Oct 23, 2020 07:00:00

'Language manipulation ability' can be traced back to the common ancestor with monkeys about 30 million years ago

One of the greatest features that distinguishes humans from other animals is often 'manipulating language.' Little is known about how the ability to understand language has evolved, but in a paper published by the

University of Warwick on October 21, 2020, that ability became a common ancestor with monkeys and apes. It has its origins and was announced to date back 30-40 million years.

Nonadjacent dependency processing in monkeys, apes, and humans | Science Advances
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/43/eabb0725

UZH -Cognitive Elements of Language
https://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/2020/language-evolution.html

Building blocks of language evolved 30-40 million years ago
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-blocks-language-evolved-million.html

Mankind's ability to manipulate language is based not only on its ability to pronounce complex sounds, but also on its ability to perform and understand complex word combinations that other species do not. A study led by Professor Simon Townsend of the University of Warwick analyzes 'non-adjacent dependency processing,' which is the ability to understand the relationships between words in a sentence, comparing humans and chimpanzees.

'Non-adjacent dependence' is the ability to decipher the relationships between non-adjacent words. For example, in Japanese, when you say 'a dog was caught by a cat and ran away', the action 'escape' follows the word 'cat', but the main action is the distant 'dog' in the sentence. It is due to. Thus, the ability to handle distant phrase relationships is considered human-specific.

Dr. Stuart Watson of the

University of Zurich , who was involved in the study, said of the study, 'Most animals do not handle non-adjacent dependence in communication systems, but how much they can understand that non-adjacent dependency. I wanted to know. '

The study explores the 'ability to process sound relationships' of animals that do not share a common language by creating a series of 'artificial grammars' that consist of meaningless sounds rather than words. It was done. Experiments have been conducted on common marmosets (Brazilian monkeys), orangutans, and humans.

Humans and monkeys to be tested are first taught the law that a particular sound follows another particular sound. For example, understand the rule that the sound of 'B' always follows the sound of 'A', and understand that the sound of 'B' follows even if the sound of 'X' is sandwiched after A. To do. This is in line with the rules of human language, where it is predicted that a predicate should always follow if there is a subject first.

In subsequent stages, researchers played a combination of sounds that violated the laws that humans and monkeys had already learned. At this time, common marmosets and chimpanzees showed behavioral changes such as 'looking at a speaker that produces sound for about twice as long as before.' Researchers describe this as a sign of 'surprise' by noticing 'grammatical errors.'

As a result of research, it is concluded that all three species were able to easily handle both adjacency-dependent and non-adjacent-dependent sound relationships. Therefore, this 'non-adjacent dependency processing', which is the basis of the ability to manipulate language, is considered to be widespread in primates, and Professor Townsend said, 'This is an important feature of language is the ancestor of primates. It is a discovery that already exists in Japan and can be recognized from 30 to 40 million years before the evolution of the language itself, 'he emphasizes the importance of research.