I see a cat chasing a mouse. You probably don’t realize it, but as soon as you see this scene unfolding, your brain makes an important distinction between cat and mouse. That is, identify who is chasing and who is being chased. This ability to distinguish between the “agent” (the entity that performs the action) and the “patient” (the entity on which the action is performed) is called “event decomposition,” and has long been thought to be unique to humans. It has been. .
However, new study Published in PLOS Biology Great apes (particularly gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans) also seem to track events and distinguish between actors and patients in the same way that we do. This discovery is notable because scientists believe that the decomposition of events is at the heart of something. teeth something unique to humans. It is no coincidence that the concepts of “agent” and “patient” are very similar to the linguistic concepts of subject and object. Scientists believe that the cognitive mechanism of event decomposition underlies the syntax and structure of human languages.
Vanessa Wilson, lead author of the paper, explains: popular science She said her team set out to answer important questions about the relationship between event decomposition and language. This reminds me of the classic chicken-and-egg conundrum. Does it mean that our linguistic abilities depend on our ability to decompose events, or vice versa? To do this, the researchers played a series of video clips to the apes and tracked their eye movements as they watched.
They found that, like humans, the apes’ attention shifted back and forth between agent and patient. This means that they share with us the ability to distinguish between the two. This suggests that the ability to decompose events evolved first and that it provides the cognitive basis for language.
Like many animals, apes communicate clearly with each other in ways that are strikingly similar to humans. They take turns vocalizing, interrupting each other, and have separate voices. Nevertheless, their communication lacks the complexity that characterizes human language. Being able to communicate more effectively appears to be an evolutionary advantage. So if apes had the cognitive framework to evolve language, why didn’t they do it?
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Wilson explains that the answer to this question is not yet clear. “One suggestion is that our social cognition plays a role,” she says. [in human language development]And our need for social cooperation has fostered an externalization of how we perceive and understand the world. ”
Humans also have much larger brains than our closest primate relatives, and one theory suggests that complex human social interactions, of which language is an important part, are at least part of the reason why. This is also a chicken and egg question. Did we evolve large brains to make language easier to use, or is it because of our large brains that we were able to develop language? Again, the answer isn’t entirely clear, Wilson says. “One theory of syntactic evolution is that increased computational ability in humans leads to the ability to form complex expressions, which are expressed through speech. Therefore, brain size plays a role. There is definitely an argument.”
“But,” she continues, “I don’t know. [could] I would never say that one led the other. If larger brains had an advantage in the computations that produce language, there would likely have been selective pressures that continued to drive brain size and communication complexity in some kind of feedback loop, in which language Pressure requires increased brain size and brain enlargement. Size is beneficial to language. ”
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The paper also mentions another possibility. Other animals may “have the ability to deconstruct events in the way humans do,” but simply “don’t have the motivation or resources to communicate about the agent-patient relationship.” This explains why early humans did There’s a motive for that. How and why did language evolve from more basic forms of communication, like grabbing a gorilla friend’s arm and pointing him in the direction of food? Again, Wilson says, one theory is that our social cognition may provide the answer.[ing] We can go beyond communicating about individual beings (such as predator-specific alarm sounds or prey calls) to communicating about the interactions of different beings. ”
But this also raises more fundamental questions. In other words, at what point does communication take place? Become Language anyway? Wilson said the issue is one that “linguists and biologists continue to debate,” and that the lines are not as clear-cut as one might think. “Ongoing research into animal communication is constantly redefining… “We are doing this,” he said. [our] It is about understanding and moving the goalposts of human uniqueness. ”
That said, she explains that human language has several characteristics that make it different from other forms of communication. “One of these features is compositionality, the ability to combine words with individual meanings in different orders to produce unique and specific meanings.Although compositionality exists in animal communication, , so far it has only been found in simpler forms, i.e. combinations of two calls or gestures that individually and together produce different meanings.”
She continues, “Another unique aspect is recursion, the ability to form nested hierarchical structures that is thought to be the basis of syntax. It emerged as a response to the increase in the number of signals, so the syntax allowed these signals to be combined more easily.
But ultimately, the more we learn about animals and how they communicate, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying those forms of communication, the more we realize that humans are perhaps not as unique as we think. It is. . “The bottom line is,” Wilson says. “We are increasingly finding that the difference between human communication and that of other species is one of degree rather than kind…At this stage, our understanding of the underlying drivers of communication is limited. That’s not enough. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of communication complexity.”
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