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English Structures

The Humanness of Language

Probing the Origins of Language

While humans communicate with all three types of communication, it is believed that animals lack linguistic communication because they lack symbols. Perhaps future research will show this conclusion to be erroneous, but most evidence suggests that natural animal communications differ from human language in this respect. This is not the only way that animal communication differs from human communication, though. Let's look at another difference, which helps explain how language may have originated in humans when it did not originate in other animals.

Activity: Finding the difference between human and animal vocalizations

Listen to the following sounds. Then identify which is produced by a human and which is produced by an animal.

Sound 1
Sound 2

The first sound was human laughing. The second sound was a chimpanzee laughing. Were you able to tell the difference? How were you able to tell the difference? There is something fundamentally different about the way that humans laugh and the way chimpanzees laugh. That difference is the same difference between the way that humans speak and the way that animals produce vocalizations. Quite simply, humans laugh the same way they talk, by chopping one continuous exhalation into individual sounds. Chimps do not employ one continuous exhalation. They emit one laugh syllable on each in-breath and on each out-breath.

Probing Differences in Breathing

Behind the difference in human and animal communications, then, is a difference in the relationship between vocalizing and breathing. Why don't chimps breathe the same way as humans? Because their breathing is tied to their locomotion:

Their respiration rates must synchronize with their movements in order to protect the thorax from damage during impact when the forelegs hit the ground.  This is true of all quadrupeds. A jumping horse emphasizes this fact:

Quadrupeds’ stride-breath ratio is 1:1, One stride for every breath. Humans have various stride-breath ratios, but 2:1 is the most common.  Respiration in humans is not completely independent of movement needs, but it is freer.

Activity: Understanding the stride-breath ratio

Test out your stride-breath ratio. You'll have to get up from the computer to do this.

First, see what is normal for you. Just walk normally and count how many steps you take as you breathe in. Then count how many you take as you breathe out. Did you get the average human 2 breaths for every one step? Or did you get a higher number?

Second, try to use the quadruped 1:1 ratio. That is, take only one step as you breathe in and only one as you breathe out. How does it feel?

Feeling adventurous? Try to be a quadruped.

Squat down and hop like a frog.  Count how many hops you take for each breath you take.

Try to use the human 2:1 stride-breath ratio while hopping.

How does it feel?

Discussion - Lesson 1, Page 5

Probing differences in locomotion

Respiratory freedom from locomotion allows humans to control breathing, as we do when laughing, and as we do when speaking. This suggests that bipedal movement is the first requirement for human speech. Provine notes that two other types of animals have breathing that is freed from the quadruped 1:1 ratio, too:

Birds

And sea mammals

While the separation of respiration from locomotion might be an interesting note in describing how human language and animal vocalizations differ, is it important in any other way? Yes, all speech begins with the issue of air movement. All the sounds in the English language are produced with the exhalation of air from the lungs.  This is a discussion that will be taken up later as part of the study of articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds.

Further Implications of Separating Breathing from Locomotion

As we have seen, because humans stand upright and walk on two legs, their breathing is free from their movement needs. This allows humans to take one breath and exhale it in a controlled way, shaping it as it moves through the mouth, producing varied vocalizations. However, birds and sea mammals can do the same thing for the same reason, but they still don't have lanaguage. Why not?

There is another aspect of human language that we have seen, and it hasn't been accounted for yet: symbolic thought. Provine reports that Homo Erectus, an early hominid that walked upright, had a spinal cord the same size as nonhuman primates, not large enough to control respiration. This shows that although bipedalism is necessary for speech, it isn’t enough to provide the necessary respiratory control for speech. A different kind of brain is needed, too.

Although the answer is still uncertain, it is possible that with upright posture came the development of nerves to control free hands, arms, neck, and torso as well as free breathing, and nerves are part of the nervous system, as is the brain. As nerves that could control the neck developed, so did nerves that could control the throat, where speech sounds are produced. And as more sounds were produced and controlled, more brain was needed to receive and process the information. The answer then may be that the brain and language co-evolved. This would mean that human symbolic thought and language co-developed out of bipedalism, but there is no definitive answer.

We do think that human brains are different than animal brains. The human cortex is larger and more complex than the cortex of other animals. Human spinal cords are different from animal spinal cords, too, and from the spinal cords of Homo Erectus. Primate spinal cords have less mass than human spinal cords, all the difference being in gray matter in the areas that control the neck, arms, trunk, and respiration. A closer look at the human brain and how it processes language will come in the next lesson.