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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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Baby Kanzi was recently adopted, and adjusting to life in his new home.
00:04
His mother was working with a language coach to learn some English, and Kanzi usually came
00:09
along, though he didn’t appear to pay much attention.
00:11
But the language coach noticed that he seemed to be picking up on how to communicate, just
00:16
by watching his mother’s lessons.
00:18
Oddly enough, it appeared that he was picking things up faster than his mom.
00:22
For example, the phrases “you tickle” and “tickle you” meant two different things,
00:26
and Kanzi’s mom, she was having a hard time understanding that syntax.
00:30
But one day Kanzi was hanging out, playing with stuffed animals, and the coach asked
00:34
him to make the dog bite the snake.
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Kanzi put the snake in the dog’s mouth, like it was no big deal.
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It was a really big deal.
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Because Kanzi is a bonobo.
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He’s actually a language superstar, even among the elite research primates, like Koko
00:47
the Gorilla.
00:49
Kanzi is the first ape to demonstrate that language can be acquired spontaneously through
00:53
observation, without planned training, and the first to show a rudimentary understanding
00:58
of grammar, syntax, and semantics.
01:01
Again, really.
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big.
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deal.
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Especially because for years humans have proclaiming that it’s language that sets us apart from
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other animals.
01:09
But are we really alone?
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Turns out, that question keeps getting more and more complicated.
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Technically we define language as a set of spoken, written, or signed words and the way
01:18
we combine them to communicate meaning.
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If we change that definition to include the use of complex grammar, then maybe we are
01:25
alone.
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But if language is simply the ability to communicate through a meaningful sequence of symbols,
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as I might do while looking for a bathroom in Sweden, or Kanzi does when she’s asking
01:35
to roast marshmallows, well then welcome to the club, apes!
01:42
[INTRO]
01:43
We communicate, in part, by engaging our brains and bodies to make sounds that let us transfer
01:53
thoughts from our brain to other people’s brains.
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But of course language is more than just making air vibrate with sound.
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I can communicate by moving my hands, which you might have noticed I do pretty frequently.
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Or by using visual symbols.
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All of these forms of language allow us to comprehend things we’ve never actually witnessed,
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and exchange information with each other quickly and effectively to, you know, get a job, or
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be a friend, or use a metaphor.
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It’s hard to imagine a fulfilling life without some kind of language.
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Humans have nearly 7,000 different languages, and no matter how different they sound, we
02:25
can break down their basic structure in the same way, using the same three building blocks.
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The smallest of them are phonemes.
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These are very short, distinctive sound units–like a, t, ch, sh, f.
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Like stuff like that.
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English uses about 40 of them.
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Phonemes go together to make morphemes, which are the smallest units that carry meaning.
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This can be words, or parts of words, like a prefix or suffix.
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For example, the word SPEECH is a morpheme that contains four phoneme sound units– s/puh/eee/ch.
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From there you can arrange morphemes into your language’s grammar, or system of rules
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allowing you to say the things that you want to say!
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So those 40 English phonemes give us over 100,000 morphemes that produce the more than
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616,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, which can then be arranged into an infinite
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number of sentences, paragraphs, Wu-Tang lyrics, or Shakespearean plays.
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And just as the structure of language starts small, so does how we learn language.
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And we start very young.
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The word infant comes from the Latin infans, meaning “not speaking”– but as early
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as four months, they can recognize differences in speech and start to read lips, matching
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mouth movements with their corresponding sounds, like ah ee eye oh ooo.
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And even at this age, you gotta watch what you say about kids in their presence, because
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this also marks the beginning of receptive language, or the ability to understand what’s
03:45
being said both to, and about us.
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Soon that receptive language blooms to accommodate productive language, when instead of just
03:52
understanding other people, babies start developing the ability to produce words.
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Of course that takes a while, but in the meantime, they get a lot of practice babbling.
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Beginning at about four months they start to make all sorts of sounds, although you
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may get a da-da or ma-ma, babbling is NOT an imitation of adult speech.
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In fact, it typically includes sounds from many different languages, and a stranger couldn’t
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tell if a kid was Italian, or Kenyan, or Korean, just by the sound of her babbling.
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Similarly, deaf babies watch their parents signing and start babbling with their hands.
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By about ten months, that babbling morphs into something that starts to make sense,
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and ma-ma probably really means Mama.
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Now, without exposure to other languages, a child will actually lose the ability to
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both hear and create particular tones and sounds that aren’t part of his or her household
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language.
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So, someone who speaks English around the house soon won’t be able to differentiate
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between certain phonemes in Mandarin if they heard them, for instance, or between aspirated
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and non-aspirated consonants in Hindi.
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By the time they’re mowing down their first birthday cake, most kids will be entering
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the one-word stage of language development.
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They now know that sounds carry specific meanings, and can connect the sound “dog” to that
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furry thing across the room.
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By around 18 months, their capacity for learning new words jumps from about one a week to one
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a day, and by the time they’re two, they’re probably speaking in two-word statements.
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These choppy sentences are a kind of like telegraphic speech — they sound like clumsy
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texts or old-school telegrams, using mostly nouns and verbs.
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Want juice.
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No pants.
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That kind of stuff.
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These little sentences make sense, and they follow the rules of their language’s syntax.
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For example, an English speaking child would put an adjective before a noun, black cat,
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while a Spanish-speaker would reverse that, gato negro.
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From there the average kid is soon uttering longer phrases and complete sentences, refusing
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to put pants on, and demanding more crackers.
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Most humans hit these same milestones during their language development, but there are
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competing theories about how our infant babbles turn into complex sentences, and how we acquire
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language.
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You’ll remember B.F. Skinner, the pioneering behaviorist who brought us learning through
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reinforcement.
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He believed language was a product of associative principles and operant conditioning.
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Skinner argued that a kid learned to associate words with meanings largely through reinforcement.
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So in the Skinner model, for example, if baby Bruno says “mmmm” and his mother gives
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him some milk, he’d find that the outcome–both the milk and the attention– rewarding, and
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eventually work his way up to saying “milk” through these learned associations and shaping
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processes.
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It’s good to be understood, right?
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But as usual, not everyone was on board with Skinner.
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In particular, legendary American linguist Noam Chomsky argued that a kid like Bruno
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would never reach his full, complex, sonnet-writing potential if his learning was dependent on
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conditioning alone.
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Chomsky instead proposed the idea of innate learning and ubiquitous grammatical categories,
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pointing out that while the world’s thousands of languages may sound wildly diverse, they’re
06:47
actually very similar, sharing some basic elements.
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He called this Universal Grammar.
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Chomsky’s Universal Grammar posited that all human languages contain nouns, verbs,
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and adjectives, and humans are born with an innate ability to acquire language, and even
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a genetic predisposition to learn grammatical rules.
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Rather than being linguistic blank slates, Chomsky suggested we’re hard-wired for it
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from day one.
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In the end though, we’re still not sure how we acquire language.
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However, developmental research and studies of other species have given us a sense that
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at least some of it is innate, while the role of learning and exposure is also important.
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So if it’s true that all humans have some innate capacity for language, where in the
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brain is it sitting?
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We’ve talked a lot about how function is localized in the brain, and that’s definitely
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true for some aspects of language.
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But while speaking, reading, writing and even singing all fall under the language umbrella,
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their “locations” in the brain are a little more complicated.
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Consider aphasia, a neurological impairment of language.
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People can experience lots of different kinds of aphasia depending on whether they’ve
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suffered an injury, or stroke, or a tumor, or dementia.
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So, maybe they can speak but not read, or sing but barely speak, or write but not read.
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The region of the brain known as Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe is involved
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with the production of speech.
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If I suffered a trauma to this area, I might still comprehend speech, but struggle to speak
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– although I might still be able to sing, because that’s conducted elsewhere in the
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brain.
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On the other hand, if that falling coconut struck another region, called the Wernicke’s
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area, a region in the left temporal lobe involved in the expression and comprehension of language,
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I’d still be able to speak, but my language wouldn’t make any sense.
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So you might find me saying something like, “It was too pizza, but I called purple brother
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on the television.”
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Aphasia and other brain injuries remind us how thinking and language are both separate
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and intricately entwined.
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For instance, it’s hard to say if “non-verbal” ideas come to us first, and then we think
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of the words to name them, or if instead our thoughts are born in language, or if we’d
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even be unable to even think without it.
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And because language often helps to frame your ideas, your thinking might actually be
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influenced by which language you’re using.
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So what are implications of this if we expand the definition of language to include other
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species?
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How might Kanzi’s ability to communicate that he wants a marshmallow affect his thinking,
09:00
and how might that thinking influence his language progression, and his identity?
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If only I had the words to describe how fascinating it all is.
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If you understood the language I was using today, you learned how languages are built
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from phonemes, morphemes, and grammar, and when children acquire receptive and productive
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language, and pass through the babbling, one-word and two-word phases of development.
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You also learned some theories on how we acquire language, what brain areas are involved, and
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how thinking and language are connected.
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Thanks for watching, especially to all of our Subbable subscribers.
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If you’d like to sponsor an episode of Crash Course, or even be animated into an upcoming
09:35
episode, just go to subbable.com/crashcourse.
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This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
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is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat.
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Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor is Michael Aranda, who’s
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also our sound designer, and the graphics team is Thought Café.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video.
