Philip Lieberman
The pied piper of Cambridge
The major “contribution” of generative grammar to cognitive science is
negative. The hermetic disjuncture of linguistic research from biological
principles and facts has influenced cognitive science. Linguists have followed
the pied piper taking a different path from that pointed out by Charles Darwin.
As Dobzhansky (1973) noted, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light
of evolution.” The hermetic nature of much linguistic research is apparent even
in phonology which must reflect biological facts concerning speech production.
For example, studies dating back to 1928 show that tongue “features” do not
specify vowel distinctions. However, the irrefutable findings of these
cineradiographic and MRI studies are generally ignored by linguists. Chomsky’s
central premise, that syntactic ability derives from an innate “Universal
Grammar” common to all human beings constitutes a strong biological claim. But
if a UG genetically similar for all “normal” individuals existed, one of the
central premises of Darwinian evolutionary biology, genetic variation would be
false. Concepts and processes borrowed from linguistics such as “modularity”
have impeded our understanding of brain-behavior relations. Some aspects of
behavior are regulated in specific localized “modules” in the brain, but current
research demonstrates that the neural architecture regulating human language is
also implicated in motor control, cognition, and other aspects of behavior. The
neural bases of enhanced human language are not separable from cognition and
motor ability. The supposed unique aspect of syntax, its “reiterative”
productivity, appears to derive from subcortical structures that play a part in
neural circuits regulating motor control. Natural selection aimed at enhancing
adaptive motor control ultimately yielded a basal ganglia “sequencing engine”
that can produce a potentially infinite number of novel actions, thoughts , or
“sentences” from a finite number of basic elements. Recent studies suggest that
the human FOXP2 gene, which differs from similar regulatory genes in chimpanzees
and other mammals, acts on the basal ganglia and other subcortical structures to
confer enhanced human reiterative ability in domains as different as syntax and
dancing. The probable date of the critical mutations on FOXP2 is coincident with
the appearance of anatomically modern human beings about 150,000 to 200,000
years ago. Humans thus can create more complex sentences than chimpanzees, but
has anyone ever seen an ape dancing?
The Linguistic Review, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0167-6318
Volume: 22, 12/2005
Pages: 289 - 301
Show full article (external site)
Show all available items of this journal
Search
