Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-lrblm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-12T05:19:22.714Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Early human communication helps in understanding language evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2014

Daniela Lenti Boero
Daniela Lenti Boero*
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Human Sciences, University of Valle d'Aosta, 11010 Aosta, Italy. d.lentiboero@univda.ithttp://www.univda.it/lentiboerodaniela
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Building a theory on extant species, as Ackermann et al. do, is a useful contribution to the field of language evolution. Here, I add another living model that might be of interest: human language ontogeny in the first year of life. A better knowledge of this phase might help in understanding two more topics among the “several building blocks of a comprehensive theory of the evolution of spoken language” indicated in their conclusion by Ackermann et al., that is, the foundation of the co-evolution of linguistic motor skills with the auditory skills underlying speech perception, and the possible phylogenetic interactions of protospeech production with referential capabilities.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 6 , December 2014 , pp. 560 - 561
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

According to Ackermann et al., human language is a multicomponent process whose evolution must have operated at all life stages (Hogan Reference Hogan and Blass1988; Locke & Bogin Reference Locke and Bogin2006). In the first year of life, human sounds undergo a radical transformation: the substitution of the cry, an analog signal paralleling the dimension of infant's homeostatic imbalance (Gustafson et al. Reference Gustafson, Wood, Green, Barr, Hopkins and Green2000; Lenti Boero et al. Reference Lenti Boero, Volpe, Marcello, Bianchi and Lenti1998) and similar to mammalian signals by design (Lieberman et al. Reference Lieberman, Harris and Wolff1968; Reference Lieberman, Harris, Wolff and Russel1971), with articulated speech-like sounds and some meaningful words at the end of the first year (de Boysson-Bardie Reference de Boysson-Bardie2001; Lenti Boero & Bottoni Reference Lenti Boero and Bottoni2006; Oller Reference Oller2000). Thus, in the first few months of life millions of years of language evolution are summarized; and therefore some benchmark might be outlined to make hypotheses about the selective pressures at work.

The how question

A first point is the transformation of the analog signal “cry” into articulated sounds: From the age of 2 months, infants start producing very low intensity protophones which are mostly, but not all, vowel-like, and have more complex melodic contours than cries (Ruzza et al. Reference Ruzza, Rocca, Lenti Boero, Lenti, Avanzini, Faienza, Minciacchi, Lopez and Majno2003). In the months to follow sounds are produced with the entire vocal apparatus (mouth, lips, nose, and throat) (de Boysson-Bardie Reference de Boysson-Bardie2001; Oller Reference Oller2000). This points to the appearance of a better control of sound emission due not only to the maturation of the vocal apparatus, but also to a better nervous motor control of phonation. Vocal tract length in neonates is about 6 to 8 cm (Vorperian & Kent Reference Vorperian and Kent2007) and reaches 8.5 cm at 18 months, that is, 55% of adult size (Vorperian et al. Reference Vorperian, Wang, Chung, Schimek, Durtschi, Kent, Ziegert and Gentry2009). Animal and human studies suggest that the nervous motor control of infant cry is similar to that of monkeys: It involves the limbic system that initiates the cry, the midbrain structures that configure the response, and the brainstem that is responsible for the mechanics of the cry. The latter integrates the laryngeal and respiratory activity with the activation of the subroutines for fixed vocal patterns pre-programmed as an answer to external stimuli (Jürgens & Ploog Reference Jürgens, Ploog and Newman1988; Lenti Boero Reference Lenti Boero and Manfredi2009, Lester & Boukydis Reference Lester, Boukydis, Papoušek, Jurgens and Papoušek1992); thus a control for articulated sounds should only come from a rearrangement and a maturation of other centers allowing more motor freedom to lips, mandible, and tongue movements (Davis & MacNeilage Reference Davis, MacNeilage, Givòn and Malle2002).

The why question

Cry is an alarm signal with striking characteristics of loudness and long duration. It can communicate individuality, sex of the caller (Cismaresco & Montagner Reference Cismaresco and Montagner1990; Rocca & Lenti Boero Reference Rocca, Lenti Boero and Sàndor2005), and urgency to a recipient (Lenti Boero et al. Reference Lenti Boero, Miraglia, Ortalda, Nuti, Bottoni, Lenti, Daubney, Longhi, Lamont and Hargreaves2008). Now, imagine a hominid social group endowed with such communicative tool: A known individual could communicate alarm and urgency to group mates from a distance. This communication might have had a basic referentiality as in other mammalian species (Lenti Boero Reference Lenti Boero1992; Rasa Reference Rasa1986; Seyfarth & Cheney Reference Seyfarth and Cheney1980; Zuberbühler Reference Zuberbühler2000b). Why go further? Cries are fixed analog sounds and we know they might be aversive even for mothers (Frodi Reference Frodi, Lester and Boukydis1985; Frodi & Senchack Reference Frodi and Senchack1990; Lenti Boero et al. Reference Lenti Boero, Miraglia, Ortalda, Nuti, Bottoni, Lenti, Daubney, Longhi, Lamont and Hargreaves2008; Levitzky & Cooper Reference Levitzky and Cooper2000), while articulated sounds are considered music-like and very pleasant to the care giver (Papoušek & Papoušek Reference Papoušek, Papoušek and Lipsitt1981). Newborns having a capacity for music-like sounds might have been preferentially selected by parents (Locke Reference Locke2006), as a pilot experiment suggests (Lenti Boero & Bottoni Reference Lenti Boero and Bottoni2009). Those same infants might have been selected when adults (Hogan Reference Hogan and Blass1988) because they were able to use frequency modulated sounds in courtship in a kind of hominids' ancestral serenade, enabling them to communicate felt emotions (Banse & Scherer Reference Banse and Scherer1996).

Auditory-motor coevolution

All communication devices, human language included, imply the coevolution of both receiver and emitter, which is evident in the specialized adult language brain areas: Wernicke's and Broca's. During early development we know that infant perception of surrounding sounds, including language, is much more advanced than motor competence: Infants are capable of auditory streaming at 2–5 days old (Winkler et al. Reference Winkler, Kushnerenko, Horvath, Ceponiené, Fellman, Huotilainen, Näätänen and Sussman2003), and they discriminate vowel and phonetic sounds from the first month (Clarkson & Berg Reference Clarkson and Berg1983; Eimas et al. Reference Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk and Vigorito1971; Mehler et al. Reference Mehler, Juskzyc, Lamberz, Halsted, Bertoncini and Amiel-Tison1988; Teinonen et al. Reference Teinonen, Fellman, Näätänen, Alku and Huotilainen2009), sharing this capacity with many animal species: rhesus macaques, dogs, chinchilla, quails, and parrots (Adams et al. Reference Adams, Molfese and Betz1987; Bottoni et al. Reference Bottoni, Masin and Lenti Boero2009; Dewson Reference Dewson1964; Kluender et al. Reference Kluender, Diehl and Killeen1987; Kuhl & Miller Reference Kuhl and Miller1975; Miller Reference Miller and Bullock1977; Morse & Snowdon Reference Morse and Snowdon1975; Pepperberg Reference Pepperberg2007). On the melodic and musical side newborn infants recognize musical melodies heard before birth (Kisilevsky et al. Reference Kisilevsky, Hains, Jacquet, Granier-Deferre and Lecanuet2004). In addition, event-related brain potential (ERP) and magnetoencephalography MEG studies show that newborns can form expectation of a musical pitch and that infants detect substitution of musical notes (Tervaniemi & Huotilainen Reference Tervaniemi, Huotilainen, Avanzini, Faienza, Minciacchi, Lopez and Majno2003). Eventually, infants shape their cries' melodic contours upon their native language (Mampe et al. Reference Mampe, Friederici, Christophe and Wermke2009), thus showing a foundation for auditory-motor connection and imitation. Infants' sense of hearing is “encyclopaedic,” because it is open to all linguistic and music sounds. This capacity is lost from 5 to 6 months (de Boysson-Bardie Reference de Boysson-Bardie2001), when infants attach their attention to motherese (Oller Reference Oller2000), a nonexistent feature at the dawn of language. Thus, sound imitation by means of protophones might have been concentrated on surrounding sounds, especially those uttered by predator or prey animals, to convey information about their presence and denote them in the acoustic channel. Though many theories point to enhanced sociality (Dunbar Reference Dunbar1993), the possibility to refer to an object is still a core point for language evolution (Lenti Boero & Bottoni Reference Lenti Boero and Bottoni2006) and might have been a key factor for the selection for articulated sounds emission.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research going into the preparation of this commentary was supported in 1995, from 2001 to 2003, and from 2005 to 2007 by grants from MURST (Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica), and by funding from the University of Valle d'Aosta from 2009 to 2013.

References

Adams, C. L., Molfese, D. L. & Betz, J. C. (1987) Electrophysiological correlates of categorical speech perception for voicing contrasts in dogs. Developmental Neuropsychology 3(3–4):175–89.Google Scholar
Banse, R. & Scherer, K. R. (1996) Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(3):614–36.Google Scholar
Bottoni, L., Masin, S. & Lenti Boero, D. (2009) Vowel-like sound structure in an African Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus) vocal production. The Open Behavioral Science Journal 3:1–16.Google Scholar
Cismaresco, A. S. & Montagner, H. (1990) Mother's discrimination of their neonates' cry in relation to cry acoustics: The first week of life. Early Child Development and Care 65:3–13.Google Scholar
Clarkson, M. G. & Berg, W. K. (1983) Cardiac orienting and vowel discrimination in newborns: Crucial stimulus parameters. Child Development 54:162–71.Google Scholar
Davis, B. L. & MacNeilage, P. F. (2002) The internal structure of the syllable. In: The evolution of language out of pre-language, ed. Givòn, T. & Malle, B. F., pp. 135–54. John Benjamins.Google Scholar
de Boysson-Bardie, B. (2001) How language comes to children. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dewson, J. H. (1964) Speech sound discrimination by cats. Science 144:555–56.Google Scholar
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993) Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16:681–94.Google Scholar
Eimas, P. D., Siqueland, E. R., Jusczyk, P. & Vigorito, J. (1971) Speech perception in infants. Science 171:303–306.Google Scholar
Frodi, A. (1985) When empathy fails: Aversive infant crying and child abuse. In: Infant crying: Theoretical and research perspective, ed. Lester, B. M. & Boukydis, C. F. Z., pp. 263–78. Plenum Press.Google Scholar
Frodi, A. & Senchack, M. (1990) Verbal and behavioral responsiveness to the cries of atypical infants. Child Development 61:76–84.Google Scholar
Gustafson, G. E., Wood, R. M. & Green, J. A. (2000) Can we hear the causes of infants' crying? In: Crying as a sign, a symptom, and a signal: Clinical, emotional and developmental aspects of infant and toddler crying, ed. Barr, R. G., Hopkins, B. & Green, J. A., pp. 8–22. Mac Keith Press/Wiley.Google Scholar
Hogan, J. A. (1988) Cause and function in the development of behavior systems. In: Handbook of Behavioral Neurobiology, vol. 9: Developmental psychobiology and behavioral ecology, ed. Blass, E. M., pp. 63–106. Plenum.Google Scholar
Jürgens, U. & Ploog, D. (1988) On the motor control of monkey calls. In: The physiological control of mammalian vocalization, ed. Newman, J. D., pp. 7–19. Plenum Press.Google Scholar
Kisilevsky, B. S., Hains, S. M. J., Jacquet, A.-Y., Granier-Deferre, D. & Lecanuet, J. P. (2004) Maturation of fetal responses to music. Developmental Science 7(5):550–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kluender, K. R., Diehl, R. L. & Killeen, P. R. (1987) Japanese quail can learn phonetic categories. Science 237:1195–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuhl, P. K. & Miller, J. D. (1975) Speech perception by chinchilla: Voiced voiceless distinction in alveolar plosive consonants. Science 190:69–72.Google Scholar
Lenti Boero, D. (1992) Alarm calls in marmots: Evidence for semantic communication. Ethology, Ecology, Evolution 4(2):125–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenti Boero, D. (2009) Neurofunctional spectrographic analysis of the cry of brain injured asphyxiated infants: A physioacoustic and clinical study. In: Models and analysis of vocal emissions for biomedical applications, ed. Manfredi, C., pp. 3–6, Università di Firenze-Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
Lenti Boero, D. & Bottoni, L. (2006) From crying to words: Unique or multilevel selective pressures? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29(3):292–93.Google Scholar
Lenti Boero, D. & Bottoni, L. (2009) Contrasting early cry and early babbling: Results from a pilot study. In: Book of Abstracts, pp. 25–27. University of Torun. Available at: http://www.protolang.umk.pl/2009/public/files/book_of_abstracts.pdf Google Scholar
Lenti Boero, D., Miraglia, S. Ortalda, F. Nuti, G. Bottoni, L. & Lenti, C. (2008) Biomusicological approach in infant cry listening. In: Musical Development and Learning: Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Developmental Psychology of Music, Roehampton University, England, 10–12 September, 2008, ed. Daubney, A., Longhi, E., Lamont, A. & Hargreaves, D., pp. 162–65. GK Publishing, Hull. (ISBN: 978-0-9553329-1-3).Google Scholar
Lenti Boero, D., Volpe, C., Marcello, A., Bianchi, C. & Lenti, C. (1998) Newborns crying in different situational contexts: Discrete or graded signals? Perceptual and Motor Skills 86:1123–40.Google Scholar
Lester, B. M. & Boukydis, C. F. Z. (1992) No language but a cry. In: Nonverbal vocal communication. Comparative and developmental approaches, ed. Papoušek, H., Jurgens, U. & Papoušek, M., pp. 145–73. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Levitzky, S. & Cooper, R. (2000) Infant colic syndrome maternal fantasies of aggression and infanticide. Clinical Pediatrics 39(7):395–400.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P., Harris, K. S. & Wolff, P. (1968) Newborn infant cry in relation to nonhuman primate vocalizations. Journal of Acoustic Society of America A 44:365.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P., Harris, K. S., Wolff, P. & Russel, L. H. (1971) Newborn infant cry and nonhuman primate vocalization. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 14:718–27.Google Scholar
Locke, J. L. (2006) Parental selection of vocal behavior. Crying, cooing, babbling, and the evolution of language. Human Nature 17(2):155–68.Google Scholar
Locke, J. L. & Bogin, B. (2006) Language and life history: A new perspective on the development and evolution of human language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29(3):301–11.Google Scholar
Mampe, B., Friederici, A. D., Christophe, A. & Wermke, K. (2009) Newborns' cry melody is shaped by their native language. Current Biology 19:1994–97.Google Scholar
Mehler, J., Juskzyc, P., Lamberz, G., Halsted, N., Bertoncini, J. & Amiel-Tison, C. (1988) A precursor of language acquisition in young infants. Cognition 29:143–78.Google Scholar
Miller, J. D. (1977) Perception of speech sounds in animals: evidence for speech processing by mammalian auditory mechanisms. In: Dahlem Workshop on Recognition of Complex Acoustic Signals. Life Sciences Report, vol. 5, ed. Bullock, T., pp. 49–58. Abakon.Google Scholar
Morse, P. A. & Snowdon, C. T. (1975) An investigation of categorical speech discrimination by rhesus monkeys. Perception and Psychophysics 17:9–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oller, D. K. (2000) The emergence of the speech capacity. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Papoušek, M. & Papoušek, H. (1981) Musical elements in the infant's vocalization: Their significance for communication, cognition, and creativity. In: Advances in infancy research, vol. 1, ed. Lipsitt, L. P., pp. 163–224. Ablex.Google Scholar
Pepperberg, I. M. (2007) Grey parrots do not always “parrot”: The roles of imitation and phonological awareness in the creation of new labels from existing vocalizations. Language Science 29:1–13.Google Scholar
Rasa, O. A. E. (1986) Coordinated vigilance in dwarf mongoose family groups: The “watchman's song” hypothesis and the costs of guarding. Ethology 71(4):340–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rocca, F. & Lenti Boero, D. (2005) Sex differences in human infant cry: A comparative view. In: Abstracts of the XXIX International Ethological Conference, ed. Sàndor, R., p. 131. Késult a Codex Print Nyondàbam, Budapest.Google Scholar
Ruzza, B., Rocca, F., Lenti Boero, D. & Lenti, C. (2003) Investigating the musical qualities of early infant sounds. In: The neurosciences and music, ed. Avanzini, G., Faienza, C., Minciacchi, D., Lopez, L. & Majno, L., pp. 527–29. New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Seyfarth, R. M. & Cheney, D. L. (1980) Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: Evidence of predator classification and semantic communication. Science 210:801–803.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Teinonen, T., Fellman, V., Näätänen, R., Alku, P. & Huotilainen, M. (2009) Statistical language learning in neonates revealed by event-related brain potentials. BMC Neuroscience 10:21. doi: 10.1186/1471-2202-10-21.Google Scholar
Tervaniemi, M. & Huotilainen, M. (2003) The promises of change-related brain potentials in cognitive neuro science of music. In: The neurosciences and music, ed. Avanzini, G., Faienza, C., Minciacchi, D., Lopez, L. & Majno, L., pp. 29–39. New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Vorperian, H. K. & Kent, R. D. (2007) Vowel acoustic space development in children: A synthesis of acoustic and anatomic data. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research 50(6):1510–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vorperian, H. K., Wang, S., Chung, M. K., Schimek, E. M., Durtschi, R. B., Kent, R. D., Ziegert, A. J. & Gentry, L. R. (2009) Anatomic development of the oral and pharyngeal portions of the vocal tract: An imaging study. Journal of Acoustic Society of America 125:1666–78.Google Scholar
Winkler, I., Kushnerenko, E., Horvath, J., Ceponiené, R., Fellman, V., Huotilainen, M., Näätänen, R. & Sussman, E. (2003) Newborn infants can organize the auditory world. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 100(2):11812–15.Google Scholar
Zuberbühler, K. (2000b) Referential labelling in Diana monkeys. Animal Behaviour 59(5):917–27.Google Scholar