Origins of Human Language - The Social Underpinnings of Language

8 important questions on Origins of Human Language - The Social Underpinnings of Language


What did Michael Tomasello (2006) and his
colleagues find when they did a test with chimpanzees to let them find food in one of the two containers, and gave them a hint?


Their primate subjects ignored the hint, even though the experimenters went out of their way to establish that the “helper” who pointed had proven herself to be helpful on earlier occasions by tilting the containers so that the chimp could see which container had the food


What exactly was Brian Hare's and Michael Tomasello's (2004) experiment between chimpanzees and a human?

The human extended her arm toward a bucket but couldn’t touch it because she had to stick her hand through a hole that didn’t allow her to reach far enough, the chimpanzees were able to infer that this was the bucket that must contain the food, and reached for it.

What comparison does Michael Tomasello make in his book Why We Cooperate (2009) when pointing out how different humans and chimpanzees are when shopping?

Chimpanzees would enter the store, pick up the items, stand in line and check out. While humans would more think about the socially acceptable norms to go shopping (e.g. Not stealing, not bumping into people, don't drop things on the floor etc.)
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What did Morales and his colleagues test on 6-30 year months old children?


How often individual babies responded to their parents’ attempts to engage them in joint attention, beginning at 6 months of age; they then evaluated the size of the children’s vocabularies at 30 months and found that the more responsive the babies were even at 6 months, the larger their vocabularies were later on

What keeps our primate relatives from creating languages or laws of their own?


1. Lack of social motivation: they’re simply less motivated to engage in complex social
behavior than we humans are.
2. They lack a specific cognitive ingredient that would allow them to engage in complex
social coordination.
3. They lack the capacity for joint attention.

What was the research question for the study of Morales et al. (2000), who studied 6-30 months old children?


Does the ability to engage in joint attention support language development in young children?

If we compare a 2-year-old with a chimpanzee, can we assume that that is a good measure of the targeted skills of each?

No, because if there's a human in charge the child could be more motivated to perform well and the chimp might be anxious.

What did the study from Povinelli & Eddy (1996) find which was about being unable to see the visual experience of another individual?


Interestingly, the chimpanzees begged randomly from either human, as if oblivious to the fact that the person wearing the bucket was temporarily blind.

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