Is language uniquely human?

The syntax reading from Carnie introduces the fundamental concepts needed to understand linguistic syntax, discusses the theory of a Universal Grammar, and starts to develop a very basic grammar to model acceptable language syntax. Something that stuck out to me was that a significant portion of this reading was dedicated to arguing for the existence of a Universal Grammar—an innate human facility for language acquisition and use. I was dissatisfied with the treatment of counterarguments to the Universal Grammar theory as I felt that Carnie mentioned some briefly, but did not take the time to consider them in any substantive capacity. In closing his argument, Carnie asserts that “language seems to be both human-specific and pervasive across the species.” While there seems to be something unique about the way humans acquire and use language, here Carnie makes a sweeping generalization with the suggestion that all aspects of language are human-specific. In response, I wanted to use this blog post to explore the extent to which language is human-specific.

I am taking a course on developmental psychology right now, and in our last lecture we discussed how babies acquire language and we explored some recent studies that shed light on this question of whether or not language is human-specific. One study of interest is Ramus (2000). This study explored the similarities and differences in language discrimination between human newborns and tamarin monkeys. Ramus and his colleagues showed that tamarins, like newborns, can distinguish between languages. Specifically, they could distinguish between Japanese and Dutch. They suggest that their findings show that “tamarins, like human newborns, are able to process not just isolated syllables, but also whole strings of continuous speech, and to extract enough information thereof to discriminate between Dutch and Japanese.” Unlike the human newborns, tamarins did not distinguish between human speakers of the same language. In other words, tamarins distinguish between different languages but do not seem to differentiate between different speakers of that same language whereas human newborns distinguish between languages and speakers within the same language. One possible takeaway that this study suggests is that our human facility for processing language may have built upon the auditory system of primates. More important to our discussion of language as human-specific or not, this study provides pretty compelling evidence that language in its entirety is not human-specific; instead, this study suggests that some aspects of language extend to other species—not just humans.

Another interesting consideration that shows something human-specific about language is our use of vocalization (especially as infants). While our vocalizations as infants can be ambiguous (e.g. squealing can be any one of excitement, anger, happiness, sadness, etc) , the vocalizations of other primates are distinctly tied to specific emotions and situations. Overall, it seems that there is a lot to language that is human-specific, but Carnie’s assertion that language is human-specific is overstated.