Language Flashcards

Question

What does the vocal tract consist of What is its structure in extant humans

Answer 1

supralaryngeal vocal tract composed of the oral cavity (OC) and the pharynx (P). OC and P should be the same lenght for producing some vowels: short OC and low position of the P in extant humans

Answer 2

Proxy for reconstructing P in fossil hominins: flexion of the cranial base, neck length, position of the hyoid bone.

Answer 3

Human-like proportions of the neck and position of the hyoid bone. • Basicranial flexion? (Lieberman, 2012)

Answer 4

Australopithecus afarensis: chimpanzee-like bulla (middle of hyoid) (presence of laryngeal air sacs attached to the vocal apparatus?). Presence of laryngeal air sac which would prevent language/ speech like ours

Answer 5

Homo heidelbergensis and Neandertals: same shape and size as in modern humans (characteristics involved in speak presence emerged at least 500, 000 years ago?)

Answer 6

structure of vocal tract unknown in australopithecus and early homo but derived in later homo hyoid is primitive in australopiths, unclear in early homo, and derived in later Homo

Answer 7

FOXP2 gene related to language: evolutionary changes shared by Neandertals and extant humans (Krause et al., 2007). Also have to be aware FOXP2 is present in a range of non-human species including mice

Answer 8

Morgan (2015) tested the efficacy of transmission of Oldowan tool-making skills along chains of adult human participants (n= 184) using five different transmission mechanisms. They found transmission improves with teaching, and particularly with language, but not with imitation or emulation They concluded: (i) low-fidelity social transmission, such as imitation/emulation, may have contributed to the B700,000 year stasis of the Oldowan technocomplex, and (ii) teaching or proto-language may have been pre-requisites for the appearance of Acheulean technology This work supports a gradual evolution of language, with simple symbolic communication preceding behavioural modernity by hundreds of thousands of years

Answer 9

Atapuerca SH hominins were similar to modern humans in this aspect, falling within the lower half of the range of variation, and clearly distinct from chimpanzees The presence of a complete cervical segment of the spinal column associated with Cranium 5 from the Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene site (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain) makes it possible to estimate the vocal tract proportions in H. heidelbergensis - found to be similar to the reconstructed vocal tract in the La Ferrassie 1 Neandertal individual, which has been suggested to have been capable of producing the full range of sounds emitted during modern human spoken language. These results in the Atapuerca (SH) hominins are consistent with other recent suggestions for an ancient origin for human speech capacity.

Answer 10

Alfred Russel Wallace invoked divine intervention Chomsky declared give the complexity of language that it could not possibky have evolved via natural selection

Answer 11

the representation of certain lip and tongue movements in motor brain maps may be mapped in non-arbitrary ways onto certain sound inflections and phonemic representations in auditory regions and the latter in turn may have non-arbitrary links to an external object’s visual appearance The stage is then set for a sort of ‘resonance’ or bootstrapping in the co-evolution of these factors, thereby making the origin of proto-language seem much less mysterious than people have assumed lip and tongue movements and other vocalizations may be synaesthetically linked to objects and events they refer to in closer ways than we usually assume and this may have been especially true early in the evolution of the proto-language of ancestral hominids an important factor may be synaesthesia caused by cross-activation between two motor maps rather than between two sensory maps

Answer 12

Darwin (1872) noted that when cutting something with a pair of scissors we often unconsciously clench and unclench our jaws, as if to sympathetically mimic the hand movements could perhaps be synkinaesia between the motor maps for the mouth and hand, which are right next to each other in the Penfield motor homunculus of the pre-central gyrus when pointing I use my index finger to point outward to you. I also produce a partial outward pout with my lips (as in English ‘you’, French ‘tu’ or ‘vous’ and Tamil ‘thoo’), whereas when I point inward to myself, my lips and tongue move inwards (as in English ‘me’, French ‘moi’ and Tamil ‘naan’) In this manner a primitive vocabulary of gesture and pantomime could evolve through synkinaesia into a corresponding vocabulary of tongue/palate/lip movements (causing vocalizations, especially if accompanied by guttural utterances).

Answer 13

each of these different effects (synaesthesia between object appearance and sound contour, between sound contour and vocalizations, and synkinaesia) in isolation may have been too small to have exerted adequate selection pressure for the emergence of proto-language, but a bootstrapping between all of them acting together may have indeed been sufficient

Answer 14

Washoe was a female common chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using American Sign Language (ASL) as part of an animal research experiment on animal language acquisition However, subsequent experiments to perform similar results with other chimps have failed - suggesting it may have been a 'Clever Hans' effect

Answer 15

Washoe: "You, Me out go". Human: 'OK but first clothes' (Washoe puts on jacket.)

Answer 16

People who should be there for her and aren't are often given the cold shoulder—her way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (Chimpanzees don't shed tears). Kat later remarked that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences

Answer 17

As Dobzhansky (1973) put it, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

Answer 18

• no statisti-cally significant differences between the Neanderthal (from 130kya, Krapina sample) and modern human means in any of the anatomical variables based on estimates of middle and outer ear such as concha, middle ear cavity, and ear canal o not similar in the early hominin taxa Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus from South Africa showed that the OBW in the early hominins was quite similar to Pan troglodyte

Answer 19

 SH hominins differ from modern humans in two aspects of their hearing pattern: a slightly narrower band of maximum sensitivity in the midrange frequencies (1e5 kHz) and a slightly higher upper limit of the audible frequency range. Both of these aspects would appear to be primitive features of the hearing abilities in the SH hominins. o Length in Australopithecus and Paranthropus are well-predicted for their estimated BM and, thus, show the primitive condition for hominids. o Ear evolved in a mosaic pattern in Homo

Answer 20

• Lieberman stresses that Skhul did not have 1:1 so therefore even ‘modern’ humans did not have our speech capabilities o This maybe true but see below – different type of speech – Lieberman also stresses that language arose before human vocal tract  Perhaps with different species being able to communicate, there was a greater selective pressure to develop more efficient speech, even at the cost of greater choking risk

Answer 21

* Although SH humans did not have the 1:1 SVT proportion characteristic of adult modern humans, their vocal tracts were fully capable of producing the human quantal vowels * the first step, already present H. heidelbergensis, represents a clear improvement beyond the communicative capacities of a chimpanzee. In turn, modern humans may represent a further specialization in the efficiency of oral communication - Although a ratio of SVTv:SVTh less than 1.0 does not prevent the production of human quantal vowels o Absence of air sacs and presence of humanlike hyoid

Answer 22

o Language may have begun to develop before presence of humanlike low larynx due to risk of choking

Answer 23

increased demands for effective visuomotor coordination and hierarchical action organization in more advanced toolmaking. This includes an increased activation of ventral premotor and inferior parietal elements of the parieto-frontal praxis circuits in both the hemispheres and of the right hemisphere homologue of Broca's area. The observed patterns of activation and of overlap with language circuits suggest that toolmaking and language share a basis in more general human capacities for complex, goal-directed action. Stout (2008)

Answer 24

Pithecanthropus alalus instructed his students such as Richard and Oskar Hertwig to go and find it.

Answer 25

Vertebrae: speech requires a complex coordination of breathing muscles to vary pitch and produce long sentences. Lucy and Turkana boy’s relatively narrow spinal cord compared to modern humans indicates that they lacked the nerves responsible for this fine control of the muscles that coordinate breathing during speech.

Answer 26

chimps in Tai national park were able to organise vocal units into different structured sequences, possibly indicating different meanings - similar to sentence construction

Answer 27

all have human-like malleus --> deep origin robustus' incus is shaped so functionally has similar sensitivity to non-human haplorrhines cochlear length predicted by body mass (ape-like)

Answer 28

humans and N have different ossicle morphology but same functional outcome different brain evolution but pressure to keep function same for language? SH -> smaller CL suggests higher upper limit than humans but still shift away from chimps Krapina (130kya) -> no significant difference between middle ear here and in humans

Language Flashcards

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