The faculty of language: what's special about it? ☆

TLDR: The approach is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution and related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is "perfect," non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication.

About: This article is published in Cognition.The article was published on 2005-03-01 and is currently open access. It has received 850 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Language acquisition & Biolinguistics.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "The faculty of language: what’s special about it?" ?

The authors examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language ( e. g. words and concepts ) or not specific to humans ( e. g. speech perception ). The recursion-only claim, the authors suggest, is motivated by Chomsky ’ s recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it can not be used to support claims about evolution. 2004. 08. 004 * the authors thank Stephen Anderson, Paul Bloom, Susan Carey, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Matt Cartmill, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Citko, Peter Culicover, Dan Dennett, Tecumseh Fitch, Randy Gallistel, David Geary, Tim German, Henry Gleitman, Lila Gleitman, Adele Goldberg, Marc Hauser, Greg Hickok, David Kemmerer, Patricia Kuhl, Shalom Lappin, Philip Lieberman, Alec Marantz, Martin Nowak, Paul Postal, Robert Provine, Robert Remez, Ben Shenoy, Elizabeth Spelke, Lynn Stein, J. D. Trout, Athena Vouloumanos, and Cognition referees for helpful comments and discussion. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception can not be reduced to primate audition, that word learning can not be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. 

Q2. What is the universal design feature of human language?

As noted as early as Hockett (1960), “duality of patterning”—the existence of two levels of rule-governed combinatorial structure, one combining meaningless sounds into morphemes, the other combining meaningful morphemes into words and phrases—is a universal design feature of human language. 

Q3. What is the fundamental question in the study of the human language faculty?

The most fundamental question in the study of the human language faculty is its place in the natural world: what kind of biological system it is, and how it relates to other systems in their own species and others. 

Q4. What is the position of Chomsky’s strongest critics?

the position that very little is special to language, and that the special bits are minor modifications of other cognitive processes, is one that Chomsky’s strongest critics have counterposed to his for years. 

Q5. What are the arguments against evolution for language in the human lineage?

Turning to the articulatory side of speech, HCF cite two arguments against evolutionary adaptation for language in the human lineage. 

Q6. What is the evidence for HCF’s hypothesis that only recursive languages are special?

mathematical notation, the set of all palindromes, and an infinity of others), the fact that actual human languages are a minuscule and well-defined subset of recursive languages is unexplained. 

Q7. What does the HCF claim is that word learning is not specific to language?

They do so by suggesting that word learning is not specific to language, citing the hypothesis, which they attribute to Bloom (1999) and Markson and Bloom (1997) that “human children may use domain-general mechanisms to acquire and recall words.” 

Q8. What is the recent comparison of the genomes of mice, chimpanzees?

A recent comparison of the genomes of mice, chimpanzees, and humans turned up a number of genes that are expressed in the development of the auditory system and that have undergone positive selection in the human lineage (Clark et al., 2003).