During human evolution, physiology and anatomy changes allowed the control of lip muscles independently of tongue muscles and soft palate, thus the human vocal apparatus passed from using “words” to differentiating syllables. Around the age of two, the child’s cognitive faculties gain control over the babbling vocal system, thought becomes verbal, syllable becomes word, the result is speech. Ancestral speakers had neurophysiological deficits, so words were used before syllable because their speech organs were not ready, so how come children do the other way round?
Hello Christina,
I think that it might be down to environment. Modern human children acquire languages which naturally contain syllables. If early language didn't have syllables, then the children acquiring this language wouldn't start with syllables but with words or whatever the "primal" structure was. Furthermore, acquisition of phonology through syllabic decomposition seems to be facilitated by infant-directed speech (e.g. Albin & Echols 1996) which might make syllabic processing easier than word form processing.
However, in the example study they showed that in infant-directed speech it is the word-final syllables that are "particularly exaggerated". So the boundary between "syllable acquisition" and "word form acquisition" might not be easily distinguishable.
I hope that this has been some help.
Petar
Article Stressed and word-final syllables in infant-directed speech
Also, for example Everett (2016: 205 ff.) theoretically entertains the thought that syllables might have been a quite early phenomenon in language evolution. There also seems to exist some research showing that cotton-top tamarins are able to perceive syllables.
Everett (2016). How Language Began. The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
I very much agree with Petar. The environmental differences of the present and the past are enormous. In the genus Homo, the first thing they would use would be sounds (more or less complex). Only very later these sounds were rationalized into simpler elements (syllables). At present and after the complex development of modern languages, the form of sound relationship between adults and children would be the one that marked the linguistic learning of children, where they predominate or give more emphasis to some syllables than to others.
Thank you so much, Petar and Angel, your answers made me look at the issue from a different perspective, as I was mainly considering it in terms of speech organs development, very interesting approach!
Hi Christina, I'm not sure whether "words were used before syllables", but IMO we do know +- how human speech evolved: IMO we can discern different (at least 4) biological predaptations to human speech, which mostly evolved at different evolutionary times: gibbon-like duetting, voluntary breathing, vocal learning, suction feeding & possibly brain enlargement, please see our paper M.Vaneechoutte cs 2011 "Seafood, diving, song and speech" p.181-9 in Vaneechoutte cs eds "Was Man More Aquatic in the Past? Fifty Years after Alister Hardy" ebook Bentham Sci.Publ., or see attachment.
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