Origins of Human Communication: A Book Review on Its Evolution

This is evolution of communication essay where the review book “Origins of Human Communication” by Michael Tomasello will show this topic.So here comes a question, what makes cognitive and social capacities of human animals so different than other non-human primates or animals that they can engage in advanced communication? As I find out the answer to this question would entail a great amount of evidence of speculation from different disciplines. The book “Origins of Human Communication” by Michael Tomasello is a work based on the lectures given by him at Jean Nicod Institute of Paris in 2006 and his main initiative is trying to provide an answer to this question. The book mainly focus on the development of human communication through ontogenetic and phylogenetic roots of it and by taking advantage of between-species comparisons. The book also elaborates a significant number of experiments and research that has been done throughout years by developmental and evolutionary scientists to understand the origins of language and more primitive means of communication. Also, I will try my best to outline and review the book.

To prove his arguments and also to find for answer, Tomasello particularly focus on the use of imitation in developing children, cultural learning and social-cognitive skills as well as the creation of a ‘common ground’ with people around them while learning a language. So according to Tomasello, he thinks that the common ground is very vital and it is a must to develop an advanced level of communication between the parties as the common ground is the basic requirement to understand referential intention and social intention of the communicator (p. 75). By investigating the underlying mechanisms of primitive communication, he then focuses on development of grammar or syntax specifically. In this context, his examples mainly shift towards deaf children and sign languages.

Firstly, he thinks that the primitive forms of communication are said to require a joint attention, shared experience ground that builds mutual understanding between the parties and motivations of human animals to feel the need to communicate, inform or share in the first place. Joint attention means two (or more) people focusing their attention on the same object or scene. This situation might be obtained through the use of pointing and gestures. Shared experience ground, in a loose sense, means relationship history between parties; a common history they have been building together through their past communication and memories. This facilitates primitive forms of communication as recipient would be likely to guess the intention of the communicator in different contexts through their shared past knowledge.

Human communication is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, operating most naturally and smoothly within the context of (1) mutually assumed common conceptual ground, and (2) mutually assumed cooperative communicative motives. 

In the book, the first condition of the quote is explained within ontogenetic origins of the language and theory of mind; whereas the second part is explained through phylogenetic origins and conception of language as an evolutionary adaptation. Before getting into details on these developmental and evolutionary standpoints, I would like to define some simple concepts in Tomasello’s terms. His theory begins with natural means of communication and he categorizes them under two groups: Pointing and iconic gestures (pantomiming). The former is regarded as the most fundamental type of gesturing in form of “spatial attention-directing”, and the latter is the enactment of some action with an intention of referring a “perceptually absent object”. On the grounds of these definitions, he claims that communication requires social motivations as it requires a joint goal and either one of three communicative motives that are requesting, informing and sharing. Requesting is provided through intentional communication, hence not being species-unique; whereas the other two requires symbolic representations and recursivity respectively, which seems to be only seen in human animals. To further explain these concepts and their interrelations, he directs the reader to the latter chapters.

Human animals have advanced communicative and cooperative skills as opposed to non-human primates who show some levels of vocalizations under specific circumstances. In order to inquire the underlying mechanisms of communication, Tomasello starts with the differences between intentions of primates versus other mammals in their gestures and vocalizations.

For all mammals, including primates, vocal displays are mostly unlearned, genetically fixed, emotionally urgent, involuntary, inflexible responses to evolutionarily important events that benefit the vocalizer in some more or less direct way… In stark contrast, a significant number of nonhuman primate gestures, especially those of great Apes, are individually learned and flexibly produced communicative acts, involving an understanding of important aspects of individual intentionality.

The main example he uses for this conclusion is vervet monkey calls and a more or less fixed pattern in performing these calls. This inflexibility is, according to him, also supported by all the failed attempts of teaching the apes new vocalizations. When they are the recipients of the communication, great apes seem to engage in it without expecting something about their own benefit, thereby not conceptualizing a common goal between themselves and the communicator. This is what we radically have in human infants from the beginning of their lives, as highly studied by developmental scientists: According to Tomasello, we shall find the complexity of human communication within the motivation to share our intentionality, rather than merely reading the communicator’s intentions. Infants’ iconic gestures and pointing seem to be a good evidence for our tendency to build the common ground as they are beneficial in the building of joint attentional frame and later in language acquisition. Besides iconic gestures, “symbolic play” is also discussed in the book as a tool playing an intermediary role in the shift from iconic gestures to language. Although we see the change in the form of iconic gestures, Tomasello claims, we see the persistence of pointing through time.

Tomasello takes advantage of highly cited experiments conducted by psychologists in order to relate the concepts of cooperation, communication and social learning. Indeterminacy of reference problem in language acquisition, which proposed by Quine, and some solutions to the problem, according to him, entails the existence of a common ground. Otherwise, there is no definite way for the language learner to determine the correct referent). I think the introductory part of the book where Tomasello defines these concepts is concise and applicable in understanding the later steps of the theory.

According to Tomasello, the second aspect of human communication is what makes it totally different from great apes’ communication as “shared intentionality is what is necessary for engaging in uniquely human forms of collaborative activity”. From this uniqueness of human communication and detecting this infrastructure in all other human collaborative activities, Tomasello claims the evolution of communication as an adaptation for human cooperative acts. According to him, everything started with mutualistic cooperation where one helps another with a future expectation, thus create a momentary -or a permanent- common intentional ground with her. Altruistic ones, on the other hand, emerged later on from one’s need to share her feelings and maybe to “cultivate reciprocity and a reputation for cooperation”. As I have mentioned above, he defines three fundamental aspects of communication as requesting, informing and sharing. The first one is what we witness in great apes as it is a normative and more primitive version of communication. For the other two aspects to emerge, on the other hand, a motivation to cooperate seems to be needed. These two motivations in human animals were proposed to increase the reproductive power by enhancing the reputation as a cooperator. In order to jump into this second and more advanced phase of cooperation, we seem to use iconic gestures in a more efficient way. This also gives rise to the transmission of these gestures as holophrases through cultural imitation within the group so as to reinforce in-group favoring. Language, according to him, might have been a result of a “drift to the arbitrary” from these natural tools, which are iconic gestures. What he means by “drift to the arbitrary” is the transition to “words”: Considering how different languages have very different vocabulary for the same object or phenomenon, words we use in daily language can be claimed as an “arbitrary” one. At least more arbitrary than gestural communication in the sense that pointing and using iconic gestures to communicate about an object vary significantly less than words. These “natural forms” of communication are mainly more connected to the object itself, rather than being independent of the object’s location, appearance or qualities. His argument regarding this transition is the following: Since iconic gestures, that is, natural means of communication, con only work in the context of an assured common ground, a more developed way to communicate might have been adopted to develop further communication when there is less common ground. This “shared common ground” assumption for pointing and iconic gestures stems from the fact that I stated regarding the dependency of these natural means on the object itself, thereby being more direct and contextual.

From the beginning, the hypothesis put forward by Tomasello step by step is the following: Language is originated from a shift from natural means of communication to arbitrary means of communication and natural means such as pointing and pantomiming stemmed from the need to cooperate and do mind-reading recursively for future investment in reciprocal relationships. “Transition to the language” part of the theory, however, is not that clear in the book and he does not propose a lot of evidence as he did with his previous points. Perhaps the details of the “drift to arbitrary” is up to a different question, that is, in order to link cooperation to communication he might not have to inquire the transition from iconic gestures to complex languages with syntax. On the other hand, I think this transition should be studied more in order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the whole process. Another concern would be to take advantage of cooperation and altruism in order to explain a further phenomenon: Considering how problematic cooperation and altruism are for evolution, I would say it is brilliant yet risky to explain a different phenomenon on them. The reason why these two phenomena are problematic is that it requires advanced theoretical and biological thinking to explain self-sacrifice of our selfish genes for the sake of others. Evolutionary theorists, including Darwin, have been developing different explanations for this yet the area still requires further work. This debatable position of cooperation in evolution results in some problems throughout the book in the sense that it is sometimes confusing to follow the emergence of these faculties temporally.

As I read through the “Origins of Communication” by Tomasello, I found that it is an extensive reference book for those who are interested in language acquisition, cognitive development and how they stand in relation to our evolutionary history. One of the best things about the book is the fact that he elegantly creates a comparative understanding of communicative needs between human babies, chimpanzees and bonobos. Overall, I would say that the way he connects different yet close phenomena such as cooperation and communication with each other is profound. He also uses plenty of evidence to strengthen his point in most of the chapters. On the other hand, it is sometimes hard for the reader to connect these phenomena, especially in the transition to language part, therefore it may require multiple readings of chapters that are full of new concepts. While evaluating the work critically, the reader should remind herself of the fact that the book is a written form of a lecture given by him. Therefore, small problems in the book can be easily attributed to this.

As a whole, there are still a lot of mysteries that have not been solved so far in psychology and I would say that human language is one of them in terms of its roots and results. The book takes a good direction in the solution of the language puzzle while giving rise to further philosophizing on language with new questions in mind.

References

• Carpenter, M., Akhtar, N., & Tomasello, M. (1998). Fourteen through 18-month-old infants differentially imitate intentional and accidental actions. Infant Behavior and Development, 21, 315-30.