looks at an intriguing theory advanced by Woll as to how this shift was made. We find the spirit of the theory plausible but take issue with its details. Specifically, we identify a serious tension at the core of the theory. We then go on to explore how that tension might be plausibly resolved. The result is a blueprint for a much-improved version of the theory, in our view.

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Fig. 1

(Adapted from Woll 2014)

Fig. 2

Adapted from Garrod et al. (2007) (with permission). Left: Graphical sign for “computer monitor” at start of game. Right: The same symbol after just six turns

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Notes

  1. Developed in great detail in Planer and Sterelny (forthcoming).

  2. It is true that recent work has shown that great-ape vocal control has been historically underestimated (see, e.g., Crockford et al. 2012, 2017; Schel et al. 2013). However, that control still pales in comparison to great-ape manual control.

  3. This form of scavenging involves driving predators away from kill sites with aggressive behavior of some kind. Picture a group of hominins hollering and hurling stones.

  4. The importance of iconicity in early language has recently been challenged by Irvine (2016). She cites a variety of studies that (in her view) suggest that it is easier for children to interpret arbitrary signs as referring to the elsewhere and elsewhen than it is for them to interpret iconic signs in this way. Irvine takes this to be an argument against theories of language evolution that give a central role to gesture early in language evolution. We are not convinced by her arguments, mainly because we suspect modern children bring specialized cognitive adaptations to the task of word learning that would not have been present at the inception of language. That said, her critique is an important one, though not one we can adequately take up here. (Note that even if Irvine were right about iconicity, this would not undermine the other motivation for gesture-central theories of early language evolution. It would, however, render moot some of the discussion in this article, as will become clear shortly.)

  5. Following Woll, we shall use the term “action” in a liberal way so that there is nothing contradictory in the notion of an involuntary action.

  6. We would like to acknowledge a referee whose comments helped us to see the important conceptual difference between iconic speech sounds and what we are here calling derivatively iconic speech sounds.

  7. The vocal energy in a sound wave clusters around certain frequencies; these dense concentrations of vocal energy are known as “formants.”

  8. Indeed, Graziano and colleagues have found that the monkey premotor cortex F5 stores grasp-and-bring-to-mouth actions as single, unified action sequences such that, by stimulating the right sub-area, one can elicit entire sequences of this form. These representations make up one part of what they call an “ethological action map.” They have found similar representations for other high frequency behaviors central to the monkey’s behavioral repertoire. See Graziano (2017) for a nice overview.

  9. A referee noted that the involvement of the mirror neuron system does not obviously account for the finding that meaningful speech and gesture interact differently than meaningless speech and gesture which is otherwise physically very similar. We agree, and it is for this reason that we above limited ourselves to saying that the broader set of effects “begins to make fuller sense” once certain assumptions are made about the brain areas in play. It is conceivable that meaningful speech and gesture, qua behaviors with a history of being performed in a goal-oriented manner, might engage the mirror neuron system differently than meaningless speech and gesture (which have no corresponding goals). Beyond this, we leave it to others to provide an adequate explanation for the finding in question.

  10. In line with sign linguistic convention, we use caps to gloss signs. The assigned gloss is a "rough-and-ready" translation (Johnston 2008).

  11. How common is echo phonology in signed languages? This question has not been thoroughly investigated to date, but the research that does exist suggests that it occurs at low but nontrivial levels. That research mainly consists in a large-scale study of three European sign languages—BSL, Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLoN), and Swedish Sign Language (SSL)—examining narrative signing (Crasborn et al. 2008). It was found that the percentage of signs involving mouth actions in BSL, SLoN, and SSL was 35% (539 signs), 39% (458 signs), and 39% (624 signs), respectively. The percentage of signs involving echo phonology was 2% (20 signs), 8% (58 signs), and 7% (99 signs), respectively.

  12. In principle, it is possible for the manual gesture to resemble the referent, and for the mouth action to resemble the manual gesture, but for the mouth action to fail to resemble the referent (in some contextually appropriate sense of “resemble”). For example (and put in abstract terms): the referent and manual gesture might resemble each other in virtue of sharing property F, the manual gesture and mouth action might resemble each other in virtue of sharing property G, but the referent might lack property G. Such cases strike us as highly artificial, however, and we propose to set them aside in what follows. We further note that Woll gives no indication that she has in mind such cases.

  13. One referee wondered how often tongue action figures in echo phonology, noting that the examples discussed in this section feature little or no role for the tongue. This referee further wondered whether the infrequent use of the tongue in echo phonology (if such use is in fact infrequent) might tell us something about the phonemes that featured in early forms of spoken language. These questions are best left for Woll and colleagues, though we note that Woll (2014) reports one example of (putative) echo phonology where visible tongue action features prominently (the BSL sign DISAPPEAR, which involves retraction of the tongue). We agree that there might be some insights to glean here regarding the phonemes of early language.

  14. See Planer and Kalkman (2019) for an in-depth analysis of this idea.

  15. This is not to say that only learned and shared arbitrary signs demand imitation learning. This can be true of some iconic signs as well. But it is not necessarily true of iconic signs. Two or more individuals might independently invent the same iconic sign for the same thing (e.g., an arm-flap gesture for bird).

  16. The qualifiers “learned” and “shared” are important in this paragraph. Arbitrary forms of communication can evolve at the level of a group via natural selection (as evidenced by a variety of animal and bacterial communication systems). But such systems are not learned. And one individual might learn to communicate with another individual in an arbitrary way via reinforcement learning. But such a system would not be public, shared at the level of the entire group.

  17. See Tramacere and Moore (2018) for a nice discussion of this point.

  18. See footnote 9, above.

  19. They may, alternatively, also retain a degree of nonarbitrariness. In a survey of 6452 wordlists from geographically maximally dispersed languages, Blasi et al. (2016) find a strong association with the concept "small" and the close front vowel [i]; the production of this vowel involves a small mouth aperture. This recalls adverbial mouth actions in sign languages, where small objects can be described with both manual and mouth gestures. Additionally, the concept "breasts" is strongly associated with [m]. This bilabial nasal sound involves sealed lips, as a baby has while at the breast. This may be a candidate for transition of an enacting mouth gesture (where the enactment is suckling) into a speech sound. Of note, neither of these potential iconic vocal signs necessarily needed an accompanying manual gesture.

  20. Or perhaps the iconic mouth action is a standalone sign.

  21. When our ancestors became proficient manual imitators remains a matter of debate. We incline towards an earlier account than some. To begin, chimpanzees already show some degree of competence at manual imitation. The same was very likely true of our last common ancestor with Pan (de Waal 2016). Moreover, as stone-tool manufacture and use became increasingly central to hominin lifeways, our ancestors likely experienced selection pressure for improved manual imitation. We think the thin, symmetrical, and neatly bifacially flaked stone tools of the late Early Pleistocene plausibly implicate manual imitation capacities.

  22. That would not be implausible if the two were strongly linked.

  23. See Planer and Sterelny (forthcoming) for a detailed hypothesis regarding why and when protolanguage became increasingly vocal in our line. At the center of their account is the control of fire and the socio-ecological changes such control brought.

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Acknowledgments

We are thankful to the referees for their comments. The comments of one referee in particular led to substantial improvement of the article, in our view.

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Correspondence to Ronald J. Planer.

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Planer, R.J., Reed, L.W. Like Hand, Like Mouth: On the Role of Gesture-Linked Mouth Actions in the Evolution of Language. Biol Theory 16, 90–101 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00377-8

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