Dear Students!
Our next speaker this week will be D. Kimbrough Oller and you will need to read the following paper for this seminar:
"Functional flexibility of infant vocalization and the emergence of language"
D. Kimbrough Oller, Eugene H. Budera,b, Heather L. Ramsdelld, Anne S. Warlaumonte, Lesya Chornaf,and Roger Bakemang
We are looking forward to lively discussions!
cheers
Your Cog Sci Team!
In general, I found the article to be quite interesting. While some of its terms and phrases were a little difficult for me to parse, given my unfamiliarity with the literature and discourse, it provided a good discussion of the topic of infant vocalizations.
ReplyDeleteMy questions/comments are twofold.
(1) It was mentioned on page 2 about the studies on chimps, their grunts, and the "variable functions" of their speech acts. I am curious as to the details of the study, as they weren't covered in the article, presumably due to length requirements. I'm just curious as to the specifics of the studies, as I'm not familiar with the literature.
(2) I really liked how the article pointed out the importance of focusing on facial affect, vocal patterns, and behavior in research on speech and communication (p. 5 "A recent review emphasizes that little effort has been devoted to multimodal description of vocal communication . . ."). This is highly complementary to the paradigm of embodiment in philosophy, which is the claim that one's body plays a large role in how one says/expresses/believes things that were previously thought to be solely in the mind (e.g. emotions, desires, opinions, etc.). I just found it refreshing/interesting that another discipline has also brought these considerations to the forefront. Then again, I'm all about interdisciplinary endeavors and breaking down the rigid borders of disciplines.
I have a question regarding the affective component of protophones studied in the article, Based on this set of studies and similar research, do you believe the primary evolutionary upshot of functional affective flexibility is found in the possible grounding for signal stability between illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects, a general prelingusitic scaffolding that helps human infants develop more advanced language capacities, an aid for both of these elements, or a different (set of) alternative(s)?
ReplyDeleteAlso, if we have time, I would be interested in hearing more about methodological controls in developmental studies, which was briefly touched on last week concerning the differences between comparative and developmental research. Thanks!
This study shows infants’ functional flexibility in vocalization by comparing with facial expression on emotion, and extents it to origin of language.
ReplyDeleteWhen I looked at the Fig.1, all of protophones are produced most in neutral state. It makes sense that vocant shows neutral emotion because infants may warm up for speech. But I don’t understand what the purposes of squeal and growl are. Because, I think, these are more likely to express what they feel (good or bad), rather than pre-speech. Are these acts, especially squeal, also indicator of verbal practicing or just for screaming loudly at high pitch at childhood?
The authors emphasize a necessity of future study that would apply this concept to animal calling. They briefly mentioned about it at the end of discussion. I’d like to know more specific idea to design an animal study which should be different from this one (e.g., facial affect coding using Ekman scheme).
I believe Dr. Oller would answer this question yet meanwhile for your information here is an excerpt from the book, the emergence of the speech capacity witten by Dr. Oller.
Delete" one parameter that seems to tie squealing and growling together is pitch. The two sound types represent extremes of the continuum of pitch, and infants explore them both...In part, it is the obvious conceptual connection between squealing and growling in the realm of pitch that first inspired the speculation that infants might be systematically exploring heir vocal capabilities during the Expansion stage" (Oller, 2000, p.169-170).
In the last class, I ask you why only human have the complicated language system. From reading this paper, I also have a same question why we need functional flexibility
ReplyDeletein our language. In the beginning, I guess it relates the framework of our memory. Along this way, I did some survey and find some support. Now, I have my answer it is about TIME!!!
Reference: "Are Animals Stuck in Time?" william roberts university of western ontario
I want to follow up on Sun Min’s question. I am also curious about the experiments on other apes that are called for at the end of the article. Specifically, I am curious if the experiments would be conducted on infant apes in relation to their primary care-giver or if they would be conducted on adult apes. Is the article suggesting that adult Chimps and bonobos etc. would communicate in the way that human infants do? And that its this tendency/capacity of our ancestors that eventually developed into language? Or is the claim that this is specifically infant-caregiver type behavior and might be found operating between infant and caregiver chimps and bonobos, though perhaps in a more limited, less frequent/sustained manner?
ReplyDeleteWhile reading this paper, I thought about the unique tendency/inclination of human infants. Since human infants seem to be interested in face-to-face “vocal” interaction, human infants may be designed to communicate vocally and explore various sounds and emotions to richly interact with others. Based on this inclination, I think, human infants may show the functional flexibility in their vocalizations.
ReplyDeleteThe functional flexibility is a "critical step in the development of vocal language" (p. 1). The clue point is to determine if that "feature" is coded in our DNA, or is just a condition to allow the language evolution. Maybe we are "wired" to live, work, and survive in community, with a different intersubjectivity conception to the apes. That can sum another point of view to the discussion.
ReplyDeleteIt's clear that having the capacity to speak is a necessary but not enough condition to develop language (see gray parrot). So, I think that apes and similar, are not stucked in time: they do not need to develop anything else, because they are perfectly adapted to their physical and social environment. Humans, maybe, had to evolve the language (develop a new skill?), just in order to adapt to a new environment. Nobody can deny that human beings change the physical world, create a new meta-world (technological, technical, cultural and so on) and, in the change, adapted to it.
It´s hard to know. But right now a "new" language is being develop that must fit our "new" technological world; a language evolution. Maybe in the actual language developments is the key to understand how language evolved. In my personal view, the key is the cultural evolution. The culture shapes the language and not the opposite.
A short video about how language evolve in the present days is found in a TED lecture (http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-languages-evolve-alex-gendler)
I think that I might be a little bit confused about the claims that are being made in this article. The study on infant use and protophones is fascinating and has a whole lot to add to our discussion of the ontogeny of language development. However, it seems like there might be a lurking (although not entirely uncritical) assumption that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Whether or not that claim is true—and it may be with regard to certain human cognitive capacities—it doesn’t seem to follow as a matter of course from this study about infant language development that protophone babbling was the necessary precursor to early human language. Isn’t it possible as well that we could have had a set of more or less functionally fixed cries and then, perhaps once cultural tool use became more common, these cries were endowed with symbolic meaning. This might have then motivated the phylogenic development of diverse vocal utterances which only then became systematized and developed into language signs.
ReplyDeleteI should mention that I think Oller et. al. are telling a more convincing story than the one that I’ve just provided. Certainly the homology of infant and primate protophones adds some good support to the claim. I’m just a little worried about the inference from infant development to early human development. It might not quite do justice to the actual sequence of prehistorical causes that led to modern human language. I hope that I haven’t misunderstood the claim here.
I thought that it was interesting that cry and laughter showed direct negative and positive affect while growls and squeals were more neutral. Looking for sounds with these characteristics may help us to better understand nonhuman primates. Though this paper proposes that it may be possible to detect these characteristics through facial affect coding and various levels of gestural observations, will it truly be possible to quantify this occurrence? Most certainly we must try and I do agree that functional flexibility plays a key role in language learning. It lays a foundation necessary to expressing emotional states and flexibility in expressing sounds. I would just like to know more about the methodology for studying this in nonhuman primates.
ReplyDeleteAs for the category of “converse” and “complaint”, complaint is also part of converse, right? I guess converse in this paper suggests a continuous interaction, while complaint refers to discontinuing the interaction.
ReplyDeleteVocal exploration of squeals, vocants, and grows in very young infants may have already been present, but culture (e.g., cultural transmission) may also play a role during exploration. Infants may squeal a lot at home but they may be told not to squeal in a restaurant, suggesting that adults may use different perlocutionary forces when infants squeal at different circumstances. Or for older infants, because they may have started to say first words, they probably have started to realize that they better say words using normal phonation so others can understand them easily. Also, infants themselves may have acted differently in different circumstances (e.g., the interviewer in the recording room or not or in a restaurant), so they might squeal less frequently in public areas.
I agree with Megan that it is interesting to compare some human sounds, crying and laughing, with vocalizations of non-human primates. Technically, these sounds are described as having constant function. It seems we could also describe them as being involuntary, at least in infants, and perhaps in primates. Though as we grow as humans we do develop control, to varying degrees, over when and whether we laugh or cry, perhaps human infants do not have this control. Research also indicates that non-human primates may not have voluntary control over whether to vocalize or not. This is a topic I would like to hear more about.
ReplyDeleteI am also interested in exploring how much of function is expressed in intonation of vocalizations, as compared with other cues such as body language and context, which may assist infant caregivers in interpreting the functions of vocalizations.