We can think of the human baby in its first few years as a living example of some of
these physical changes taking place. At birth, the baby’s brain is only a quarter of its
eventual weight and the larynx is much higher in the throat, allowing babies, like
chimpanzees, to breathe and drink at the same time. In a relatively short period of
time, the larynx descends, the
This almost automatic set of developments and the complexity of the young child’s
language have led some scholars to look for something more powerful than small
physical adaptations of the species over time as the source of language. Even children
who are born deaf (and do not develop speech) become fluent sign language users,
given appropriate circumstances, very early in life. This seems to indicate that human
offspring are born with a special capacity for language. It is innate, no other creature
seems to have it, and it isn’t tied to a specific variety of language. Is it possible that
this language capacity is genetically hard-wired in the newborn human?
As a solution to the puzzle of the origins of language, this innateness hypothesis
would seem to point to something in human genetics, possibly a crucial mutation, as
the source. This would not have been a gradual change, but something that happened
rather quickly. We are not sure when this proposed genetic change might have taken
place or how it might relate to the physical adaptations described earlier. However, as
we consider this hypothesis, we find our speculations about the origins of language
moving away from fossil evidence or the physical source of basic human sounds
toward analogies with how computers work (e.g. being pre-programmed or hardwired)
and concepts taken from the study of genetics. The investigation of the origins
of language then turns into a search for the special “language gene” that only humans
possess.
If we are indeed the only creatures with this special capacity for language, then
will it be completely impossible for any other creature to produce or understand
language? We’ll try to answer that question in Chapter 2.