The New York Review of Ideas » Q&A | June 2009
War of the Words
Dean Falk argues that women gave birth to language.
By Jessica Kaplan
Physical Anthropologist and Florida State University Professor Dean Falk is in the midst of waging an evolutionary battle of the sexes with the publication of her new book, Finding Our Tongues. Falk argues that it was pre-historic Woman who sparked the flint of intelligent human evolution. She theorizes that baby talk, or motherese, is unique to humans and that it holds within its high pitched, sing-songy nature the key to language itself. As a mother and grandmother herself, Falk is no stranger to using voice as a tool of comfort.
Your theory champions the idea that the mother of modern language is, in fact, the human mother. Why mothers?
Our early ancestors would have been like our nearest cousins, the great apes, and our more distant ones, the monkey, and in those groups paternity is not recognized. Survival of the infants is all up to the mother, so that mothers and infants had to be targets, you know, lightning rod foci for natural selection. Survival of the fittest had to have depended on mothers and infants and so I pursued that. If you look at comparative primate behavior and all the tool use that does exist, it’s the females. It’s the females who crack those nuts with stones more than males in the Ivory Coast, the female chimpanzees. It’s the females who recently were discovered differentially making spears and spearing bush babies. If you look at Japanese Macaque monkeys who are famous for their proto-cultural inventions, it’s the females spreading it to their kids. Eventually the males got it too, but the focus has been on mothers and their infants.
Do you consider your argument “feminist”?
I’m supportive of women and I recognize sexism, but I’m not a ranting, raving, radical feminist. However, there has been a traditional school of thought in Paleo-Anthropology that’s been going on since at least Darwin, that males—Man the Hunter and Man the Tool-Maker— have been the movers and shakers of evolution. And then around the 1970s women anthropologists and a few men realized that there are some other people around, too, other than adult males and so they started to examine women and their evolutionary role. They formed a model of Woman the Gatherer who opposed Man the Hunter; they pointed out correctly that women, in non-industrialized cultures actually produce most of the calories by gathering food while the men are out trying to hunt. More recently there has also been the recognition that grandmothers were really important for childcare, which would have allowed their daughters to produce more children. So there’s been some recent recognition that women have a significant role in human evolution.
Is there anyone out there currently offering a counter-view?
There’s another book that just came out called Adam’s Tongue by Derek Bickerton, and he’s in the other school. I did not know he was doing Adam’s Tongue and I doubt that he knew I was doing Finding Our Tongues. It’s like an evolutionary battle of the sexes.
Your ideas have created controversy with many linguists. How do you break with existent theories on language development?
First off, any discussion of language origins by its nature is going to be controversial, that’s always been the case. It was such a hot topic that The Linguistic Society of Paris outlawed all discussion of it. And there are schools of thought today. One school of thought in which I partake is called Continuists, and we believe that language evolved out of the basic vocalizations of our ancestors. There is another school called Discontinuists, and they say that ape calls have nothing to do with it; language is something totally new and different. Often, not always, those folks are linguists and linguists look at language from the top down. They look at language today in the world and then speculate how it could have evolved. They’re very mathematical, very formal, very logical. There’s nothing wrong with that; I admire it, but they discount the fossil record and the behavioral information. Continuists look at language more comparatively and go bottom-up.
You do go bottom-up in your book by claiming that language is a consequence of evolution. What evolutionary changes set the stage for speech?
We share a common ancestor with chimps. Between five and seven million years ago our ancestors, the hominins, split off from chimps and went their own way. We have fossil evidence that shows it was around this time the whole human body was refined for walking on two legs and we know the pelvis, hip area and birth canal were changed. We also know from fossils that brains were very small in the beginning and that they evolved in size through time, and that theory is irrefutable. So birth canals were getting narrower as the brains were getting bigger.
How did these physical changes allow for language development?
Birth is no problem for apes, that baby slips out. But for our ancestors there came a point when birth was really difficult, as it is today for women. The evolutionary solution was that natural selection favored babies that were very small— small enough to make it through the birth canal. Those smaller babies were developmentally delayed; there was a postponement of their gestation, they were finishing gestating until the first year of life. Because of this delay, newborns didn’t have the physical capability to cling to their mothers. I figured the initial kind of vocalization between infants and mothers had occurred because of the physical separation.
But why would humans be physically separated from their babies?
Those apes and monkeys are glued onto their mommies; they’re never put down and there’s very little vocalization between mother and infant. But, with humans that’s not the case. Babies can’t cling to us; we have to cling to the babies. At first I wondered “But why would our mothers put their babies down? Why would they?” Then I realized that it ties to the physical evolution of bipedalism and that was the epiphany; it had to do with brains and heads getting bigger at the same time that there were modifications in the human body. So I realized there was something about opening the vocal channel that had to do with the fact that our infants were at times not glued onto their mommies.
Does this mother/infant communication appear at all in chimps?
Contact calls between mothers and infants are wide across animals. But motherese, or baby talk, is what you hear when you go to the grocery store and hear mommy talking to her one-year- old baby. It’s not the way she talks to the clerk she’s checking her groceries out from. It’s very special; it’s got distinctive features and it’s incessant, it’s non-stop, it’s pervasive, it’s a continual communication. And it’s two-ways, because infants respond to it with their own body language and vocalizations and that is unique to people. Chimps don’t have that, and they probably never did.
How did this idea of pinning language to motherese originate?
The initial stimulus came from a woman named Ellen Dissanayake— I heard her present a paper a number of years ago talking about motherese and its evolutionary relationship to the templar arts like music and dance. That is where I learned in real life that baby talk is unique to people and I thought “Oh, there must be something there to do with language origin.” But I just filed it away and let it rumble around the attic. Later I picked it up and started to develop the idea; the book kind of evolved in pieces. It was a very important epiphany for me to tie in physical evolution and hominin evolution with these behaviors.
How did you come up with the evidence to back up your notion?
The book is really a synthesis of information from a lot of fields- psycho-linguistics, comparative psychology, social anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology. I synthesized a lot of information and a lot of fabulous work of other people to come up with my theory.
When you first came out with this theory in a 2005 target article in the journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences some of your peers criticized your claim that baby-talk is universal?
Yes and I have addressed the idea that baby talk is not universal by looking at Western Samoan, Kaluli New Guinea and African-American Working-Class cultures where it was not supposed to exist and it most certainly does.
How did you respond to critics who said that you did not explain how motherese relates to linguistic grammar and syntax and others. How did you respond?
At the time I never said I would explain the grammar and syntax. What I was talking about in that article was the initial, the pre linguistic substrate. The question that I was addressing in the target article was ‘Where does baby talk come from?’ and making the argument that it was preliminary from the substrate from which afterward language would have evolved.
In what ways did this book grow out of these criticisms?
I decided to take up the challenge and go further and that is what got this book going. I also have gone into a lot more detail about the relationship between being exposed to motherese when you’re an infant and the acquisition of language. I also did several new things. I looked into what was happening in the brain when babies lost the ability to grip onto their mothers, and what was happening when those vocal channels opened and mothers and their infants started making noises towards each other. I found that Neurologists were already looking at hands and their representations in the brain. They had already formulated the hypothesis that language areas had come out of hand areas in the brain. I also looked at music and art. I started to think about what must have been going on in the brain to facilitate these behaviors.
What is the connection between motherese and music?
Music is basically a right side of the brain phenomenon, language is left; they both have to do with sounds and processing sounds in a sophisticated way. I think the two halves of the brain evolved together, and I think music and language evolved together. Babies are born without language, and by the time they’re one they’re getting it. With the acquisition of musical skills it is very, very similar to the kinds of things that happen with the acquisition of language skills.
Between motherese and art?
I think of art as frozen gestures; it’s visual, it’s something you put down and you freeze. I got really interested in seeing if there were parallels between artistic and linguistic development. I started to look at kiddie art from around the world and, lo and behold, the same kinds of things happened in the development of artistic skills that happen in the development of musical and linguistic skills. And then I went into the fossil record and asked “Where do we see art in the fossil record, and does it make sense?” Essentially the argument is that neurologically what happens in our brains to allow us to have language really is affecting neuro-networks in general and is really affecting multiple domains.
How would you like to see the conversation commenced in your book move forward?
It will direct itself and if I feel the need to respond I will. In the target article, for instance, I put stuff out there and when I got beaten up I thought “Well, I’m going to answer these people.” And that’s where this book came from.
Why does this matter to so many people?
I think people are inherently interested in their origins and so called trade books. They’re interested in the question of where they came from. They’re interested in evolution. It’s a hot topic, particularly in light of Darwin’s 200th birthday.
What practical conclusions about mothering can you draw from your research?
Looking at all primates from monkeys on up to people, it is clear that little babies have a strong and intense need for physical contact and cuddling and affection from caregivers. I think it’s worth keeping in mind when we’re parents. ♦