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Where did language come from? Connecting sign, song, and speech in hominin evolution

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Abstract

Recently theorists have developed competing accounts of the origins and nature of protolanguage and the subsequent evolution of language. Debate over these accounts is lively. Participants ask: Is music a direct precursor of language? Were the first languages gestural? Or is language continuous with primate vocalizations, such as the alarm calls of vervets? In this article I survey the leading hypotheses and lines of evidence, favouring a largely gestural conception of protolanguage. However, the “sticking point” of gestural accounts, to use Robbins Burling’s phrase, is the need to explain how language shifted to a largely vocal medium. So with a critical eye I consider Michael Corballis’s most recent expression of his ideas about this transition (2017’s The Truth About Language: What It Is And Where It Came From). Corballis’s view is an excellent foil to mine and I present it as such. Contrary to Corballis’s account, and developing Burling’s conjecture that musicality played some role, I argue that the foundations of an evolving musicality (i.e., evolving largely independently of language) provided the means and medium for the shift from gestural to vocal dominance in language. In other words, I suggest that an independently evolving musicality prepared ancient hominins, morphologically and cognitively, for intentional articulate vocal production, enabling the evolution of speech.

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Fig. 1

Extracted from Perniss and Vigliocco (2014), reproducible under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0

Fig. 2

Image by Selket, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1679336. Accessed 20 July 2017. Reproducible under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0

Fig. 3

Extracted from Capek et al. (2008), reproduced here with permission of MIT Press

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Notes

  1. Terms like “protolanguage” and “language-ready” are a convenience, not meant to imply an element of purpose or teleology.

  2. Indeed, it is likely that language evolution took hold in the kinesic and oral-aural modalities together (see Kendon 2016) to some extent—and in coevolutionary tandem.

  3. Corballis (2017); for earlier versions see Corballis (2002, 2009).

  4. Fitch puts it like this: ‘To the extent that there was a lexicon, it was a simple list of tunes or “riffs”—complex, multi-unit phrases linked to whole, context-bound events’ (Fitch 2010, p. 476).

  5. Largely, but not exclusively, voluntary; recent evidence suggests great ape vocalization may be a little more flexible than previously thought. For discussion, see Kendon (2016); Irvine (2016).

  6. I thus resist the widespread (e.g. Kendon 2016) ‘gesture-first’ versus ‘voice-first’ nomenclature.

  7. Later work by Bickerton (e.g. 2009) explicitly allows for a role for gestures in establishing referential displacement. He envisions a scenario in which an individual has located a carcass somewhere in the distance and needs to recruit others to go and help exploit that carcass: ‘waving and screaming and pointing “Thataway!”, the elephant noise or the hippo noise or whatever it was could have only one meaning: dead megabeast, food for the taking only a short march away’ (2009, p. 161).

  8. Also laughter, sobbing, and so on; these reactive, affective vocalizations may be continuous with primate vocalization.

  9. For example: ‘We can’t tell, just by the sound of the words, what kind of motion is indicated by walk, run, swim, fly, or crawl. But in sign languages, some iconicity has often been retained, and the meanings of the signs for these motion-types can be more successfully guessed at’ (Hurford 2014, p. 107). Perniss and Vigliocco (2014) argue that iconicity played a key role in language evolution in establishing displacement (i.e., reference to that which is beyond the immediate here-and-now) and continues to play a key role in ontogeny in supporting the development of word-referentiality, crucial to vocabulary acquisition and meaningful communication.

  10. According to Thompson et al. (2012), children learning BSL tend to acquire iconic sign production and comprehension before that of non-iconic signs.

  11. The following is a typical articulation of this: ‘In a group of people just beginning to signal meanings to each other, many more meanings could be guessed from manual and facial gestures than from attempts to express them vocally. It would be easier to get a gestural language off the ground in the first place than a speech-based one’ (Hurford 2014, p. 107). Indeed we have seen the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language, a newly established, full language, built from the idiosyncratic homesign gestures of deaf children (Senghas 1995; Senghas et al. 2004; see Begby 2017 for philosophical implications).

  12. ‘A transition is variation limited when the available genetic variation in the given lineage does not offer even a partial solution to the problem at hand, and it takes considerable time (in evolutionary terms) for the necessary variation to arise. By contrast, a transition is selection limited if the necessary genetic prerequisites of a possible transition are present, but the given transition is not selected for as this would require a specific ecological or social context’ (Számadó and Szathmáry 2006, p. 555).

  13. For more on great ape gestural communication in the context of language evolution see e.g. Moore (this issue), Sterelny (this issue).

  14. The evidence in its favour is not decisive, of course. However taken together it makes for a very compelling package, in my view.

  15. Such pantomimic additions to speech enhance comprehension when congruent, and stifle it when incongruent. It appears that the dynamic influence of gesture on speech and vice versa is obligatory (Kelly et al. 2010).

  16. Corballis co-opts Max Müller’s famous use of “Rubicon”—the divide between humans and other species with respect to language: ‘the one great barrier between brute and man is Language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare cross it’ (Müller 1861, p. 340).

  17. For a short BBC video clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0. Accessed 20 July 2017.

  18. E.g., that the two streams don’t in fact operate independently of each other, as some dual-stream theorists have supposed (see McIntosh and Schenk 2009).

  19. After all, chimps and bonobos vocalize a lot while communicating via gesture. For example: ‘Kanzi the bonobo vocalizes prolifically while communicating through gesture… but this is probably largely emotional and it is the gestures that provide the information’ (Corballis 2017, p. 163).

  20. Saussure, for one, famously thought of arbitrariness as a defining feature of language.

  21. I thank an anonymous referee for pushing this point.

  22. I am grateful to Lauren Reed for bringing this hypothesis to my attention.

  23. Capek et al. find that ‘speech-derived mouthings (DM [disambiguating mouth signs]) generated relatively greater activation in a somewhat circumscribed region of the left middle and posterior portions of the superior temporal cortex, whereas for mouth gestures (EP [echo phonology signs]), which are not speech-derived, there was relatively greater posterior activation in both hemispheres’ (Capek et al. 2008, p. 1231). This suggests that in EP the manual gesture drives the accompanying mouth gesture, providing a plausible cortical correlate. They continue: ‘Although mouth actions can be of many different sorts, DM and EP show systematic differences in terms of their functional cortical correlates; DM resembles speechreading more closely, whereas EP resembles manual-only signs’ (Capek et al. 2008, p. 1231).

  24. This hypothetical example shouldn’t seem too wild. There is evidence that ancient hominins were procuring aquatic prey including crocodiles, presumably a feat requiring coordinated action, 1.95 million years ago (Braun et al. 2010).

  25. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing this point.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Simon Greenhill and Kim Sterelny for compiling this special issue. I am grateful to Michael Corballis, Kim Sterelny, and an anonymous referee for helpful critical comments on previous versions of the manuscript. I thank audiences at the Empirical Philosophy Workshop 2017 at Victoria University of Wellington, the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language Seminar Series at the Australian National University, and the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference 2017 at the University of Adelaide for helpful questions and feedback on this and related material. In particular I thank Matt Spike, Kim Shaw-Williams, and Lauren Reed.

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  1. School of Philosophy and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, 2601, Australia

    Anton Killin

  2. Philosophy Department, Florida International University, Miami, FL, 33199, USA

    Anton Killin

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Killin, A. Where did language come from? Connecting sign, song, and speech in hominin evolution. Biol Philos 32, 759–778 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9607-x

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