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When we speak, our sentences emerge as a sound stream. Unless we are really bored, we. Do not. Speak. A word. AT. A. the time. But this property of speech is not the way the language itself is organized. The sentences consist of words: distinct units of meaning and linguistic form that we can combine in many ways to create sentences. This disconnect between speech and language is a problem. How do children, at a very young age, learn the discrete units of their language from the disordered sound waves that they hear?
In recent decades, psycholinguists have shown that children are "intuitive statisticians", able to detect frequency patterns in sound. The sequence of sounds rktr is much rarer than intr. This means that it is more likely that intr could happen inside one word (interesting, for example), while rktr is likely to extend over two words (dark treeModels that children can unconsciously detect could help them understand where one word begins and where another ends.
One of the fascinating discoveries of this work is that other species are also able to track the frequency of certain combinations of sounds, just as children can. In fact, it turns out that we are more difficult to identify certain sound models than other animals.
Linguistic Rats
One of the main arguments of my new book, Language Unlimited, is the almost paradoxical idea that our language powers can come from the limits of the human spirit and that these limits shape the structure of thousands of languages. that we see in the world.
A striking argument in this respect comes from the work of researchers led by Juan Toro in Barcelona over the last ten years. Toro's team investigated whether children were better at learning linguistic patterns involving consonants than those involving vowels, and vice versa.
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They showed that the children quite easily learned a set of nonsense words that all follow the same basic form: you have a consonant, then a particular vowel (say a), followed by another consonant, that same vowel, one more consonant, and finally a different vowel (say e). The words that follow this pattern would be Dabale, litino, nuduto, while those who break it are dutone, bitado and Tulabe. The Toro team tested 11-month-old babies and found that the children had learned the model very well.
But when the model involves changes in consonants as opposed to vowels, children simply do not learn it. When they were presented with words like Dadeno, coil, and lulibowho have the same first and second consonant but a third different, the children did not see it as a rule. Human children found that it was much easier to detect a general pattern involving vowels than a pattern involving consonants.
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The team also tested rats. The rat brain is known to detect and treat the differences between vowels and consonants. The twist is that the rat brains were too good: the rats learned the vowel rule and the consonant rule easily.
Children, unlike rats, seem to tend to notice certain patterns involving vowels and those involving consonants. Rats, on the other hand, look for patterns in data of all kinds. They are not limited in the patterns they detect and, therefore, they generalize the rules for invisible syllables for human babies.
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It seems that this bias in the configuration of our minds has influenced the structure of languages.
Impossible languages
We can see it by looking at Semitic languages, a family that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic and Tigrinya. These languages have a special way of organizing their words, built around a system where each word can be defined (more or less) by its consonants, but the vowels change to tell you something about grammar.
For example, the modern Hebrew word for "keep" is actually just the consonant three sounds sh-m-r. To say "I keep", you put the vowels a-a in the middle of the consonants, and add a special suffix, giving Shamarti. To say "I'm going to keep", you insert completely different vowels, in this case e-o and you mean that it's "I" guarding with a prefix stopping to give glottaleshmor. The three sh-m-r consonants are stable, but the vowels change to make the past or the future.
We can also see it a bit in a language like English. The present verb "to ring" is just Ring. The past is however rang, and you still use a different form in The bell has now sounded. Same consonants (r-ng), but different vowels.
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Our particularly human preference for storing consonant patterns in the form of words may underlie this type of grammatical system. We can learn grammatical rules that involve easily changing vowels, so we find languages where this happens quite often. Some languages, such as Semitic languages, make enormous use of it. But imagine a language that is the reverse of Semitic: words are basically vowel patterns, and grammar is done by changing consonants around vowels. Linguists have never found a language that works like that.
We could invent a language that works that way, but if Toro's results resist, it would be impossible for a child to learn naturally. Consonants are anchor words, not vowels. This suggests that our particularly human brains are skewed in favor of certain types of linguistic schemas, but not to others equally possible, and that this has had a profound effect on the languages we see around the world.
Charles Darwin once said that human language skills are different from those of other species because of the higher development of our "mental powers". Evidence suggests today that it is actually because we have different types of mental powers. We do not just have more punch than other species, we have different punch.
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