"Mind Design"

The last chapter of Steven Pinker's "valuable" book; deals with how some of the major social sciences have based their recent theories on what Pinker has introduced as the brain's ability to produce language through an innate "mind design".

Margaret Mead, anthropologist and John Watson, psychologist are the two founders of the "Standard Social Science Model" (SSSM) which asserts that the human nature is changeable to different personalities through social upbringing. Pinker in fact sets forth a more coherent version of such model suggesting that at the beginning heredity builds an "innate psychological mechanisms" such as "learning mechanisms". Meanwhile the "environment" provides input for this hereditary innate system. The interface between the environment and these innate mechanisms results in the human behavior. It also helps humans develop skills and values and access the knowledge.

A recent alternative to SSSM is the "Integrated Causal Model" in which some psychologists or anthropologists embark on the evolution theory to form their own science-related hypothesis. For example, Tooby and Cosmides pioneered the "psychological foundations of culture". This "evolutionary psychology" announces the emergence of brain as a result of evolution. The brain in turn produces the psychological processes such as knowing and learning. These two developments in the human psyche lead to the acquisition of "values and knowledge" which make up a person's culture.

Computational linguists like Ray Jackendoff have used this substitute model to enhance this part of the language science.

Pinker believes that the "evolutional psychology" takes its lessons from human language. The psychology that is based on the evolution considers the existence of mental softwares for reasoning and perception and supposes that some "innate mechanism" involves that makes the learning happen when it works at cross-purposes through different modules each with provisions to learn in its own way. Like the languages, these mental mechanisms in turn have evolved from the "natural selection"; but not all aspects of mind are adaptations. The mind's adaptations are not necessarily beneficial in the evolutionary novel environments like the twenthieth-century cities.

Just like how the languages have spread among humans through the years; particular kinds of learning have contagiously spread in a community and the minds of people have become coordinated into shared patterns to form a certain culture.

Meta Culture is a Universal Pattern shared by all human beings. An example of an innate module is "folk biology" in which humans are believed to be born with basic intuitions about plants and animals. According to this module, stone-age people were both botanists and zoologists who had special instincts about living things that began early in life.

The question is how the difference in the biochemistry of people helps the natural selection and consequently the evolution?

The Language Evolution

The next chapter of Language Instinct is about how the language evolved. It sets forth questions answered in detail, through this part of the book. Pinker believes that language evolved gradually in what he calls "a sequence of intermediate forms" which were useful for its possessor's survival.

Who the first "grammar mutants" interacted with, What an intermediate form of language looks like, and how these intermediate language's evolution provided the survival means for the human being; are the three questions asked and answered by Pinker.

There are two possibilities for the answer to the first question:

1) The first men could have used their language instinct to communicate with the family members who inherited the same gene and instinct.

2) They could have talked with their neighbors who despite the lack of the "new fangled circuitry" understood them using the "overall intelligence". An example of the use of the mental ability and background knowledge to appreciate a language is when native speakers of English intuitively grasp the gist of the news on an Italian newspaper with the additional mercy of common words in both the languages.

The effort these neighbors took to decode the language of their cohabitants led to such ability being wired in their brains by the "natural selection".

The answer to the second question-the possible structure of an intermediate grammar-would be some kind of "grammar with intermediate complexity" in which for example"symbols would have a narrower range, rules would be less reliably applied or modules would have fewer rules". This language would look something like the"protolanguage of the chimps signing, pidgings, child language in the two-word stage, the language of immigrants and the unsuccessful partial language of Genie and other wolf-children learned after puberty".

Here, I came up with a question myself: If the intermediate language looks like the language of the immigrants and if the language evolves; does this mean that the spread of immigrants in a country and the use of their language is going to change or deteriorate the use of the native language of the country in which they live now? Or on another level is it possible that the desperate need to learn a second language for survival after the puberty change the "critical period" by "natural selection"? Later Pinker hints that living in the modern times and having everything needed for survival at hand, the humans have ceased to evolve by natural selection.

The author has found the way out of the third question by providing us with four reasons why the evolution of the human language is not as absurd as one might think:

1) We need to know that the small advantages will do for the natural selection to take place. For example a natural selection rule in a mouse that changes its size by one percent each generation will result in a mouse the size of an elephant by a few thousand generations. The author apparently fails to explain clearly how this works in the language evolution. Though, one might guess that a coined word or a change in a word order at a time would lead to what we see as language today.

2) Using the language to trade hard-won knowledge (biology, crafts, tools, ecology, animal and plants' behavior with kin and friends makes a big difference in conveying the "exact message" through more complex grammar. This conveyance of knowledge of the environment, tools, animals and so on serves as a fitness enhancer and therefor leads to better survival of the human race.

3) Using the language for "cooperative efforts for survival" like forming alliances and exchanging information and commitments could have led to its evolution. In Pinker words:"A cognitive arms race could propel a linguistic one." In other more clear words he explains: " There could easily have been a selection for any edge in the ability to frame an offer so that it appears to present maximal benefit and minimal cost to the negotiating partner and in the ability to see through such endeavors and to formulate attractive counter proposals."

4) According to the anthropologists the tribal chiefs were both "gifted orators" and "highly polygynous". They would have easily and effectively woven the language into the politics, economics, tech, family, sex and friendship which were the key roles in the "individual reproductive success.

Three final learnings

Yesterday I finished this book: How Languages Are Learned and here are the last pieces of information I learned from it:

1. That the best time to have my child srart learning a second language is around the age of 10 when (s)he has already improved gramatically in his/her first language. The question is considering that my husband and I speak persian as our first language living in a country where the first language of people is English; which language would be my child's first?
2. That teachers like parents tend to change the structure of their spoken language intuitively according to the progress their students make in learning the second language. To me, that was an interesting finding.
3. That when teaching a second language, especially in the immersion contexts, teacher's correction of students' errors in the form of "recasts" often is received unnoticed and as part of the conversation. So the teachers should grab the students' attention by indicating directly before the correction what they are going to do; like the following suggested interaction: "I understand what you say, but here is how you can say it better...".
   

Babies language and Grammar gene

At the beginning of the language instinct's chapter 9, one gets flabbergasted at the possibility of babies starting to talk right out of their mommies' wombs. But somehow the author leaves the matter unsolved after mentioning two or three such incidents reported in some magazines. He simply dismisses the possibility for some scientific reasons that are tied to how languages are learned by children. Through the rest of the chapter we are introduced to a clear sketch of different stages a child go through in his mission to develop what is already embedded in him as language instinct. Our assumptions about the true effects of motherese on helping the child fix his incorrect grammar are adjusted when the author puts forward the idea that motherese is useful insofar as it provides a two way collaboration in using the language helping the child develop his own language system. The child does this through a process of trial and error building up the language trees in his mind starting from simple branches. For this he needs to reach into his innate repertoire of grammar and use the most general forms in all languages. He would notice them by hearing his parents' speech. So correcting a child's language would show no effect unless the child realizes the underlying grammar through the aforementioned process.

When the assumption of the child language development processes is done with, the author turns our attention to an interesting evolutionary question:"Why is that the ability to learn the language fades away as one matures. The answer has to do with how the evolution theory works. The evolution premise chooses which benefits should stay with humans at what costs. For example the old age is the cost we pay for the benefit of youth. Likewise the ability to learn a language in an early age is the benefit we get (so we enjoy having the language for a longer time during our life span) at the cost of not being to speak a second language fluently at a later age.

In chapter 10, we get to learn which parts of the brain are involved in storing and producing the language so far as the science can say. It is interesting to know that all the tiniest parts of the language from the words, phonemes, sounds and so on each with their subgroups have different locations allocated to them in different parts of the brain. These locations that vary in different individuals are interconnected through a very organized network of neurons and synopses which act as paths for transferring language data. These paths get strengthened in the child's brain each time they are correctly used to convey a message through language. The language instinct containing the general language grammar guides the correct use of the language and therefore forms the correct paths. So contrary to the wrong assumption mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, there is no grammar gene making all that to happen, but a network of neurons and synopses reinforced through the use of correct grammar made possible by the language instinct.

This hypothetical sophisticated circuitry and its highly organized utility explained by Pinker has hugely contributed to my quest on how languages are learned. Although it might not be true for second language learning, at least it gives me some understanding as how the brain might also work in the case of SLL. So if before I suspected that the memory does all the job, now I have a wider perspective thanks to Pinker.

As far as genes are concerned, we know with a high probability that some genes interfere with the language "circuitry" and its function in brain and produce Specific Language Impairments (SLI). The linguists say so, because they find no environmental evidence to affect the patients with SLI.

Having read these two chapters I have found myself curious to know more about the effect of evolution on language learning ability. As well I would like to follow more closely any scientific advances made on the neorolinguistics.