My colleagues might roll their eyes at this point, but I’d like to take this opportunity to write an article for Het Talige Brein to share some of the up-close observations I’ve made of my young son growing into his social, cognitive and linguistic human heritage. This has been a truly remarkable process that has been filled with surprises, but I am thinking now specifically about what has stunned me as a scientist and as a former student of linguistic anthropology. As a scientist looking for explanations of how language is created by the brain, I have thought about language as something that is largely internal to the brain.

For example, I would ask people to read words and study their brain responses as they related a written word to its meaning. In anthropology, my interest was related to how language can inform us about the culture of a language community, can be related to culturally grounded communicative goals, and can provide a window into how language groups internally negotiate meaning using their language. My takeaways center on the idea that my son’s efforts to communicate came well before he could communicate with language, and that actually learning the names of objects was secondary to communicating about them. Furthermore, from this experience, I’ve gained first-hand evidence that the capacities we regard as instinctual, such as language and reason, co-develop in an environment where the instinct to interact and communicate provides a rich set of objects and events to stimulate the development of these capacities. There might be an instinct for language acquisition and an inborn ability to reason, but these capacities are fed by the instinct to communicate. 

In the beginning, I expected my son to first learn words for objects, with actions or behaviors coming later, but one of his very first “words” was actually deur dicht!  (roughly, “door closed”). There was some work to do with the pronunciation, but this was what he was trying to say. He used this to describe any time he wanted something closed, anytime someone closed something (a door, a drawer, a container), or if he wanted to be covered with a blanket. What is striking about the ‘deur dicht’ example is that he didn’t know the words ‘deur’ or ‘dicht’ when he started using it. He was not trying to learn the words for these things and then learn how to put them together, he was trying to identify a way to describe an outcome – there is a thing, and someone manipulates it to create a barrier. 

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When he did begin to acquire and produce labels (words) for objects (baseball!), behaviors (eten!) and social conventions (hoedoe!), it gave him a way of identifying things out there in the world to make it easier to talk about them, but he was “talking” about these things long before the words appeared. He got by just fine by pointing and saying die ( Dutch for that ). ‘Die’ was another extremely early word of his, and this makes a great deal of sense because it is enormously useful for communicating, if somewhat redundant with pointing gestures. If you have an instinct to communicate, then it would be surprising for you to wait until your vocabulary is sizable enough to name the things that interest you. And from a communication perspective, ‘die’ was also an extremely useful way to create a shared focus point between him and whoever he was interacting with, which almost certainly contributed to word learning and to communication generally. 

To understand why shared focus, ‘die,’ and pointing are important, it is helpful to know that shared focus describes the situation when two or more people are focusing on the same thing, be it an object or an event. This shared focus then creates a context that people who are speaking can share with the people who are listening. The benefit of this is that it’s easier to understand the meaning of what someone says when there is a good chance it relates to what everyone is paying attention to. This is central to communicating because people need to know the topic of communication, but it also makes it much easier for an infant (say, my son at this time) to figure out that when he points to a pear and I say ‘pear,’ that there is some relationship between these events. Even if you conceive of this type of pointing as a labeling game driven by an instinct for word learning  (he points, I name, he learns), the instinct to communicate, to play the game, is still what supports this process. I don’t want to create the impression that most word learning happens through this type of interaction, as I suspect only a small proportion of his vocabulary was gained in this way. If anything though, this observation provides an even stronger argument that pointing or creating shared focus primarily fulfills a communicative goal. 

Another point I’d like to make about pointing and creating shared focus is that it allows you to communicate not just about objects, but about what those objects are doing. For example when you point at a goat, that goat is always doing something, so pointing can capture far more than the object itself at the expense of adding some uncertainty (what exactly about the goat is interesting?). A good deal of this uncertainty can be more or less resolved since infants would presumably share many cognitive biases with adults. In other words, pointing lets infants (and others) communicate about actions and behaviors in a way a list of nouns cannot, and while it is helpful for word learning, it can loosely capture anything that the infant is focusing on and can invite you to focus on the same thing. It’s then up to you to figure out that the infant is pointing at the goat because it’s funny that the goat is standing on top of a tiny rock. This is an example of shared cognitive biases allowing people to resolve the ambiguity in pointing, where a shared common sense about what is interesting about the scene allows to you figure this out. That infants make great use of pointing gestures makes sense if their goal is to communicate. 

There are many more examples of these dual instincts I could give, but unless there is interest in yet another baby blog, I will end here.  What I must conclude from my experience thus far is that human infants are a remarkable cauldron of instincts and capacities which grow together like a thicket of vines. If a wide view of language is taken, it can provide an excellent window through which to understand the higher capacities of our species.