I would just like to draw attention to Stanislas Dehaene's research group at Neurospin in Paris, where investigations have been performed using brain scans of both the adult and developing infant's brain with regard to learning to read and write and their relationship to the spoken language areas of the cortex. Two interesting findings inform the current question. First, the cortex of two-month old infants has been found to be well organised to process spoken language that seems to support Chomsky's idea of a deep structure for learning language. Second, learning to read and write give rise to the formation of the visual word form area in the occipito-temporal cortex that processes visual information. In order for reading and writing to proceed in children, direct links are formed between the visual word form areas and the dedicated areas of cortex for spoken language. As a result, neural tracts are enhanced between those two areas. Most of this research is detailed by Dehaene in a presentation on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSy685vNqYk&t=4s

Those two insights suggest spoken language is "hard wired" in the brain (i.e. we are pre-tuned to learn language) but reading and writing require considerable cultural learning (note reading and writing is a fairly recent phenomenon that occurred just over 5,000 years ago whereas spoken language has existed for hundreds of thousands of years).

My recommendation would be to check out the research by Jim Magnuson and his collaborators at Haskins Laboratories.

http://www.haskins.yale.edu/research.html

Best wishes,

Damian

There are a number of good papers from Li Hai Tan on neural correlates of Mandarin characters: Human Brain Mapping 10:16–27(2000), NeuroImage 13, 836–846 (2001)

full list: http://hub.hku.hk/cris/rp/rp01202/publications.html?open=journal&sort_byjournal=1&orderjournal=asc&rppjournal=20&etaljournal=-1&startjournal=0

-Reese

A lot of the actual neuroscience work done to delineate the neural basis of acquisition, refinement, and crystallization of meaningful sounds from other members of the same species has been preformed in songbirds; this includes a number of lesion and circuit mapping studies. Give a look at a good review and go from there!

Take a look at Terence Deacon's book "The Symbolic Species", which suggests language is related to the dynamic relationship between parents and children during development, where children "condition" parents to structure their speech to meet ongoing communication needs. In this way, language becomes instantiated in the brain through development. Surprisingly, Chomsky does not subscribe to an evolutionary origin of speech championed be Pinker even though he regards fundamental aspects as hard wired. Recent work in neuroscience indicates that speech processing in the brain recruits many more areas than previously thought, which concurs with Deacon's ideas.

There are several review papers and a couple of books on the subject that are very interesting, but if you are only interested in recent publications, I would suggest the book "Talking Heads: The Neuroscience of Language" by Denes, which was published two or three years ago. Although not so recent, the "The Neuroscience of Language:

On Brain Circuits of Words and Serial Order", by Pulvermüller (2003), is also an interesting book. 

Recently, it has been argued that the best data comes from stimulating the brain directly in awake surgery. I would suggest to check out the papers of Hughes Duffau, Mitchel Berger (both neurosurgeons with research interests in neuroscience-language). There are also 3 very good Neurolinguists that evaluate language functions during the procedure and publish very interesting things: Djaina Satoer, Elke De WItte, and Silvie Moritz-Gasser.

See some books that will published in this field:

http://routledge-ny.com/catalogs/cognition_and_cognitive_neuroscience/1/8/

Best regards,

Henrique.

In French Guyane  exists interest researchs about how to teach a language and adopt a method that correspond of the psychologie and culture of the native amerindien... teaching french ato amerindien as to french children is not succesfull because their language  is oral and not written and their syntaxe is very different... it could be a good example for your interest. 

Check out Andrea Moro's "The boundaries of babel: the brain and the enigma of impossible languages". It relates directly to your question on innateness.

As an example of an alternative approach you might try this:

Thibault Paul John Language Behavior as Catalytic Prosess: Steps Towards a Theory of Living Language (Part 1) and (part 2) (2011). The public journal of semiotics . ISSN 1918-9907. 3 (2),

good day to all, my suggestion is to read the books written by Andrea Moro. He dedicated his researches at what you are looking for: syntax, possible languages and natural language learning. Take a look also to Jackendoff and Chomsky studies about grammar

Cher Monsieur Comeau. Je cherche depuis une vingtaine d'années à resensibiliser la communauté à tout un ensemble de recherches sur ce sujet dont les références semblent être tombées dans l'oublie au fil du temps. En 2003 j'ai publié une synthèse listant l'ensemble de ces références, depuis Pavlov jusqu'à la synthèse de Eccles dans les années 1990. Voici un lien vers l'ouvrage, dont le premier 15% est en accès libre. Si l'ouvrage vous intéresse, il me fera plaisir de vous en faire parvenir un exemplaire complet, français et/ou anglais à votre choix. Je n'ai rien découvert moi-même. Il s'agit d'une synthèse, selon ma compréhension, de l'ensemble du contenu de ces références.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/156882

Hi Samuel, it has long been known that the neuroscience of language(s) has to do with the oro-laryngeal parts of Brodmann's areas 4 (motor), 3, 1 & 2 (sensory), Broca (motor), Wernicke & the insula (sensory), the fasciculus arcuatus etc. One of the recent discoveries seems to be the work of S.Brown's team, e.g. "A larynx area in the human motor cortex" Brown, Ngan & Liotti 2008 Cer.Cortex 18:837-845 ("The map of the human motor cortex has lacked a representation for the intrinsic musculature of the larynx ever since the electrical stimulation studies of Penfield ... using fMRI ... We had subjects perform a series of oral tasks designed to isolate elementary components of phonation & articulation, incl. vocalization of a vowel, lip movement & tongue movement ... we had subjects perform glottal stops (forced closure of the glottis in the absence of vocalizing). The results demonstrated a larynx-specific area in the motor cortex that is activated comparably by vocal & non-vocal laryngeal tasks. Converging evidence suggests that this area is the principal vocal center of the human motor cortex. Finally, the location of this larynx area is strikingly different from that reported in the monkey ... implications of this observation for the evolution of vocal communication in humans.") This is the same for all languages: AFAIK, there are no neurological difference between different languages. How the human brain becomes mature & functional for verbal communication has to do IMO with how human language (speech) evolved, see e.g. our work on Pleistocene archaic Homo's littoral intercontinental dispersal along African & Eurasian coasts & rivers (S.Munro 2010): shallow diving & breathing control; suction of soft seafoods vs biting-chewing; brain expansion cf brain-specific nutrients in shellfish; vocal learning & provisioning of one own's family), e.g. see attachment.

Mark

You may be interested to know that detailed study and mapping of the verbal areas dates way further back than Penfield.

Pavlov was the first to connect the establishement of language in the verbal areas to the kinesthetic excitation induced by the use of the speech organs. Unfortunately, his work in this area is currently available only in German and was never translated to English:

Ref: Lothar Pickenhein. I. P. Pawlow - Gesammelte Werke - Über die Physiologie und Pathologie der höhere Nerventätigkeit, Ergon Verlag, Germany 1998.

 Free translation oft he pertaining Pavlov comment dating from the 1930's:

“In superior animals, including humans, there develops, in the brain's hemi-spheres, a first system of signalization that brings to the individual's attention the signals originating from the environment and emotions. In human beings, a second system of signalization brings to the attention of the individual the signals of the first system. This second system is made up of cerebral structures created by the kinesthetic excitation induced by the use of the speech organs."

His work was picked up and carried out by Paul Chauchard, neurophysiologist and Director of Research at l'École des Hautes Études in France in the 1950's, and other French neuroscientists in the 1940's and 1950's. Their work was never translated to English. Their ultimate conclusions were exposed in a now very difficult to obtain book by Paul Chauchard

Ref: Paul Chauchard, Le cerveau et la conscience, Les éditions du Seuil, France, 1960

A good synthesis of the research carried out in Europe in the first part of the 20th century can be found in this ref:

John C. Eccles. Évolution du cerveau et création de la conscience, Flammarion, France, 1994

Quite a bit of the material referenced was never translated to English.

 Way more advanced material than anything available today,  even with MRI imaging.

Thanks to those who replied, I start having quite a lot of informations on this topic. Much appreciated. 

Thanks, André, yes, we already knew a lot before fMRI, but whether this was "way more advanced than anything available today" I don't know.

In any case, how human language evolved can best be understood, not in the light of the conventional open plain hypotheses (ape->human = quadru->bipedal = forest->plain), but in the light of human waterside evolution (Pleistocene Homo's dispersal along coasts & rivers, see attachment).

Marc

Just an example of an important discovery that I see no trace of in any current referenced work. The discovery that the myelinization of all verbal areas appears to be genetically delayed in our species until the age about 7, which seems to explain why children so easily learn to speak any language, even many languages during youth.

The bulk of this research can be found in work dating back the 1920's: "Anatomie des Menschlichen Gehirns und Rückenmarks auf Myelogenetischen Grundlage" by Paul Fleisig.

If this is so, and considering that the neocortex areas dealing with writing and reading are different  from those dealing with speaking but also are concerned, doesn't this hint that teaching all children to read and write to minimal autonomy before the age of 7 would be hugely beneficial?

Much more is available in the references I gave.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Comeau & readers,

Readers of this thread may find the following question of interest:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_language_and_how_is_the_term_language_defined_in_linguistics_and_philosophy_of_language3

Many thanks for your kind attention.

H.G. Callaway

Dear André Michaud, sorry for this (very) late answer. Yes, you may well be right, I have no idea, but it's worth being investigated I'd think. Note "verbal areas" are not necessarily or exclusively connected with speech or language (they probably did evolve *for* speech, but might have been preadaptive to speech origins). It may also been that musical skills are involved and/or that it has to do with (the disappearance or reduction of) shallow-diving or airway-closing adaptations, probably in early H.sapiens (cf attachment, and ontogeny +-recapitulating phylogeny).

and how do you explain the transition from seeing and constructing images to enunciation ? the letters in hebrew for instance clearly represent objects

How do letters resembling objects become abstract grammatical objects of language?

Dear Callaway, the term "language" is very broad (can mean every form of communication), usu. we mean "speech" (spoken in the first place, later also written).

I just see a disturbing mistake in my answer of Sept.26: I apparently forgot "not": please read: ... "verbal areas" are not necessarily or exclusively connected with speech or language, they probably did NOT evolve *for* speech, but might have been preadaptive to speech origins ...

Please see update of PPT on speech origins (attachment).

thanks it is indeed clearer to speak of speech rather than language since there is non audible language forms .

I would just like to draw attention to Stanislas Dehaene's research group at Neurospin in Paris, where investigations have been performed using brain scans of both the adult and developing infant's brain with regard to learning to read and write and their relationship to the spoken language areas of the cortex. Two interesting findings inform the current question. First, the cortex of two-month old infants has been found to be well organised to process spoken language that seems to support Chomsky's idea of a deep structure for learning language. Second, learning to read and write give rise to the formation of the visual word form area in the occipito-temporal cortex that processes visual information. In order for reading and writing to proceed in children, direct links are formed between the visual word form areas and the dedicated areas of cortex for spoken language. As a result, neural tracts are enhanced between those two areas. Most of this research is detailed by Dehaene in a presentation on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSy685vNqYk&t=4s

Those two insights suggest spoken language is "hard wired" in the brain (i.e. we are pre-tuned to learn language) but reading and writing require considerable cultural learning (note reading and writing is a fairly recent phenomenon that occurred just over 5,000 years ago whereas spoken language has existed for hundreds of thousands of years).

Thanks

Incidentally, the word form area has been found to form in the same part of the cortex no matter what the language, that is it is universal.

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Comeau & readers,

It has been some time since I last looked in on this thread.

As I understand it, the question concerning the neurosciences of language, and this includes attention to both speech and written language.

It struck me as very interesting that according to Dehaene, the brain areas especially connected with reading (what he terms the VWFA) appear to have been culturally adapted from visual areas originally associated with recognition of lines and line intersections. Reading and written language are, of course, much more recent than speech and spoken language.

Now I wonder if there are any studies indicating that brain areas especially associated with speech perception are similarly adapted from areas associated with more general recognition of sound patterns? Are there studies available based on fMRI?

Any recommendations?

H.G. Callaway

Philadelphia, PA

Dear Uomini & readers,

I came across a paper authored by Friederici & Chomsky, relevant to the present question. It dates from 2012.

See the following:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.472.1726&rep=rep1&type=pdf

I wonder if you may have any comments? The argument is, as one would expect from Chomsky, that human language abilities arise from species-specific evolutionary-physiological development. I'm particularly interested in how neuroscience enters into this judgment and result.

H.G. Callaway

Dear Dr Callaway, "Evolution, brain, and the nature of language" RC Berwick, AD Friederici, N Chomsky & JJ Bolhuis 2012 (Trends Cogn.Sci.17:89-98): "Language serves as a cornerstone for human cognition, yet much about its evolution remains puzzling. Recent research on this question parallels Darwin’s attempt to explain both the unity of all species and their diversity. What has emerged from this research is that the unified nature of human language arises from a shared, species-specific computational ability. This ability has identifiable correlates in the brain and has remained fixed since the origin of language c 100 ka. Although songbirds share with humans a vocal imitation learning ability, with a similar underlying neural organization, language is uniquely human."

Neural organization is indeed very relevant, but not in the way Chomsky cs think. And yes, our language is of course uniquely human, but when we analyse human language into more elementary parts, different comparisons can be made with non-human species, and human speech & language then become much less puzzling: the necessary preadaptations to human language can best be explained in the light of human arboreal & waterside evolution: gibbon-like duetting, voluntary breathing, oro-pharyngeal closures, laryngeal & hyoidal descent, & brain expansion, esp. Broca, Wernicke & association cortex., see Vaneechoutte cs 2011 "Seafood, diving, song and speech" p.181-9 in Vaneechoutte cs eds 2011 ebook Bentham Sci.Publ. (attached - for an update, google e.g. "speech language origins 2017 biology vs anthropocentrism").

In reply to H.G Callaway. The Friederici, Chomsky et al paper state that: "Human language appears to be a recent evolutionary development: archaeological evidence suggests that it arose within the past 100,000 years" does not take into account that the human brain, virtually in its present form, dates back to 300,000 years ago. So it is likely that language existed as early as 300,000 years ago, if not before.

Derek Hodgson The argument is that within the last 100 000 years there was what paleoantropologists call "the great leap forward". An explosion in artefacts, tools weapons in grate variety. Before that, there was pretty much nothing comparable. It is now known that there are groups that split about 120 000 years ago with the same language capacities. So, the current estimate is that the genetic capacity dates at least that far back.

In evolutionary time frames, a couple of hundred of thousands of years doesn't amount to much. What is interesting is that language evolved so recently, which suggests that the trait is based on a very small genomic change.

Sven Beecken,

Its rather shaky basing the appearance of speech on artefacts. Not so long ago based on the "explosion" in artefacts around 40,000 years ago onward, the so called genetic mutation for language was hypothesised to take place then. Now, because artefacts have been found dating to more than 100,000 years ago the genetic event has been reassigned to a much earlier date. The relationship between artefacts and speech is, however, not straight forward and there are taphonimic factors to take into account. I am rather inclined to think that speech was evolving even before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene, as it was essential for the complex social world in which fossil hominins were living (see for example Robin Dunbar's research on this).

Derek Hodgson

Well, it may be shaky (although I think Ian Tattersall makes a compelling case), but it is the available evidence. As Richard Lewontin has pointed out, it is extremely difficult to study the development of higher cognitive functions in any way that is known today. There is no record, there is no variation within the species, we cannot make experiments and so on. What is known about the evolution of language is pretty much this: The genetic bases emerged roughly together with humans, no other organism has language and we find the first evidence for unique human behavior about 100 000 years later.

Notice that there is one fact about language that makes any gradualist story implausible to begin with. Language is infinite, you cannot get to infinity in small steps. So, there must be what one may take to be a singular event, the emergence of a recursive procedure.

Chomsky's and Tattersall's account may very well be taken as an “evolutionary fairy tail” (Chomsky) and it is worth keeping in mind how evolutionary biologist over came the “just so” stories, namely by asking “What is the molecular mechanism?” And it seems that no one today is even close to an answer.

Yes, IMO it's very shaky to base the appearance of speech on artefacts or "higher" (=neocortex?) cognitive functions, nor on Chomsky's or Tattersall's just-so explanations. The comparative evidence (analytically comparing the different elements (preadaptations) of human speech with other animals: vocal learning, voluntary breathing, oral closures, laryngeal & hyoidal descent, ...) is the only reliable approach IMO.

A gradualist scenario for the evolution of language is strengthened by a study just published that found, despite previous assertions to the contrary, primates share the same hemispheric asymmetries as humans, except (surprisingly) in humans this displays much greater variation around the average. Here's the reference:

Simon Neubauer, Philipp Gunz, Nadia A. Scott, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Philipp Mitteroecker. Evolution of brain lateralization: A shared hominid pattern of endocranial asymmetry is much more variable in humans than in great apes. Science Advances, 2020; 6 (7): eaax9935 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax9935

Gradual, yes, in clearly different steps IMO. IMO, FWIW:

1) Miocene hominoid territorial songs: gibbon-like duetting cf.Darwin?

2) coastal forests: suction-swallowing of shellfish etc. (less biting-chewing) at lips, teeth, palate, throut, cf labial, dental, palatal, uvular... consonants?

3) early-Pleistocene H.erectus cs colonizing the open continental shelves (tree-poor & shellfish-rich?) cf glacial sea-level lowerings: shallow-diving: voluntary breath-hold (coastal diaspora -> Java, Flores...)

4) sea-food = brain-food, esp.DHA: very large brain,

5) late-Pleistocene H.sapiens less diving, more wading->walking = "freeing" the airways from diving, for speech?

Dear H.G. Callaway

You might be interested in a study I just came across. A Dutch research group has compared brain activation during language comprehension both for spoken and for written language. They report that their “study provides direct neurophysiological evidence for sensory modality independent processes supporting language comprehension in multiple left hemispheric brain areas.”

I’m not too sure what to make of this, since it is (necessarily) a study of performance, and not necessarily of competence. On the other hand, it seems to support your view that written language is another modality (as we discussed in your thread https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_language_and_how_is_the_term_language_defined_in_linguistics_and_philosophy_of_language3 ).

I hope this is of some interest to you as well as to readers of this thread.

Best,

Sven Beecken

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334716005_Stimulus-modality_independent_activation_of_the_brain_network_for_language