[MUSIC PLAYING]
Stanford University.
Let's get started.
We switch to our next subject,
where the overall plan
could be summarized
like that, as you well
know by now-- looking
at the language,
looking at the biological
roots of the interactions
with the environment,
all the deal
that we have under
our belts by now.
Same strategy as usual,
starting off with the behavior,
and then working our way back.
First off, two announcements
before I forget.
One is we're not going to
have a lecture on depression.
The remaining lectures will
be Wednesday schizophrenia,
Friday is biology of religion,
and the following Wednesday
is the final lecture
personality disorders
individual differences.
And apropos of that, not
positive at the moment,
but I'm leaning towards
the last two lectures
not being taped for
a number of reasons.
OK, also one final
point from Wednesday,
from Friday's lecture,
the complexity one,
back to that business, swarm
intelligence, and being
able to solve the traveling
salesman problem for you
with remarkable efficiency,
that business again
about how the cortex wires
up that two generation
business of cells,
the first cells being
those radial glia
that established
sort of a super structure,
the second generation
then being the neurons that
do the random laundering, hit
and grow up there, and then
wire up in these optimal nodes.
What you also get is a version
intrinsic in that it is solving
the traveling salesman problem.
If you think about
it, if you've got
20, 30 billion cortical
neurons there, and all of them
are wiring up to
10,000 other neurons,
depending on how
efficiently you pack it,
you could have a hundred
gazillion miles of axons
that you have to grow, or just
a couple of kilometers worth.
And, again, the pressure is
to come up with the traveling
salesman efficiency to be
able to pull off the wiring
that you want with the minimal
amount of expenditure of axons.
And what you see when
you look at the way
the cortex does wire
up people working
on this showing remarkably
efficient solutions coming out
of that brain's equivalent
of doing swarm intelligence.
So language, starting off with
our usual strategy-- starting
off with what the
behaviors look like.
And the place to
begin is with some
of the universals of language.
Across all the different human
languages, approximately 6,000
of them, and all sorts
of depressing news
about that to come.
First off, something that
they all have in common
is semanticity-- the
notion that there
is an endless array,
an infinite array,
of sounds that could
be generated by voices.
And what all languages do is
bucket them, as per usual,
break up this continuum of
sounds into units of meaning,
and where meaning corresponds
to the unit itself.
The notion of that
being a pair of people
we'll more about later--
Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky,
pointing out that even
though you could generate
an infinite number of words, you
could never generate 6.5 words.
That's part of what
semanticity is about.
Not only do you break
continuum of sounds
into buckets of meaning.
But they are discrete buckets.
You cannot have partial words.
Also, what else is
universal to languages?
The possibility of
embedded clauses.
And ones that get
considerably more complicated,
all languages not
only have a can do b.
But they all have a
under this condition,
but not under that condition,
and sometimes on Tuesdays
but never on Thursdays can do b.
All of them will
have embedded clauses
like that, that
being a universal.
What else?
All of them show
recursion, which
is a really important property.
Old term for it would be
something like generativity,
which is all languages have
a finite number of words.
And all languages
have the potential
to generate an infinite
number of combinations.
And all you have to
do see that is come up
with what you believe
is the longest sentence
in all of history.
And all you have to do is put
at the beginning of it Bill said
that, blah, blah.
And once that's
there, then you have
to have Jane said
that Bill said that.
And, thus, you have an
infinite generativity.
All languages, finite
number of words,
infinite number of combinations.
What else?
Very important feature
of human language
when we get to comparing it
with animal communication--
displacement.
We can talk about
stuff from the past.
We can talk about
stuff from the future.
We can talk about stuff on
the other side of the planet.
We can talk about
things that are
emotionally distant from us.
And as we'll see with animals,
the overwhelming majority
of animal communication
is about emotion.
I am upset.
I am angry.
I am afraid.
I am horny.
I am hungry.
I am whatever it is.
Humans, instead, can talk
about chess strategies--
displacement,
displacement from emotion.
Related to that, there's
arbitrariness of language.
What do I mean by this?
In virtually any
animal species that
is communicating, for example,
I am terrified out of my mind,
it's going to involve something
resembling that species'
equivalent of screaming and
emoting loudly, and saying,
ah, or some equivalent of that.
We are able to say, I am
feeling a deeply corrosive sense
of disquietude at the moment.
We don't have the actual
words being tied inextricably
into their meaning.
You cannot look
at a word and say,
whoa that word has an awful lot
of right angles in the letters
there.
It must be a word that
tells you something
about this type of philosophy.
It's arbitrary relationship
between the signal
and the message.
And that is universal
to human languages.
What else is universal?
The ability to have this
lecture, meta communication,
to communicate
about communication,
to be able to step
back from language
and discuss it in and of itself.
And one extreme version
of it is to have
people who devote their
times to inventing language.
Two examples-- one is the French
have some national institution
which is meant to save
the French language
from the sullying
effects of words
from all sorts of
other languages.
And they make all
sorts of rulings
as to what words are now
allowed to become French.
And I don't know what they
decided about le Big Mac,
whether that came in.
But this is a body that
studies and decides what words
should be part of its language.
Similarly, there is a
college in Washington DC
called Gallaudet College,
which is for deaf individuals.
And it's ground zero for
American Sign Language.
It's the place where some band
of sign language elder poobahs
sit around and decide on
new words in that language.
As we'll see, that's not
a very effective strategy.
But nonetheless, that
is meta communication.
Every single language has the
ability to talk about language.
Every single language
and its practitioners
use motherese, use baby talk.
Baby talk where typically the
mother, but not exclusively so,
will speak to a child
in a high-pitched voice
emphasizing melodic and
vowel aspects of it,
repeating phrases, focusing very
closely in on the baby's face.
All of these languages
have motherese.
And the question becomes,
is motherese about emotion,
or is it about instruction?
And what you see is some real
similarities between motherese
and how people often
talk to their pets.
And you're usually not
trying to teach your pets how
to speak your native language.
One difference,
though, with speaking
to pets you get the repetitive,
high-pitched voice stuff.
You don't get the close clarity.
You do not make a point
of making the sound slowly
and clearly.
You are not teaching
your dog language there.
So that is a difference.
Nonetheless, in every single
language, you get motherese.
Next, you have
what's going to be
an issue throughout
when trying to make
sense of the biology of this.
When we're looking
at what's going
on in the brain in
that sort of thing,
is language in those
cases what you're
doing with your lips,
your larynx, your throat?
Is the language mostly
about the motoric aspects?
This is a system involving
the generation of sound
and the reception of sound.
Or is it more about cognition?
Is it more about the
conceptual structure?
And the general
view in the field
is it's overwhelmingly
about the latter.
And some of the strongest
evidence for that
comes from sign languages--
American Sign Language.
American Sign Language, which
shows all sorts of very subtle,
deep properties that are
similar to spoken language
amid it not being
a spoken language,
and amid using completely
different systems in the brain.
One example of this-- you
look at babies who are born
deaf and will be learning
American Sign Language.
And right around the age
that hearing infants begin
to babble with their
spoken language,
deaf babies begin to babble
in American Sign Language,
and are starting to
make signs with that.
Just like hearing babies, they
tend to babble that most people
before going to sleep.
It's the same property.
There is not a rule
that says, somewhere
around nine months
of age, begin making
sounds that are fragments of
stuff you've been hearing.
Somewhere around
nine months of age,
begin to practice fragments of
whatever communicative system
you are being exposed to.
Similar evidence
that language is
about the cognitive
structure and not
about lips and tongue--
when older individuals who
are native speakers of
American Sign Language
happen to have a stroke, they
can get the exact same sort
of communication
disorders in sign language
that speaking individuals do.
And we'll see that in
more detail, what some
of these pathologies look like.
It's coded for in very
similar parts of the brain.
Both spoken language
and sign language
have something called prosody,
which we will hear more about.
Prosody is not the
words in a language.
Prosody is the tone, what you're
doing with your face, what
you're doing with your hands,
the gestures, your body
posture, all the things
that are communicated
through those routes
there, all the things
which virtually by
definition-- email,
you can't do prosody with,
beyond little smiley face
things.
That's about the
limits of prosody.
You find prosody in
American Sign Language,
people doing very different
facial expressions.
One classic example
of sign language
prosody is if somebody
in American Sign Language
is describing a conversation
between two people they will
subtly shift their body as
they're going from one person
to the other there.
This is prosody.
This is reinforcing
the information.
This is a dialogue that this
is exactly what spoken language
people do in terms
of that prosody,
the same thing in
American Sign Language.
Next, amazing bit of evidence
from ASL-- American Sign
Language-- that this is about
cognition, not about lips
and tongue of what makes
it a language, which is you
look at someone
who is born deaf,
and where ASL is
their native language.
And when you are
signing to them,
their auditory cortex
activates, the same regions
that do some of the initial
processing of hearing language.
Again, it's about the
deep concepts within.
It
More evidence-- you get accents
in American Sign Language.
And, apparently, this
consists of different speeds,
slurring, that sort of thing.
And there's regional
accents in ASL.
And I have no idea if
it matches in some ways
the accents of the
spoken English there.
My guess is no, but
you have accents there.
You have poetry in American
Sign Language, where
you will have a sign that
is some movement followed
by this movement.
And I'm obviously
just making this up.
And then you can
have this movement
followed by the same movement.
That counts as rhyming words.
You get poetry in
American Sign Language.
And you get storage of
American Sign Language when
it is a second language in
the same sorts of regions
of the cortex as when people
get a second spoken language.
This is not merely
about languages what
you do with sounds and hearing.
Language is, instead, about
the underlying cognitive
structures.
OK, cool thing, if you ever
start learning American Sign
Language, almost certainly
somewhere on the first day
they're going to show you what a
cool language it is by teaching
you the following word.
This is always
the first word you
need to learn in
American Sign Language.
OK just to show you
building blocks of it,
this is the word for milk.
OK, you can kind of see some
iconic stuff going on there, as
to this means milk.
So what does this word mean
in American Sign Language?
Pasteurized milk.
Who said that?
How do you know?
Do you know it already?
It's his favorite joke.
Oh my God.
How's that-- identical
twins separated at birth.
Do you flush the
toilet before you go?
OK, yes, giving it away,
past your eyes milk, oh, oh.
Can you believe that?
You better guess the folks
at that Gallaudet College
went out and celebrated
the rest of the day when
somebody came up with that one.
Yes, you can have puns in
American Sign Language.
Yeah, it's you and me there
with the pasteurized milk sign.
Yes, the very first thing
you learn in most cases.
This is a real language.
You have emotion.
You have physical prosody.
You have accents.
You have puns.
You have a poetry.
And it's got nothing to
do with lips and tongue.
And as we'll see
more and more here
about the neurobiology of it, it
will be more and more evidence
for that.
Thus, we now shift over
to the neurobiology.
What's going on in the brain,
in terms of language production,
language comprehension?
Right off the bat, there is
this sort of irritating debate
that goes on in the field, which
is how modular of a function
is language in the brain?
Which is another way of
saying neurobiologically,
how fancy and
separate is language
from the rest of the cognitive
stuff that the cortex does?
And what we
certainly just argued
with ASL is insofar as
language might be a relatively
isolated module, it's
sure not a module
that's very concerned
about tongues and ears.
It's about the
cognitive elements.
How different are
the cortical devices
devoted to making
sense of language,
different from the
other cortical regions?
And at one extreme,
there's a view
that talks about the cortex, the
brain, as a Swiss army knife,
that it has all these separate
little functions, language
being one of the most
isolated, identifiable ones.
My sense-- and I
know next to nothing
about it-- is that this
argument doesn't stand up.
Here's the two things
that people always
cite when discussing
how much is language
a cortically modular function.
First one is the disease we
heard about the other week,
that Williams Syndrome.
And that's that strange
genetic disorder of you
have these kids who are
wildly verbal, and expressive,
and warm, and affectionate,
and have that weird vasopressin
oxytocin world
going on with them.
They're extremely
adept with language.
Yet, they typically have IQs in
the borderline retarded range,
around 70 or so.
Whoa, how can you have
functional language
amid everything
else being a mess?
This is an argument for
language as a distinct module.
Conversely, you have things
called specific language
impairments, which are also
heritable disorders where
you have individuals, where you
have pedigrees, where people
have a huge amount
of time producing
language,
comprehending language.
And this is not
sensory problems.
This is people having
perfectly normal IQs--
oo, separate module.
The arguments that both Williams
and the selective language
impairment disorders
argue for a module
breaks down with
the fact that when
you look at language
and the Williams kids,
they're very fluent, and
very generative of words.
But there's not a huge
amount of meaning in there.
And, likewise, the people
with the specific language
impairments, it's
turning out it's
usually not in the normal IQ
range in these individuals.
So I think, generally, there's
this pretty strong argument
against language
being a strict module.
Nonetheless, people who actually
think about this for a living
as opposed to spout off, this
is a very, very controversial
issue.
More, the next most
characteristic thing
about the neurobiology of
language is it's lateralized.
Lateralization of brain
function-- the notion
that somewhere in your
cortex, your cortex
could be doing
something or other,
and it turns out that it will
only do that something or other
on one side of your brain.
There will be specializations
on different sides of the brain.
That goes back to last Friday.
That's one of the ways you gotta
solve the traveling salesman
problem.
If you have these massive
numbers of neurons
in the cortex, you gotta
start inventing lateralization
to save yourself some axons.
And it's not until you
get to monkeys and apes
that you see substantial
amounts of lateralization.
Human brain lateralization
for language
is probably the most
distinctive lateralization
we've got other than handedness.
And for that, we begin to
look at the relevant brain
regions going on here.
How, first, do you see that
brain regions, that language
production, language
comprehension,
is carried out by only
one side of the brain?
Our usual, ever-reliable
research technique,
which is getting people whose
heads are damaged in accidents
or warfare and seeing, you get
damage on one side of the head
and people are far more likely
to get language problems
afterward than the other.
What turns out to be the
case is about 90% of people
have language lateralization to
the left side of their brain.
As we'll see, not so
fast, it's not that clean.
But nonetheless, you
begin to see that.
Another test,
another way of seeing
that which is considerably
more subtle than somebody
getting their head bashed in, is
something called the WADA test.
The WADA test where,
weirdly enough,
you anesthetize one half
of somebody's brain.
You infuse anesthetic
into one of the carotids.
And you put one
hemisphere to sleep.
And what you see is you
do it on the left side.
And most people, they lose
their language production.
And you do it on the other side,
and other stuff disappears.
Whoa, that must be a fun
thing to do at parties.
When does this happen?
First off, it is very brief.
It lasts for only a few minutes
or so until the anesthetic
clears.
But what you do that for is in
circumstances where somebody
has intractable epilepsy.
And they're good to
go in and cut out
part of the cortex
in cases where
it is cortically localized.
And if it's near what might
be the language center
of the brain, they go in.
And they do a WADA
test first to see,
is this person doing language
on left side or right side?
If it's the side where
we're doing the surgery,
we've got to be that
much more conservative
in terms of getting this
out, getting the tumor out,
whatever.
It gives you a sense
of whether that's
going for the language center.
And what you do is the
person is sitting there.
And they're supposed
to be reading.
Or you're reciting
something to them.
And they're supposed
to be writing it down,
or some such a language-y thing.
And you infuse a barbiturate
into one carotid.
And, suddenly, 10 seconds
later, they can't speak.
Or they're not
understanding language.
And you've now
identified that that's
the side with the
language lateralization.
I'm not sure.
But my guess would
be that the WADA test
is going to disappear soon
because you could do it just
with brain imaging.
You look at someone.
You give them some sort of
linguistic something or other.
And if one side of the cortex
activates preferentially
in the areas we're
about to hear about,
you've just identified the side.
So the relevant
areas-- very broadly,
there are three regions in
the brain, the cortex, that
are most pertinent to language.
First one is called
Broca's area.
Broca's area, which is sitting
on the cortex in a region
called the parietal lobe.
And simply what it is is
it's the bottommost part
of the strip of the cortex
that does motoric stuff, moving
your body.
And by the time you're
getting down here,
what this is about
is moving your lips,
moving your larynx,
language production.
We've already seen it's not
just going to be about that.
If people with American Sign
Language get a stroke here,
and they get problems
producing this.
But, nonetheless, on
the first crude pass,
it's the part of the cortex
devoted to motoric regulation
of lips, tongues, throat,
larynx, et cetera.
So what happens when
you get damage there?
General term, an aphasia.
Aphasia is the broad
neurological term
for being unable to
communicate effectively
because of a neurological hit.
You get a Broca's aphasia,
a production aphasia.
This is someone who now
has a great deal of trouble
generating meaningful
words, meaningful messages.
It comes out haltingly.
The actual content
can be quite impaired.
Amid them, being relatively
good at comprehending.
Then just south of
there, you've got
this area called Wernicke's
area, again named
for famous poo-ba in that area.
And this is right near some
primary auditory cortex.
What's Wernicke's about?
Of course, obviously it's
about language comprehension.
And you get someone with
stroke damage to there,
you get a Wernicke's aphasia.
And you get someone who just is
fluidly generating of language
they can't comprehend.
They can't comprehend
directions.
Put your right
hand on your left,
whatever, that sort of thing.
But what you also see
is they're very fluidly
generating language that often
makes no sense whatsoever
because they are
not comprehending
anything spoken around them.
They produce what is
often called a vegetable
salad, a language salad.
Somebody knows?
Word salad, yes.
OK, you guys come
down teach this.
I'm going to go back
there and check my emails.
OK, so word salad-- so you got
Wernicke's, you got Broca's.
You got Wernicke's
aphasias, Broca's aphasias.
And then you've got this
area, the arcuate fasciculus,
which was not named for somebody
named arcuate fasciculus.
But it's the bundle, it's the
set, of projections, the axons,
connecting Wernicke's
with Broca's.
So what's that about?
It's about connecting
comprehension
to language production.
In theory, if you had an
absolutely pure wiping out
of the arcuate fasciculus, and
both these guys were completely
intact, you would get
somebody who could completely
understand language.
You could give them complex
instructions, what to do.
They would be able to follow it.
This would be somebody who could
produce language perfectly, say
anything they want to.
This would be someone
who is incapable of going
from Wernicke's
comprehension to production.
You could not successfully
say to the person,
say the word cat.
They could not connect this
auditory command to production
there.
So that would be a pure
arcuate fasciculus damage.
Not surprisingly, you
hardly ever see anybody
with stroke damage causing
an aphasia where it's cleanly
only in one of these areas.
Almost everyone
who gets an aphasia
has some sort of a mixed
Broca's, Wernicke's connection
conduction aphasia there.
It's always a mess.
And in the past, but I don't
think we have time for it this
year, I would bring in a tape to
listen to a number of different
types of individuals with
aphasias post-stroke,
hearing a relatively pure
Broca's, a relatively pure
Wernicke's.
But those are quite rare.
OK, so those are some of
the relevant brain regions.
Production, what you've
got there is motoric stuff.
OK, so back to--
we've just defined
that this is the
part of the brain
having to do with your lips and
tongues, and this deal again.
This is about hearing.
So what about
people who are deaf,
born deaf, with
American Sign Language?
These are the
areas that light up
when they are
hearing, when they are
seeing, when they are being
spoken to in American Sign
Language.
This is the area,
Broca's, that activates
when they are communicating.
What you've done here
is hijacked-- you know,
this is traditionally
about tongues, and lips,
and all of that.
But we can hijack it for a
very symbolic way of doing
the same sort of cognitions.
Yeah, this part of the
brain is for somebody
sticking a pin in your finger.
But it's been hijacked to
feeling the world's pain.
It's making use of new ways that
we're doing stuff here, just
jamming it into old sites.
You're going to try to
communicate using your hands.
And, suddenly,
you're going to have
to make use of some of
these spoken regions
there if you don't speak
a language, so that.
More examples of how ASL is
about the content rather than
the motoric aspects-- take
someone who is speaking.
And they're having to recite
a bunch of words quickly.
And you're checking
them for accuracy.
And you give them a
distractor that they
have to do at the same time.
They have to tap their feet,
their left foot, three times,
and once on the right,
three times, once--
and your performance gets
screwed up at that point.
It's not as accurate, because
you're also paying attention
to this.
Now do the same thing with
someone with American Sign
Language.
Give them the same
foot distractor.
If American Sign
Language is heavily
about it's just stuff you're
doing with your hands,
it's just another way of
communicating spoken language,
all it's really about is
tongues, and lips, and throat.
American Sign Language, what
it's about is motoric stuff.
If it's motoric, it should
be screwed up by this task
to a greater extent than people
that are messed up when they're
using a spoken language.
It's messed up to the
exact same extent.
The pertinent thing
about this is not
what you're doing
with your muscles.
It's the same
cognitive structures
that you're tapping into
with the spoken language.
Finally, in that realm, there is
some weirdo whistling language
that's used on some island
in the Canary Islands
that people have been
whistling at each other
and at their sheep for
centuries and centuries.
And, apparently,
it actually fits
some of the profiles of
what a true language is.
There's a very complex
structure to it.
And what you've
seen in one study
so far is when people
are producing it,
they're lighting up here.
When they were hearing it,
they're lighting up Wernicke's.
Again, basic off the
rack hominid for a long,
long time, this is about
ears, this is about tongues.
And, instead, it's about
the abstract, the symbolic,
elements of language.
Demonstrating that
further, depending
on where you get
the stroke damage,
there's this whole world
of bizarre aphasias,
or disorders of communication.
You get alexias.
You get agraphias-- people
who can speak, can comprehend,
can read.
They simply cannot
write anymore.
People who can do
all those things,
they simply can't read anymore.
People who lose the capacity
to recognize certain letters,
certain types of words, gerunds.
There's some gerund
aphasia out there,
whatever a gerund is,
which I once knew.
You get all these sorts
of specializations
by having far smaller strokes,
all these subroutines.
Apparently, there has
been at least one case
of an elderly sailor
who had a stroke, who
had learned semaphores,
which I guess
was some big thing in
World War II or something,
and had a semaphore aphasia.
This is not a very common
hominid event to have happened.
This is all the different ways.
This is lips, ears.
It's reading.
it's writing.
It's semaphores.
It's pantomime.
It's who knows what.
It's much, much more
abstract than that.
OK, so you've got
the left cortex,
with its specialization.
In 90% of cases, you get
slightly different localization
of Wernicke's and Broca's, in
particular the areas related
to reading when you
have a language which
instead of an alphabet
is a pictograph language.
For example, Chinese,
a pictograph language,
you get slightly different
areas of activation, and thus
slightly different
areas of strokes
will produce a Chinese
Broca's aphasia, or an alexia,
that sort of thing.
Doing language as pictures,
as opposed to doing language
of building blocks of
individual letters,
slightly localized
differently in the brain.
So the brain is completely
devoting its energy
on the left side to
language in 90% of people.
Lateralized, you don't have
a Broca's or a Wernicke's
on the right side.
Destroy the equivalent areas,
you do nothing to language.
Cut through the brain in cross
section, and on this side
the cortex will be
a little bit thicker
than the cortex on the right
side, the equivalent area.
So language is all about
the left hemisphere.
So, of course, this is
not true, because you
get the prosody stuff
in the right hemisphere.
That's where you get the
coding for tone of voice.
That's the part of
the brain that's
telling you if the
person is having
a sarcastic tone in their
voice when they're saying that.
That's the area that's picking
up on facial expressions, body
language.
All of that is right
hemisphere in 90% of people.
And what you see
is stroke damage,
you can get prosody
disorders as well.
People are perfectly normal in
their auditory comprehension,
their reading, writing,
their production,
all that sort of stuff.
But they can't understand
context of spoken language
from body posture, from tone
of voice, things of that sort.
So you can have prosody
damage, right cortex.
Next, more pertinent
areas in the brain--
a subcortical region
called the basal ganglia.
What's the basal ganglia about?
It tells a lot of your
muscles what to do.
And, for example, when
your frontal cortex
has finished wrestling with
all the limbic regions,
a lot of what the outcome is, is
activation of the basal ganglia
making you do something.
Oh, go do the harder but right
thing, that sort of thing.
Basal ganglia is
about motor stuff.
OK, duh, this is not surprising.
This is not terribly
interesting.
Obviously, language
involves motoric stuff,
whether it's spoken, whether
it's signed, whatever.
So, obviously, the
parts of the brain
that generate relevant
muscle movement,
they're going to get activated,
also they're involved.
Just a couple of things that
makes this basal ganglia more
interesting, though, which
is the next time you're
talking on the phone or watching
somebody talk on the phone,
see the frequency with which
they're making hand gestures.
You're hand gesturing
under those circumstances.
You're hand gesturing
to your GPS system
when it's talking to you.
You're hand gesturing in
all sorts of circumstances
where there is no visual
communication going on.
Blind individuals, when they
are speaking to each other use
the same sorts of hand gestures
as seeing individuals do.
It's not just, OK, we've got to
get the basal ganglia in here
because we've got to
do something or other
with our jaw and our lips.
Something about the
emotiveness is centrally
tied into the motoric output.
Because it's impossible
to talk on the phone
and not to be gesturing
with your hands.
If you're talking
about anything that's
at all sort of activated,
or aroused, or emotional,
your hands are going like crazy.
And it makes no sense.
The basal ganglia is really
central to all of this.
Next, finally, in terms
of a brain structure,
the rest of the limbic system.
Totally clear what
that one's going
to be about, which is
the limbic system has
nothing to do with language.
The limbic system has to do
with screaming your head off
if you're terrified.
The limbic system has
to do with singing.
The limbic system,
it's emotional.
It's got nothing to
do with, OK, let's
embed a clause here now in
order to express some emotion.
And what you see is, initially,
a nice clean dichotomy
with that.
And a remarkable
thing you will see.
So somebody has had a stroke.
And they've got a
Broca's aphasia,
which is to say they're
having a production aphasia.
It is really next to
impossible for them to speak.
It is halting.
It is broken.
They can't get the words.
It is insanely frustrating.
And one of the things
that speech therapists do
is get people to sing what
it is they're trying to say,
because if you make
sort of a running leap
there and start singing it
before you think about, oh,
here I am singing the
menu at the restaurant
for the customers here,
before you start doing that,
if you can jump quickly into it,
people with Broca's production
aphasias can sing, often,
what they want to communicate
because they are sending it
down south subcortically,
and looping it through
limbic language areas,
sort of marinating it in
some emotional content--
music in this case--
and out it comes.
Not surprisingly,
accuracy is not
so hot under those
circumstances.
But it's a lot better than when
you've got the Broca's aphasia
not being able to speak at all.
So that's pretty interesting.
Next thing that suggests that
the limbic system has something
central to do with
language, you look
at people with
Tourette's disease, which
we're going to hear a
lot about on Wednesday.
And Tourette's
disease, everybody
knows what Tourette's
disease is about.
It's the disease where
you curse uncontrollably.
As we'll see, there's much
more going on than that.
But cursing, it's all
about limbic stuff.
Tourette's is
involving not problems
with Broca's cortical
regions generating cursing.
It's about limbic hyperactivity,
and all sorts of other realms.
So limbic system
having all sorts
of access to your
language production.
Another realm in which
there is clearly,
the second you think
about it, an intersection
between your cold, machine-like,
analytical cortical regions
doing symbolic language
production comprehension
for you, and your
emotional limbic world,
this remarkable
phenomenon of you
can feel better
when you are upset
about something as a result
of talking to someone.
Psychotherapy is
completely built
around the notion that
there are very deep,
fundamental connections
between one's language world
and one's limbic one.
So, again, this is
doing in the notion
not only that all
language is about is
motoric aspects of generating
language, and auditory.
It's about the deep,
cognitive structures.
It's also not some cold,
cognitive task there.
It is highly intertwined
with limbic structures.
As you would thus
expect, studies
showing that if you,
for example, stimulate
some subcortical
regions in individuals
as part of, again,
neurosurgery, trying
to figure out where
a tumor is, stimulate
some of those regions.
And people will say
emotionally loaded things.
They will say something
very emotionally expressive,
positive, negative, whatever.
Stimulate some of
the same regions,
say, in a rhesus monkey, and
it will give a threat call.
It will give an alarm call.
It will give a solicitive call.
It will express
something emotive.
So the limbic
system has all sorts
of ways in which it's talking
to these cortical regions.
And, not surprisingly,
it's got lots
of ways of talking
to the porosity areas
in the right
hemisphere, since that's
where a lot of the
emotional expressivity
is coming through--
not in the words,
but in the tone of voice,
the facial expressions,
all of that.
So neurobiology, now looking
at it in a taxonomic context--
other species.
Everyone would have
guessed up until people
actually went and
looked that we're
the only folks with a Broca,
with a Wernicke's area,
that this is a human
specialization.
And what you see is that's
pretty much the case.
But you see the starts of it
in a number of primate species,
a number of apes, and
chimps, and orangutans
In rhesus monkeys, what you
see is the cortical thickening
just on one side
corresponding to this area,
not as thickened as in the human
brain in the left hemisphere.
But nonetheless, you get
thickening like that.
Moreover, how's this
for interesting-- OK,
does everybody know
the factoid that it's
the left side of
your brain that's
telling the right side of
your body to do something,
and it's the right
side of your brain
that's crosswiring,
whatever it is it does?
OK, get a monkey
who is vocalizing.
And while it is vocalizing
something communicative,
while it is doing
that, if it is doing
any sort of facial
expressions, it's
more pronounced on the
right side of the face.
If it's doing something
with its arms,
it's more likely to
be the right arm.
In other words, generating
the vocalization
is preferentially coming
from the left hemisphere,
and pulling in
more motoric stuff
on the side of the brain that
operates this part of the body.
It is lateralized communication.
The same has now been seen
when you do imaging on monkeys.
When they're
communicating, there
is a bias towards the left
hemisphere, the thickened area.
It's the start of
the specialization.
Moreover, in both humans and
in other apes and monkeys,
there is very, very close
connections between the Broca's
area, or the pre-proto
Broca's area in a monkey,
and all sorts of
muscle groups having
to do with facial
expressions-- intensely
intertwined connectivity there.
And that's that prosody stuff.
Seemingly, a monkey making
some of it's emotionally loaded
vocalizations, there's
some facial prosody
that goes along with it because
the wiring is very, very
intertwined there.
And it's facial stuff that
tends to be lateralized
to the right side of the face.
Finally, when a monkey in
a brain imaging machine
is hearing vocalization
of its own species,
the left hemisphere
preferentially
activates in the proto
equivalents of these areas.
And then, finally
finally, what people
are beginning to see in
skulls from ancient ancestors
like australopithecus is
these really tough things
to infer very indirectly
from endocasts of what would
be the brain inside the skull.
But australopithecus a
million years ago or so,
already a little
bit of an asymmetry
in the left hemisphere.
So this has been
something that's
been developing in monkeys and
apes for a long, long time.
Switching now from
neurobiology, moving back--
there is hormones
that are relevant,
and acute environmental
whatevers.
But we're going to
skip over those just
because a huge
feature of the field
is language acquisition,
language development
early in life.
And there, you have one
of the great debates
in the field coming in
around the 1960s or so, which
was between these
two silverbacks
in this whole field, both of
whom you've heard of before.
One, B.F. Skinner, the
king of behaviorism
who probably was as most
influential by the 1960s 1970s
or so, and Noam Chomsky,
a champion of a very
different view of language.
Chomsky, who is
still around, and who
to the extent that
I can understand it,
revolutionized linguistics
when he was about
four and a half years old.
And has been the dominant
figure in the field
for 2/3 of a century since.
OK, so here was
the basic matchup
in their wrestling match.
Behaviorist view--
you can already
construct what the behaviorist
view of language acquisition
is going to be, which is
you begin to make a sound,
attempting to learn a word.
And if you say it
right, you get rewarded.
Oh, please feed me.
Very well said, I'm
going to feed you now.
And now you've
learned to say that.
[MUMBLING], you don't get fed.
And you get severely
hypoglycemic.
And you try to find other,
until you happen to stumble
on the right way to say it.
And, oh, I've been
negatively enforced
when saying [MUMBLING].
And I've been positively--
and just do that all the time.
And that's how I learn language
in a classic behaviorist
framework.
Chomsky, meanwhile,
was taking a stance
that this bears no resemblance
at all to what is going on.
And what we'll see is
more versions of his view
have prevailed.
Basically, the behaviorist
view was just sheer,
raving gibberish.
But this produced
these fireworks
of debates between Skinner and
Chomsky in the '60s and '70s.
Skinner was at Harvard.
Chomsky was at MIT.
And they were regularly lobbing
missiles across at each other,
and shooting across
their bows and stuff.
And this was this
huge debate, simply
because behaviorism was
so totally dominating
American psychology at the time
with a complete stranglehold
that there was Skinner, and like
three and a half other people
out there who had any
sort of academic training
who would seriously argue
that you acquire language
through standard
behaviorist rules.
That was their extreme
view, and a behaviorist sort
of standing in the sand on that
one, and virtually no evidence
for it at all.
So what's the Chomskian
view about, instead?
The very nature of
language acquisition
shows that it is
not behaviorist,
because of a very significant,
critical thing that kids
do as they learn language.
A landmark somewhere along the
way, 15 to 20 months of age,
this major, major event,
the first time a child
says a combination of words
that it's never heard before.
I like chocolate ice
cream, says the child.
Now you say, oh, here, there's
such a thing as Velcro ice
cream.
And the child after
tasting it, never
before having heard the
sentence, I like Velcro ice
cream, now says, I
like Velcro ice cream.
It has just generated
a language construction
that it has never heard.
The generativity of
language, the possibility
that kids not only that business
of a finite number of words,
but an infinite number of
messages, but at some point
kids do something
which is impossible
by strict behaviorism.
They generate examples of things
they have never heard before.
And this is, in
the Chomskian view,
this inflection point where
something explosive exponential
occurs.
That's where it goes off.
And there was a
Chomskyte disciple,
a guy named Roger Brown, who
was a professor for many years
at Harvard, who did this insane,
obsessive study to actually
demonstrate what everybody
can infer, like, if they ever
had kids, which was
having kids where
he and his band of
researchers would keep track
of every single
word kids would say
during their first year of life.
God knows how the parents
put up with these people
hanging around in the
nursery and stuff.
But what they showed
was, yes, suddenly
you have kids generating
language constructions
that they have
never heard before.
And Chomsky has
advanced a whole view
that there is an innate
structure to language.
And this is one of the key
bits of his argument, that
right around a certain
point of development kids
are able to generalize
the rules of language
into constructions
they have never heard.
Moreover, kids are
able to generalize
the rules of language when
they have only got an imperfect
instruction by adults speaking
around them who may not
be grammatically perfect.
And one individual
may be off here
or there in one word,
somebody off in another one--
if nothing else, not producing
every possible combination.
And out comes a sense
of the grammar from kids
when constructing rules
out of imperfect examples,
and constructing completely
novel combinations of words
that they've never heard before.
So the argument that
has always been sort of
at the core of
the Chomskian view
is when kids suddenly
explode into this language
acquisition-- to give you a
sense of this, there are long,
long stretches where you are
learning about 10 words a day
during development.
By college, typical person has
a vocabulary of 60,000 words.
You are not going to
have gotten those 60,000
from behaviorist reward
and punishment stuff.
What is this explosion about?
And what's always been
an argument in favor
of the Chomskian notion that
there is something innate,
there is innate drive
towards language acquisition,
is what's called the poverty
of stimulus argument, which
is stated quite simply,
kids are generating
a lot more examples of
language then they're hearing.
They're generating
all sorts of things
that they have never heard.
This whole example
here, kids have
to be learning in some prepared
learning, ethological way.
And that's a term that
definitely comes into the field
because they are
generating constructions
they have never heard before.
They cannot possibly
be taught to do that.
And they are not being sat down
and being explicitly taught
the structure of grammar.
They are constructing rules out
of imperfect, partial examples.
So that's always been
a very strong argument.
And there's always
been a counter argument
saying that you
don't have to have
strict instruction of every
single type of construction
of words that you generate.
You can have
statistical learning.
You can pick up the rules
from statistical patterns.
And you can do that with
artificial intelligence
programs.
And you can do that with adults
who could pick up patterns.
And a number of years
ago, extremely cool study
showing that kids
way before they
start using language--
six months of age or so--
can actually pick up statistical
patterns in language.
How would they show this?
They would have a whole bunch
of nonsense syllables, which
they would play
long strings of them
at these kids where there
would be combinations.
These two nonsense
syllables, the first one
would be followed by the
second one 100% of the time.
This combination would be
followed 90% of the time.
This one 75, this one
10%, this one never,
and long strings of
these, and showing
that kids would begin to learn
the statistical associations.
How do you know?
Because you play
a novel pairing.
You get one of these pairings
where 90% of the time
you make this sound.
And it's followed
by this on the tape.
Now, instead, you
make this sound.
And it's followed by something
it's never associated with.
And the kid's heart rate
increases, because this
is a novel combination.
And it is not an all or none.
It is merely a statistical
linking of the two.
So really young kids can
do statistical learning,
picking up statistical patterns
in language very different
than people would have guessed.
OK, so now let us take
a five minute break.
And we will start
marching through some
of the developmental landmarks
and what the biology is of it.
What you see in terms of
child development language
acquisition is one very
clear phenomenon, which
is right at the
beginning of life,
a kid could learn any
single language out there.
There are hundreds and
hundreds of different vowel
sounds in different languages,
even more consonant sounds.
And any kid and can
learn any language.
And what you see in a child
in one to three months of age
is roughly equal
response to any phonemes,
any sounds that are
building blocks of language.
And what development is from
there is you lose that ability.
As you begin to
acquire your own,
you start being unable
to hear the difference
between other sounds.
And, suddenly, you're back
to taking biopsies out
of bears instead
of pairs, depending
on what language you're in.
As you acquire your
own language, virtually
by definition in
acquiring it, you
are losing the capacity
to hear vast amounts
of phonemic subtlety from
all the other languages.
By three months of
age, kids are already
beginning to preferentially
pay attention
to a spoken language, rather
than nonsense syllables.
They are already beginning
to note structure of language
in terms of what
they pay attention.
By three to six
months of age, they're
already preferentially paying
attention to vowel sounds.
They're beginning to learn
that sounds are broken up.
They're beginning to do that
statistical relationship stuff
of combinations of sounds.
Somewhere by about eight,
nine months of age, babbling
starts, and, again, the business
about babbling during sign
language showing that.
What you also see is
when kids start babbling,
they tend to have stronger
facial expressions
on the right side
of their face--
that same argument about the
left hemisphere beginning
to take some control over stuff.
What else?
By nine months of age,
kids are beginning
to recognize structures,
word combinations.
In terms of responding
to them, they
are beginning to have lost
an awful lot of their ability
to pick up phonemes
from other languages.
By about 11 months
of age, they are
beginning to generate the
typical vowels, consonants
of their language.
And out of that pops
language soon afterward.
OK, so a feature of
language acquisition
in humans which
is pretty bizarre
is that adult members
of our species
sit around and invest
huge amounts of energy
in a one on one level to in an
intentional premeditated matter
help young ones acquire the
communication of the species.
We do directed
teaching of language.
And this is unique.
And it turns out, this is not
what is found in most cultures
on this planet.
In most of them, kids
pick up language purely
by observation, by hearing,
by being witness to.
It is a relatively recent,
Westernized invention--
I don't know maybe in
the last 1,000 years
or so-- where you
sit down children.
And you generate simple
examples of the language, which
you present in a repetitive
way, simple versions of words,
of grammar, were you
direct it towards them,
and were you then correct
their attempts at repeating it.
That's a relatively
new invention.
And bizarrely enough,
it's not entirely clear
if that accelerates
language acquisition, which
would be a real
drag after everyone
being tortured with phonics
back when or some such thing.
This is a relatively
new hominid invention.
It is relatively
rare culturally.
And it's not so
clear if it actually
accomplishes a whole lot.
Now, part of what you also
find with kids beginning to not
be able to discriminate between
two different sounds in what
will prove to be another
language other than the one
they're learning, that begins
to be when you're doing imaging
there, that Wernicke's is not
distinguishing between the two
sounds in terms of its
activation pattern.
That's where you're
beginning to lose the ability
to hear universality
of language sounds,
and instead begin to
focus in on your own.
What else do you see?
Second languages-- where
do second languages
fit in with this?
And there are all sorts
of critical periods
of development with it,
as to when it comes in.
One of the ones
that everybody knows
is if you learn a language
any time after roughly age 12
or so, most typically
you will never
be able to speak it
without an accent
for the rest of your life.
That seems to be one of the
landmarks, exceptions, blah,
blah, the usual.
Nonetheless, that seems to
be, generally, the pattern.
What about brain coding
for a second language?
What is found is if you get a
second language before roughly
six years of age, essentially if
you were growing up bilingual,
both languages are coded
in very overlapping regions
of Wernicke's and Broca's.
How can you see that?
Because you get individuals
when they have a stroke
will get, for example, a
comprehension aphasia in both
of the languages that they
are native speakers of,
that they grew up with.
Learn a language after six,
and what you typically see
is the Wernicke's area that
does the second language tends
to be a more peripheral area.
And likewise, what's
activating a Broca's, you're
not getting the center seats.
You're not getting
the orchestra seats
for where you're doing a second
language if it's coming in
later.
And, thus, you can get
the truly bizarre cases
of people who get a
very selective stroke
and will lose language
and not the other.
So you begin to get that there.
What accents are about, what the
critical period is on accents,
God knows.
But you have that coming in
there by around age 12 or so.
Next, acquisition invention
of new languages-- and this
is relevant in terms of
child acquisition of language
because of what's a
truism in the field, which
is new languages are
invented by kids.
Adults do not invent
new languages.
Adults may be able to go
to the office each day
and decide whether
this or that word
should be protected from
the French language.
But languages are
invented by kids.
And what you see with that
is a standard pattern of age
distribution, of novelty,
which is not only
do languages tend to
be invented by kids.
But nobody a whole lot
older than them ever
learns the new language.
New languages are
invented by the young
and have lateral and
downward transfer.
This is what you see.
Great example of this-- about
20 years ago in Nicaragua,
where for the first time
after the revolution
there, for the first
time there was anything
done in the country in
the way of education
for deaf children, who
otherwise were just
left to sort of languish
in villages, and ignored,
and not educated,
and all of that--
the first attempts
to have schools
explicitly for deaf children.
And people there
teaching them were
beginning to grow for
OK, how are we going
to communicate with these kids?
What's going to be
an efficient way?
And worth noting, in addition
to American Sign Language,
there's British Sign Language.
And there's French
Sign Language.
There's all different ones.
And what began to emerge
after the first year
or so in the school
was the kids came up
with their own language.
They began to generate their
own sign language, which
over the subsequent generations
became more and more
mature and sophisticated.
And we'll see ways in
which that occurred.
And this is now
Nicaraguan Sign Language.
This is the sign language that
is taught to deaf individuals
there.
And this was invented by kids.
This emerged from
the students there
while the adults were
trying to figure out,
and having conferences,
and meetings, about what
sort of sign to use for this.
And there are the kids
in the dorms generating
their own language.
10-year-old kids was
the average age there
where this was happening.
Language was
invented by new kids.
And what you saw with the
Nicaraguan Sign Language was it
took about three generations
worth of school kids
to have a fully-formed
grammar in the language
as complex of a grammar capacity
for embedded clauses, all
that sort of thing, as you
would find in any other sign
language.
It took about three generations.
And with each new
elaboration, it
was whichever kids had come up
with it, and everybody younger.
Even after a while,
the original generation
who had invented
Nicaraguan Sign Language,
that first generation,
they weren't
very good at the later,
fancier versions.
That same deal-- languages
are invented by the young.
And languages are greatly
shaped, and changed,
and modified by
the young as well.
And there's not a
whole lot of people
older than them who
ever pick up on it.
So that's a pattern
again and again.
So acquisition of language,
what's going on in the brain
there?
Prenatally, you already begin to
get-- OK, let's cut the brain.
There you have it.
There's the brain
in cross-section,
cutting right through there.
And what we have,
this is the left side,
is thickening of what would
be Broca's, thickening
of Wernicke's.
It's around 12 to 16
weeks of age in a fetus
that you begin to see different
patterns of gene expression
around here versus there.
And a couple of these are
genes that have already
been identified
to have mutations
in families with language
production disorders.
So around then, begin to have
differential gene expression.
By around 30 weeks, this part is
now thicker than on this side.
You're beginning to get
the structural asymmetry.
Interestingly, during the
first few years of language,
you don't see
enhanced metabolism
on this side relevant to that
side when kids are talking.
Even amid the right
side of their face
being more expressive,
it's not until a few years
that you lateralize all the
metabolic activation there.
Next bit of development
that's pertinent
is that stuff about myelin.
Myelin, you remember the axons.
And you wrap them
up with myelin.
And your frontal cortexes,
which are not myelinated fully
yet in most of you guys.
What you see developmentally
with language
is something not terribly
Earth shattering,
which is kids tend to
myelinate their Wernicke's
area about three months before
they myelinate their Broca's
area.
Kids are starting to
comprehend language
before they are producing it.
So Wernicke's is
beginning to wire up
around nine months of age.
Typically, Broca's takes
a few months past that.
That's the time course.
OK, so intrinsic neurobiology
of language acquisition-- how
about social aspects,
environmental aspects?
And right off the
bat, we pick up
on something we heard,
a couple of weeks
ago, that whole business
about the importance of peer
socialization rather
than parental influences.
And that's the work of that
psychologist Judith Rich Harris
arguing that peer
influences are far more
important than the literature
has usually given credence to.
And the area where it
is most clearly the case
is language acquisition.
And that was her whole
point as to why kids grow up
with accents of the
community around them,
rather than the absence
of their parents
if the parents were not native
speakers of that language.
Why do you pick up the accents
of your peers around you
and those a little bit older?
Because peers are
pretty important.
And back to that
issue of it being
a relatively new
invention for humans
to try to have somebody
acquire language
by sitting them
down, and instructing
them, and correcting
their errors,
what most of
language acquisition
has been about for a
gazillion years in humans
is you learn from your older
sibling, and your cousins who
are a little bit older than you.
And they learn
from their cousins
who are a little bit older.
And that's where
language is attained.
And you watch the adults,
and listen to them.
We're very wired to pick
up our language influences
from peer groups, and
slightly older ones.
So her emphasizing right off
the bat that remarkable deal.
When you think about it,
it's totally amazing.
Nobody winds up with the
accent of their home language.
They wind up with the accent
of the community around them.
For the rest of
their life, they may
be incredibly good at imitating
their parents in the home
accent.
And, surprisingly
early, as I mentioned,
they do not want to answer their
parents in the home language.
They start preferring
the outside language--
all this evidence of the
strong peer socialization.
What's intrinsic in that
is language acquisition
also involves a huge
amount of inculcation
into the values of the society
that uses that language.
And intrinsic in that is
kids at very young ages
already getting embarrassed
about their parents' accent,
and wanting to answer them
not in the home language,
values built into that.
Examples-- one that
we heard already back
in the aggression lecture, that
whole business of languages
that have a formal you class,
and an informal to and who
in French, for example.
And that business
that after revolutions
as a value statement in terms
of that pseudo kinship stuff,
everyone is supposed to use
the informal structures there.
Everyone is supposed to use
the informal conjugations.
Great thing in
Tolstoy's autobiography
back when he was a
kid-- apparently,
at one point, the family nurse,
who adored him and had raised
him and all of that, one
day sort of spoke to him
and used the informal
verb tense in Russian.
And he threw a fit because she
was not of his social class.
And how dare she
use the informal.
She should be addressing
him as the young master,
or whatever the
Russian conjugation
equivalent was-- that one
laden, laden with social values.
More examples of this--
different languages,
very different notions
about relationships
expressed between people.
For example, in English you
can be talking to a relative
and say something like
my aunt, your mother.
Or you could be saying,
my aunt, your grandmother.
And that's how you
communicate it.
In certain languages-- for
example one in the Malayan
peninsula-- what you find
is if you were saying
my aunt, your mother, is a
completely different word then
my aunt, your grandmother.
It is not possible
to state a kinship
word without it reflecting
also the person you're
speaking with.
You cannot talk about kinship
terms outside of the context
of it being a conversation
and interaction much,
much more indicative of
intertwined relations there.
How is this?
Here's another example.
Here, you have in what would
be termed egocentric languages,
like English, you refer
to directions with respect
to your body.
It's over there, you
say, indicating where it
is with respect to your body.
Where is that person standing?
Just behind him.
What you see in a lot
of other languages,
less egocentric
ones, is directions
are entirely a function
of external landmarks.
And, thus, in a bunch
of aboriginal languages
in Australia, you
can't say something
like, oh, my right
foot is on fire.
You can only say,
oh, my foot that's
to the Northwest is on fire.
The world is based by external
landmarks, rather than
ones that are internal.
Great example I heard
of this from [? Leah ?]
[? Burdinksi-- ?] oh no, I
just mispronounced her name,
I'm sure.
And that's shameful, given that
it's a Russian name like mine.
But in any case, in the
psychology department,
and telling me this
great example that
you get in some of these
non-ego language ones.
OK, we tend to think of stories
going from left to right.
If you give somebody
a bunch of tiles,
which is part of frequent
IQ tests for kids,
and they make a story.
If you put them in
the right sequence,
in English, what we do is we
put the first scene on the left.
And it moves to the
right from there.
Stories progress
from left to right.
What you see in
these languages that
are based by external cues,
is stories begin in the east,
because that's
where the sun rises.
So if you were
sitting facing south,
and you were given
the tiles, you
would put the story
starting over here,
because that's where
the sun comes up.
And if you were sitting,
instead, facing north,
you would place
the tiles starting
from the right to left, because
the only pertinent direction
is nothing with respect
to where your body is,
where your arms are.
Directions, things,
start in the east.
And that determines
things far more
than your body's orientation--
classic, very non-ego-centered
directionality in a language.
So that is very frequent.
So what begins to be
intrinsic in all of this
is the notion that language
shapes the way you think.
And this harks back to a grand
old theory in linguistics
and language acquisition.
And two guys, early in the
20th century, Sapir and Whorf.
And the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
being that language constrains
thought, that your
capacity for thinking,
the way in which you think,
is constrained by the language
that you have been taught,
the language you speak.
And that has been
debated endlessly
in terms of just how
much evidence is there
for that, versus how
much the style of thought
shaped what the language is.
This has endlessly been debated.
And it's one of the hallmarks
of what linguistics is about.
In the last decade, two
traditional populations
in the Amazon that
were studied that
are viewed as giving
really major support
for a strict Sapir-Whorf notion
that your capacity for thought,
the nature of your thought,
is deeply shaped, potentially
deeply constrained, by language.
So these two trials-- the
first is called the Paraha.
And the other is called
the Murdruku, I believe.
And what you have
in both of them
is a very different number
system than we have,
than virtually every
Western society does.
In the first group, the
Paraha, their number system
consists of three
numbers-- one, two,
and something bigger than two.
In Murdruku, it's
essentially the same thing.
But it's five terms.
It goes up to-- six terms, 1, 2,
3, 4, 5, and all other numbers
that are bigger than five.
And I don't know
completely what you
suggests about how often you
have to count stuff down there.
But what it suggests
is this is going
to be a very different
relationship with numbers.
And what they show,
studies with these folks,
is doing mathematical
computations,
doing estimates,
doing everything,
in the second tribe
with numbers up to five,
the exact same level of
accuracy as would a Westernized
individual.
But get above five, and
accuracy goes down the drain.
Somebody in that society has a
huge amount of trouble telling
the difference
between six objects
and eight objects, eight
objects and 10 objects,
because they all get bucketed
as, how many are there?
It's the number that
means more than five.
And in the first group, you
see the same exact thing
for any number above three.
There's a lot of trouble being
accurate distinguishing three,
from four, from five, and
so on, because they all
have the same term.
They are that number
that is bigger than two.
All of that occurring once
you get above those numbers,
guesses essentially
at the chance level.
So that's kind of impressive,
and very interesting.
But maybe there's always
this potential counter
interpretation as to
what's happening there,
which is maybe these are not
terribly sharp folks there,
and maybe have had
all sorts of issues
with protein malnutrition,
or cerebral malaria,
or God knows what.
No, because in each of
these populations, each
of these cultures,
they know thousands
of different types of edible
plants and medicinal plants.
These are enormously
sophisticated people
in those realms.
Numbers just aren't a big deal.
And what you see is somebody
growing up in that society who
has not invented the language,
but are instead acquiring it,
it constrains their
ability to tell
the difference
between the numbers
three and four-- very
shaping in that regard.
So all sorts of people
debating endlessly
how much does language
shape the way you think?
How much does thinking
shape the sort of language
you come up with?
But at the end of
the day, there's
this whole
philosophical business
that no matter how similar
the language is that you're
using with someone else,
it's going to mean something
slightly different to you.
And, thus, you have the flipside
to our ethology sound bite.
Ethology is
interviewing the animal,
but it's its own language.
Sort of the flip side, a
quote once to the effect
of, if you could interview
a lion in its own language,
you wouldn't have a
clue what it was talking
about because communication
is so intertwined with mind,
with values, with meaning,
all of that, that it would
essentially be inaccessible.
And you hear about people
who are multilingual.
How many of you are pretty
adept at a second language?
Third language?
Any hands up there?
Whoa, OK.
So those of you who
are really comfortable
in multiple
languages, do you find
you have different
emotional emotive
styles of communicating when
you're switching languages?
Do you tend to have more
expressivity in one of them?
Do you tend to be more
analytical, whatever?
OK, I'm going to pretend
that there was just
hundreds of faces going up and
down agreeing with that stance,
because that's a
well-known fact based
on years of teaching BIO150.
Yeah, languages
serve different ,
functions and
different emotions,
and different cognitions,
very intertwined.
And at a true extreme,
interviewing somebody
in their own language, even
if it is the same language
that you ostensibly
share with them,
you're not quite going to be
speaking the same language.
Shifting now over to animals--
animal communication,
and in what ways
is it completely
distinct from what we do?
And in what ways are
there major overlaps?
It's going to be the
same sort of themes
as with the sex lectures,
the aggression lectures,
all sorts of things that
people used to think
were unique to humans
turn out to be less so.
For example, other species
show the building blocks
of semanticity.
Semanticity, the fact
that a discrete sound
can have meaning, and meaning
distinctive enough that it
is separate from emotion.
We've already heard
a great example
of this with the
vervet monkeys who
could tell the difference
between a vocalization saying,
something scary up
in the air, get down,
and something scary down on
the ground, get up in the tree.
These are in common in terms
of the emotional content.
But in terms of the semanticity,
the factual information
transmitted, they're
diametrically opposite.
This is what a word is.
It is communicating
a stable concept
that is independent of emotion.
Vervet monkeys have
the starts of that.
It turns out chickens
do that as well.
I have no idea what
chickens emote about.
But they have
different types of ones
that communicate
information about what
they are being menaced
by-- again, predator stuff.
Vervets, not only do they have
a vocalization for scary raptor
up in the sky versus scary
snake down on the ground,
but they have two
vocalizations for one of them.
And I forget which,
they have a synonym.
They have the building
blocks of synonyms.
What else?
Animals and their
communication systems
somehow have
incorporated the fact
that facial expressions
and auditory communication
go hand in hand.
How can you show this?
Take a rhesus monkey.
And show it a film clip
of another monkey making
some vocalization with
the facial expression
over and over, and then
some other facial expression
and emotion where they tend
to go together vocalization.
Now pop one up there where
the monkey that is watching
is giving an alarm
vocalization, and a come
groom me sort of smiley face.
And the monkey is
immediately oriented.
And heart rate increases.
It knows that facial
expression doesn't
go with that vocalization.
It's incorporated multi-modal
pathways of communication
like that.
Something else that
used to be thought
to be unique to
humans-- intentionality
of communication.
I am making this sound not
because I am terrified,
because I am happy, because
I am hungry, whatever,
where I would be making
that regardless of who else
is around.
I am going to communicate
something only
if this person is around, but
not that one-- intentionality.
And it turns out, you find
that in other species as well.
You see that in
vervets, for example.
Vervets will give alarm
calls much more readily
when their relatives
are around, then when
non-relatives are around.
Squirrels will do the same
thing with alarm calls.
And if squirrels have been
having aggressive interactions
with some other
squirrel, they are
less likely to give an alarm
call when a predator is around
than if it was
somebody they liked.
There is intentionality
in that realm.
What's implicit in that,
at least some proto
building block steps
of theory of mind.
So what else?
What things remain
unique in human language?
Dramatic displacement--
that ability
to talk about things on the
other side of the globe,
and things that never happened,
and imaginary whatevers,
and philosophy,
the arbitrariness,
the embedded clauses,
the recursiveness.
And a very important thing
about human language,
pretty uniquely--
the capacity to lie.
And that has to do
with the arbitrariness.
You are human.
And you are in some
confrontational situation.
And you are terrified
out of your wits.
And the last thing you
would do is say, oh my,
I am terrified out of my
wits, because you do not
want to have the
other individual know
that you are terrified.
What do you do?
You suppress the expression of
emotionally revealing language.
Or you can even do something
like start chest thumping,
and say all sorts of things
implying anything but fear--
and, in fact, sort of
bullying pugnacity.
And they're you're
lying as well.
Humans have the
capacity to do that.
A dog who is terrified
is going to be terrified.
An animal that has
a strong emotion
is going to give off pheromonal
signals, for example,
depending on the species, that
communicates it, no matter
how much that is
not the thing they
want to be doing at the time.
And here's a great
example of it.
You take a dog,
one that's scared.
And it doesn't want to
let an opponent know
that it's scared if this
is some sort of dominance
confrontation.
And what it's doing
if it's scared
is it's pumping out scared
pheromones-- pheromones
with high levels of breakdown
products, of stress hormones.
We know this already.
It's pumping them out.
And that's the last thing
it wants to be doing.
It would love to be able
to lie and say, no, I'm
not scared at all.
But it can't do it
because there is not
an arbitrary relationship
between being scared
and how it's communicated.
They are intertwined.
The same phenomenon of the
scaredness is the signal of it.
They can't prevent the
pheromones from coming out,
in terms of shutting
down the glands.
So what does a dog
do when it's scared
and it's giving off all
these scared pheromones
from its anal glands?
It tries to shut
down the glands.
It tucks its tail
between its legs.
It tries to cover up
the pheromone release.
And what does a dog
do when its perfectly
content, and perfectly willing
to let the rest of the world
know how its feeling
about things?
It wants to spread those
pheromones around it.
It rags its tail.
Dogs can't lie.
All they can do is try to put
their hand over their mouth.
When they're about to
say something revealing,
they tuck their tail
between their legs.
So humans retain
this capacity to lie.
Now, in terms of other
species and what they can do,
what we transition to is a
really interesting subfield
of this whole subject,
which is attempts
to teach human languages
to other species--
attempts to teach language
to other primates.
And that has a long
and storied past,
with all sorts of
disastrous outcomes
and huge controversies
getting at this issue of,
what sort of cognitive
aspects of language
do we potentially share
with another species?
OK, all of this has
been with chimps
up until the last
20 years or so.
And it started off
with a poor chimp
named Vicki who belonged to send
researchers back in the 1930s.
And I forget who and where.
And what they
decided was they were
going to teach Vicki to
speak English, naturally,
and to speak.
And how were they
going to do it?
Using the then cutting edge,
just emerging principles
of behaviorism, Vicki was
subject to behaviorist rules.
If she wanted water,
she would have
to make a sound
that vaguely sort of
sounded like the word cup.
She'd have to make this sort of
exhaling, barky sort of thing,
which if your imagination
really ran away with you,
would sound like the word cup.
There were a few other
one syllable words
were they wouldn't
feed her unless she
made whatever sound they said
was close to the word food.
This was one screwed
up chimp, in terms
of seeing films of this chimp.
This was one incredibly
neurotic animal.
And thank God, after
only a few years,
the researchers decided, you
know, this isn't working.
And this poor animal
was allowed not to have
to go through this anymore.
Oh, this doesn't work.
Soon after that, there
was another chimp
that had one of these
sorts of upbringings.
And this was raised by a
psychologist named Kellogg
at, I believe, Yale.
And what this person
was oriented to
was Judith Rich Harris'
work on peer influences,
even though she wasn't born yet,
the notion of peer influences.
Why couldn't Vicki
learn English?
Because she didn't have a peer.
You need to have a chimp
grow up with a human.
The two of them
growing up together
with the exact same
environment and same treatment,
and the human who's really
good at acquiring language,
the chimp then will
have a peer, will
have a role model, all of
that, and we'll pick up English
as well.
And, thus, the Kelloggs
raised their child, Donald.
Donald was raised
with this chimp.
And I'm forgetting
the chimp's name.
But Donald fared almost
as poorly as Vicki.
And they did this whole
study on the acquisition,
and studies of the two,
and these whole books
written about Donald and
his chimp brother there.
And what was supposed
to be happening
was the chimp was going to
learn English from Donald.
And what you saw
developmentally,
the chimp, of course,
was miles ahead of him.
The chimp was climbing trees
while Donald was still cruising
on the couch kind of thing.
But in terms of language stuff,
it never went that direction.
What wound up
happening was Donald
started making vocalizations
of the chimp, at which point
his parents stopped
the experiment.
But this was totally nutty.
They were doing
things-- like, they
did this experiment on auditory
acuity in the two of them.
You could see this in the book.
They filmed them.
There's Donald, and I believe
the chimp's name was Gua.
And the two of them were
sitting there being perfectly
happy sitting on the lawn.
And they're were being
filmed, high speed film.
And what does the
damn father do?
He sneaks up behind them
with a starter's pistol
and shoots it so that they can
get on film which one of them
has the faster reaction time of
being scared out of their wits
by their father shooting
this thing behind them.
And what do you know?
Gua had slightly faster
panic reaction stuff.
So this was something that,
fortunately, hit a wall.
And Donald, I believe, wound up
having a very interesting life.
And I don't think it
was urban legends.
I wish I remembered.
But it made perfect
sense, given what
a bizarre childhood he had.
OK, soon people realized
they, or not so soon, then
in the 1960s some
researchers finally
realized what the
problem was with this,
which is it is absurd thinking
that a chimp is going to learn
how to speak a language
because they simply do not
have the larynx that can do it.
They do not have the
larynx that could produce
discrete sounds like that.
It's impossible.
Not because they're
not smart enough,
but they simply don't
have the anatomy to do it.
And, thus, this was
a couple, University
of Nevada named the
Gardeners, who came up
with the brilliantly creative
idea of teaching a chimp
American Sign Language to
bypass the vocal limitations,
and just get at a system.
Chimps have great
manual dexterity.
Tap at the cognitive
aspects of language.
Bypass the sound
vocals business.
And, thus, came the
first sign language
ape, a chimp named Washoe.
Washoe was the
darling of linguists,
psycholinguists a while,
because there was something so,
so cool about a chimpanzee
sitting there being
able to sign in sign language.
Washoe, by the time she was
about a half dozen years old,
had acquired about 150
different signs in English.
And she could communicate
with the Gardeners with it.
And people were producing
these glowing sorts
of articles about them.
I remember this one
guy, a science writer,
who happened to
have deaf parents.
So he was raised bilingual with
both English and American Sign
Language.
And this article about
going to visit Washoe,
and the bizarrity of
speaking to a chimpanzee
in his native language.
And how cool is that?
And Washoe was being
reported to do a hallmark
feature of language
use, which is
to begin to invent words,
where she combined the word
water and the sign
language for bird,
put them together,
to water bird.
And that's what
she called ducks.
Oh my God.
She's made a new term.
She babbled.
Before going to sleep, she
would do her favorite signs
to herself, and babble
herself to sleep.
She used sign language to lie,
and to do all sorts of stuff
she shouldn't have been doing.
And Washoe lived in this
trailer on the campus there.
And they often had this video
camera up at night filming her.
And they would have
a low light there.
And every now and then
you would see things like,
there was a refrigerator there.
And Washoe was not supposed
to open up the refrigerator
and steal food out
of it at night.
And, suddenly, the
camera is there.
And the trailer is
absolutely quiet and empty.
And, suddenly, you see Washoe
walking across, signing,
saying, quiet, Washoe,
quiet, Washoe, and raiding
the refrigerator that
way-- totally cool stuff.
They brought in a second
chimp, a second chimp,
to have Washoe and the chimp
start learning sign language,
and start talking to each other.
And a couple of
months into it, they
had the first conversation
in sign language
ever by another species.
The two chimps were
sitting there, and facing
in opposite directions.
And they both made use of what
in every one of these projects
was the first word that
any chimp ever mastered,
which was tickle, because
chimps love to be tickled.
And the first sentence
they ever mastered
would always be
tickle me, tickle me.
So there's the two of them,
sitting Washoe and Bowie
I believe his name was.
And Washoe says, tickle me.
And Bowie says, tickle me.
And Washoe, tickle
me, me, me, me, me.
And Bowie says, tickle
me, tickle me, tickle me.
And, finally, the two of
them get up and walk off
in opposite directions.
There you have failed detente
in the very first conversation
there.
So my God, they're even
talking to each other.
This is totally cool.
Meanwhile, a guy at the
University of Pennsylvania
named David Premack had
his chimp named Sarah.
And he was very irritated
about the imprecision
of sign language.
He was teaching Sarah
a symbolic language
pattern of different
shaped magnetic tiles,
and showing very rigorously
that Sarah could do if-then type
clauses, could begin
to do embedded clauses,
saying things like,
he would put up
the sign saying, if the
red ball is in the bucket,
go hoot crazily in joy.
And Sarah would be
able to do this, and be
able to construct these as
well-- nothing very much
resembling the
fluidity of language,
but nonetheless showing really
sophisticated structure to it.
So these guys were
rolling along.
And everybody loved this.
And this was the
greatest stuff ever,
chimps speaking
American Sign Language.
And you could hang out
with them, and tickle them.
And they'd never tickle
you back, apparently.
But showing interviewing an
animal in its own language,
none of that reciprocity of
tickling stuff with a human.
But then, then,
along came the ape
to end all apes
when it came to sign
language, Koko,
Koko the gorilla.
Koko the gorilla started off her
linguistic life here on campus.
Koko was originally a gorilla
up in the San Francisco Zoo.
And a graduate student, by
now I can't remember how
many decades ago, named Penny
Patterson in the psychology
department decided that
for a bunch of reasons
gorillas were going to
be a lot more focused.
Compared to gorillas,
chimps all have ADD.
And Koko was going
to be the one.
And she managed to
get a loan of Koko
from the San Francisco Zoo.
And apparently during that
era, like half the days
you could be going
around campus and there
would be Koko going by
on a bicycle with Penny
Patterson or some such thing.
So Koko is this baby growing up
here on campus, totally cool.
Koko begins to learn
American Sign Language.
And that was clear was this
was the ape of all time when
it came to learning
American Sign Language.
Koko was amazing.
Koko was learning stuff.
Patterson was reporting the
most astonishing things.
Koko could report dreams.
Koko could gossip,
could gossip as
in there would be two
people on the project
who, like, had a fight in
front of her in the morning.
And later in the day, she could
tell one of the other humans
that the two of them were having
some fight thing or whatever.
Koko could gossip in
American Sign Language.
Koko could do anything.
Koko could philosophize.
Koko could lie like
crazy, of course,
because all of these
chimps and apes
immediately began
lying like crazy.
Here's one of the things
she was reported as doing.
So Koko is left
alone in this room.
And there's a
potted plant there.
And nobody's around.
And Koko being a gorilla,
what does she do?
She looks around.
There's nobody there.
So she eats the plant.
So after a while, in
comes Patterson, and says,
what happened, in sign
language, to the plant?
Where's the plant?
And Koko, who has
been caught red-handed
here, Koko says, Bill ate it.
Bill, the poor bastard grad
student on the project,
oh, blame the grad student.
So Patterson says,
don't tell me that.
Bill's not a gorilla.
Humans don't eat plants.
Gorillas only eat plants.
And Koko sits there and
says, some other gorilla,
some other gorilla.
So this was amazing.
Koko was just the best.
So, suddenly, Koko was like
double dating with Madonna,
and endorsing [INAUDIBLE],
and aerobic exercises,
and the Koko diet, and
things of that sort.
And it was totally great.
And this was the
best gorilla ever.
And this was the best ape.
And they brought
in this male who
was supposed to,
like, knock up Koko
so that she could have a
baby and teach her baby sign
language, a multi-generational
gorilla teaching
philosophy to their children.
And all of this was great.
And then around 1980
all of it got ruined.
And it got ruined by a guy at
Columbia named Herb Terrace.
Terrace had been another
one of the ones starting
one of the sign
language chimp projects.
And he started with
a chimp who was
going to disprove Noam Chomsky,
who argued that there was
no way anything that these
chimps and gorillas could do
would actually
count as language.
He was going to prove him wrong.
With his chimp who,
he named Nim Chimpsky,
to disprove Noam Chomsky.
So there was Nim Chimpsky.
And Nim Chimpsky starts
learning American Sign Language,
like all the other ones.
And Nim Chimpsky,
as opposed to, like,
Washoe, who's living out there
in the American West, and
manifest destiny
and all of that,
Nim Chimpsky lived in a
townhouse up on the west side
of Manhattan, and was
a regular favorite
at Lincoln Center, and
Zabar's and all of that.
And the person who
got the bagel probably
knows what I'm referring
to, but nobody else does.
And Nim was just
growing up there,
and learning sign language.
And Nim was great.
And Nim was terrific,
and learning just as fast
as the other ones.
And, actually, the summer
after my freshman year,
I spent the summer working with
Nim, which was incredible fun,
and tickling him, and
him not tickling me back.
And it was all so exciting,
and getting to do this
all day long with a chimp.
And moving on, and
then Terrace and crew
beginning to expand on this.
And then, suddenly,
about three years later,
out comes this big
landmark paper in Science
by Terrace and some
of the colleagues
there basically
saying, you know what?
Nim is totally cool.
And he is a blast to
spend a long weekend with,
and that sort of thing.
But he's not learning language.
This really doesn't count.
And you know what?
None of the other
ones are either.
And what you had was the
first real hard-assed analysis
of what these animals
were producing.
And what Terrace demonstrated
in this paper in great detail
was nothing Nim was doing fit
the criteria for language.
Nim was not inventing words.
Nim was not getting
word ordering correct.
Word ordering was basically
at the random level.
Me eat, and eat me,
50% chance of either
when expressing the same notion.
Nim was failing to
do something that
was very fundamental
to language,
which was the more words in your
string, the more meaning to it.
And what I have on the
handout at the very top
was some famous quote
from Nim who was just
babbling on
something incoherent,
suggesting like a
Broca's aphasia,
except that he was fine.
As the utterances
got longer, they
didn't contain more information.
Moreover, the utterances
were not spontaneous.
Language is not about
answering questions.
Language is about
choosing to communicate.
Nim was not generating
any of this.
He was responding to,
if you answer this,
you will get a fruit loop,
which is what he mainly ate.
And, thus, most of the
people on the project
were constantly stealing
his fruit loops from him.
So this looked pretty bad.
And what Terrace
then proceeded to do
was the same analysis on
all the other projects.
And none of the chimps
were doing anything.
All of them were failing
these same criteria
of accurate word
ordering, expanded
meaning with longer utterances,
spontaneous, all of that.
Washoe, oh, coming up,
the duck is a water bird.
Washoe was saying, water, bird.
No, it had not just
neologistically come
up-- if that's the word--
with a new word for duck
in American Sign Language.
It wasn't doing that.
The word ordering made no sense.
It was completely random.
Terrace rips apart
the whole literature.
So out of that emerges the
great, bloodied prizefight
of 1983 between Terrace
and Penny Patterson.
Penny Patterson, who
had by that point
had stolen Koko from
the San Francisco Zoo--
and you think I'm kidding.
She had been promised Koko for
only a certain number of years.
And then, of course, she
was going to give him back.
And when it was time for her
to give him back, she said,
I'm not giving him back because
he has human values now.
And it would be unfair for
him to live with a gorilla.
So that was just on the edge
of being a lawsuit built around
whether or not Koko
could be emancipated
along the lines of
having human values,
because she had
been, like, skating
on Lake Lagunita when it was
frozen, or things like that.
And the San Francisco Zoo,
seeing a public relations
disaster on the horizon,
decided, what the hell?
Let's give Koko, let's
give this $60,000 gorilla
to Penny Patterson,
who by that point
had pretty much had her
association with Stanford cut,
and by then was
up in the Woodside
Hills at a large estate paid
for by gorilla enthusiasts,
and hanging out there with Koko.
So Patterson winds up being
the strongest defender
down to the end that this
is real language that Coco
is doing.
And Terrace, going completely
after it-- and one problem
at that point was there were
no actual data that had ever
been published by Patterson.
All there were, were some
several heartwarming films
of Koko, Koko and
global warming,
and Koko and the trade deficit,
and Koko and this or that.
And there were no data.
Scientists couldn't
make any sense of it
because there were no numbers.
There was no anything
you can actually analyze.
And when you look at the films.
And they would be pitiful.
They would be pitiful.
Koko would be sitting
there, for one thing,
would never be generating
spontaneous utterances.
Koko would be sitting there
having the same word order
randomness as all the chimps.
Koko would be having--
and part of the problem
was Patterson kept
enabling Koko.
She would ask Koko, what
do you call this thing?
And Koko would come up with
a completely wrong sign.
And Patterson would say,
oh, stop kidding around.
And then Patterson would
show her the next one.
And Koko would get
it completely wrong.
And Patterson would say,
oh, you funny gorilla.
And then-- I'm really serious.
And I mean it this time.
And so when she
gets it wrong again.
And, oh, Koko, is
being so ironic.
What?
What are you talking about?
She's going on like that
in these films here.
And as you look closely
using the sort of criteria
that Terrace was using,
your socks new more
American Sign Language
than this gorilla did.
it's showing none
of the spontaneity,
none of the word ordering,
none of any of that stuff.
So out came the knives.
And here were the basic stances.
Terrace's stance was
Patterson wouldn't
know a controlled experiment
if it hit her over the head.
Patterson's response
was, Terrace
was this cold, affectless
fish who had driven Nim
into virtual autism.
And this guy Terrace
was not someone
who you would want to sort
of cozy up and on his lap
and have him tell you
bedtime stories or whatever.
And another feature that
Patterson pointed out very,
very accurately was Nim had
no continuity of teachers.
Nim had all sorts of people
who knew three and a half
more words of sign language than
he did-- like me, for example--
who would show up for a
summer, and then disappear.
He was going through 20, 30
different teachers a year.
Oh, that's not a very good
setting for learning stuff.
That's not ideal.
Language is not
just about language.
It's about the
emotional relationships.
And Nim ultimately wound up
being a pretty screwed up
chimp in terms of like
nobody stable in his life
except for this cold
fish Terrace who
basically didn't like him.
So it's going back and
forth, and these accusations.
And Patterson coming out
with just incredible stuff,
and Terrace going after her.
And then things
got really dirty,
Patterson beginning to
suggest that maybe Nim
wasn't playing with a full deck
compared to the other-- oh,
so Terrace got the stupidest
chimp in the entire literature
there, and did the best
analysis on his inadequacies,
and is trying to take down the
whole field-- totally messy,
messy sort of conflict there.
And pretty much the
whole field collapsed
in the aftermath of it.
Patterson is still up in
the hills of Woodside.
Although I hear rumors
she's about to move
to Hawaii with Koko
to a large estate
that she's gotten
somebody to give her.
She sends out things like
newsletters talking about Koko
sends greetings for world
peace, and things of that sort.
I met her once.
And she wanted to talk
about this gorilla Michael
was brought in who was
supposed to mate with her.
But they brought him in
when he was too young.
And they did a kibbutz brother
and sister deal instead,
and just did folk
songs together.
And Michael wasn't working.
He wasn't mating with her.
So they eventually brought
in this big, larger male.
And Michael promptly
died of heart disease,
which I thought probably had
a major stress component.
And that seemed
perfectly legitimate,
and was talking with that.
And then was
informed that October
is going to be really tough,
because the end of October
is Michael's birthday.
And Koko is going to have
a really hard-- saying,
is anybody else hearing this?
Am I the only one
hearing this who
thinks something is off here?
They have continued there.
And Terrace pretty much took
down the rest of the field.
In the aftermath, and
the remnants of it,
there remains one chimp
who I think legitimately
qualifies as using
something beginning
to resemble true language.
And this is a bonobo
chimp named Kanzi.
And Kanzi, they are
doing everything right.
It is clear that Kanzi
is incredibly smart.
They are doing all
sorts of data analysis.
And Kanzi is learning stuff.
Kanzi is doing embedded clauses.
Kanzi does if-then stuff,
logical progressions.
Kanzi is able to do a
whole bunch of things.
Kanzi can do analogy.
Small ball is to small
bucket, as big ball is to--
and she will
indicate big bucket.
She can do analogies like that.
And most intriguingly,
not only is Kanzi
generating language, and
spontaneous and all of that,
is that when Kanzi makes
mistakes identifying things,
they tend to be within
semantic categories.
She accidentally comes up
with the sign for apple
when she means to say orange.
She doesn't accidentally
come up with the sign
for existentialism when
she means to say orange.
It's semantic categories,
exactly the sort of stuff
you need.
So at this stage, most of that
field went down in flames.
At one point, people were making
a big deal out of the fact
that there's not a whole lot
of gorillas left on Earth.
And when, supposedly,
Koko and Michael
were able to be talking their
hearts out with each other,
when you calculated those two
gorillas, and the total number
of gorillas on Earth, and how
many people speak American Sign
Language, and how many
people on Earth there are,
a greater percentage
of Earth's gorillas
were speaking American Sign
Language than Earth's humans.
Like, that was stuff
coming out at that time.
So the entire field
has collapsed.
Kanzi remains
about the only hope
for making sense of
anything going on
with this-- really appealing,
seductive stuff, not
a whole lot of science.
OK, so what we will
pick up on on Wednesday
is the genetics evolution
of language, and then--
For more, please visit
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