Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

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.

To reconcile the recursion-only hypothesis with the fact that vocal learning and imitation are distinctively human (among primates), HCF refer to a “capacity for vocal imitation” and assign it to the “broad language faculty” which subsumes non-languagespecific abilities.

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.

Thus “capacity for vocal imitation” in humans might better be described as a capacity to learn to produce speech, contradicting the idea that grammatical recursion is the only human-specific and language-specific component of the language faculty.

HCF’s second argument against human adaptations for speech production 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 while a descended larynx “undoubtedly plays an important role in speech production in modern humans, it need not have first evolved for this function” but may be an example of “preadaptation” (in which a trait originally was selected for a 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 was evolutionarily shaped to subserve human language.

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.

This trait, as expected, is specifically 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 owing to the fact that humans, unlike chimpanzees, lack snouts (Lieberman, 2003).

Finally, the descended larynx is part of a suite of vocal-tract modifications 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).

We do not know of other human capacities that have been shown to re?ect this formal organization, though it is it an interesting open question. Is phonology uniquely human?