Most animals bark a little

In The Hidden Life of Dogs, anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas reports what she has learned about dog behaviour and psychology from watching different breeds in diverse environments and social situations. I like the observations she makes about the communicative aspects of barking and sniffing:

[O]nly the pugs took much interest in the human life around them, so only the pugs barked. Of course, most animals bark a little – which is to say that if surprised and puzzled simultaneously, most animals, including human beings, make a short, sharp call; the call is “Huh?” in our species. Highly domesticated dogs make an art of their puzzlement and bark insistently, alerting others to unexplained events. But not the huskies, who didn’t bark at human-generated sounds or happenings any more than they barked at birds in the sky, and surely for the same reason: the doings of the birds and the people lacked significance for them.

Is it true that most animals make such a sound? It depends on what’s meant by animals, I suppose: mammals or non-aquatic vertebrates may be closer to what was meant, but I still don’t know how true it is.

In any case, by the author’s reckoning I myself have, on occasion, barked in puzzled surprise, and maybe you have too. I don’t know if there’s another verb for when people make this sound. Huh is a good phonic approximation but it doesn’t lend itself naturally to inflection. Yelping is usually high-pitched and is associated more with pain. I’m open to suggestions of existing words or invented ones.

Marshall Thomas continues:

In contrast, the dogs took an unlimited interest in each other. When a dog returned after a brief absence, the others would quietly surround him and investigate him for scent – the scents of his own body, which would show his state of mind and probably a great deal more as well, and the scents of the place he had been, which he carried on his fur. They’d smell his lips and his mantle, his penis, his legs and his feet. Seldom, if ever, would they investigate his anus or anal glands, evidently because the information therefrom has to do with a dog’s persona but not with his travels. The dogs would investigate me too, particularly if I had been away a long time. They paid special attention to my legs from the knees down, as if I had been wading through odors.

“Wading through odours” is a lovely, memorable description, evoking the dog’s sensorial surroundings with appropriate emphasis on smell. What a rush of stimuli it must be for a dog to go exploring outside, where – save a minuscule stationary layer above the ground – the air is more subject to turbulence and so constitutes a fluctuating “garden of exotic flora and fauna”, to use a phrase from Lyall Watson’s book Jacobson’s Organ.

Humans’ sense of smell is puny by comparison, and our visual sense may have crowded the field in recent history, but our noses are still capable of delivering intense and subtle effect, sometimes transporting us instantly to another time and place. Most of us need hardly a moment’s thought to list many smells that give us particular pleasure; other smells might even make us bark.

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Related items: I’ve written before about word recognition in dogs and the claims made for their command of human language. On Tumblr I posted another passage from Marshall Thomas’s very enjoyable book, which includes the marvellous phrase cynomorphic substitute; you can read chapter one of Watson’s book on smell and pheromones online; and finally, here’s a fun drawing by Lili Chin of a Boston terrier’s body language.

The normality of conversation on Twitter

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, recently said that it may be unhealthy to spend too much time using the service. He has a point, albeit a trivial one: it may also be unhealthy to spend too much time in the bath or up a tree. Too much is too much, and by and large we can judge this for ourselves.

But his comments were ammunition for Professor Susan Greenfield, who believes Facebook and video games, among other things, are damaging our brains. So she appeared on Channel 4 News to offer condescending assumptions about people’s use of Twitter. Fortunately, her arguments were well challenged by science journalist Mark Henderson.

Many scientists and viewers responding to the interview seemed exasperated (or grimly amused) by Prof. Greenfield’s habit of using commercial news media to sound societal alarm bells instead of publishing peer-reviewed studies to support her sweeping claims. It has become a running argument.

I’d like to draw your attention to one response in particular, from someone I follow on Twitter. Professor Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at the UCL Speech Communication Laboratory, was unsurprised to find that Greenfield is missing some essential facts about human communication. Her riposte, “A little more conversation”, is a sane and solid defence of how normal it is to spend time on Twitter:

much of what goes on, on Twitter, is people using a slightly different medium to do what they’ll do any way they can, which is to converse, to talk to others. For humans, conversation is an end in itself.

Conversation, she writes, is “like a dance, only instead of dancing in synchrony, we take turns.” By outlining and illustrating some of the principles of conversation, Prof. Scott also makes helpful reference to the similarities and differences between electronic and face-to-face forms of it:

if you free people from the demands of having to organize all the stuff in face-to-face conversations that is concerned with the turn-taking negotiations, then conversations can really flourish. People can leap from one conversation to the next, and back and forth, when the time line is fast and busy, as it is for many people on Twitter (or chat rooms etc.).

You can read the rest here; it’s well worth two minutes of your time.

Another reason we can hold several simultaneous chats online is that although they happen in real time, if slightly delayed, they remain available to us as tweets, comments, etc. This is significant because our parallel processing power is limited, speech is ephemeral, and we quickly forget exactly what someone has said in spoken exchanges.

I love chatting on Twitter for more reasons than I could say. Most have to do with the people I chat with, who are a constant source of insight, fun, help, and goodness. Some have become friends or acquaintances offline. I need hardly mention Twitter’s other uses, for example as an aid to journalism, education, and activism.

Of course it can be addicting, but so can many everyday activities; what matters is the degree to which they’re healthy or unhealthy, and this depends more on how they’re used than on the activities themselves.

What do you think?

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Terrence Deacon on language evolution

Was it William Burroughs who first described language as a virus from outer space? I’ve always liked the analogy, though it may be more useful to think of language as a symbiont from inner space.

In his book The Symbolic Species (1997), Terrence Deacon describes the language-as-a-virus metaphor as extreme but helpful. He identifies the most basic principle guiding the design of languages to be “not communicative utility but reproduction — theirs and ours”.

Deacon feels the best way to study language structure is to do so from an evolutionary point of view. Languages have co-evolved with their hosts — us — under the forces of selection. This can help us make sense of children’s precocious rate of linguistic development:

The structure of a language is under intense selection because in its reproduction from generation to generation, it must pass through a narrow bottleneck: children’s minds. Language operations that can be learned quickly and easily by children will tend to get passed on to the next generation more effectively and more intact than those that are difficult to learn. . . . Language structures that are poorly adapted to this niche simply will not persist for long.

As language emerged in tandem with the human nervous system — each adapting to the other — it drew on existing cognitive abilities. The facility for language is not the responsibility of some dedicated device in the brain but rather is spread across many parts of it.

In his excellent article “Rethinking the natural selection of human language”, Deacon writes that

the neural structures and circuits involved in the production and comprehension of language are homologous to structures found ubiquitously in most monkey and ape brains: old structures performing unprecedented new tricks.

Below is a video of Deacon giving a talk in 2010 called “Language & complexity: Evolution inside out”. It’s quite a technical presentation (I was grateful for my distant background in genetics and developmental biology), but Deacon is a clear and engaging speaker and his subject matter is deeply interesting.

A post at Replicated Typo, reporting on the talk, says Deacon’s ideas are “our best avenue for exploring how language evolved”. Edmund Blair Bolles at Babel’s Dawn is similarly impressed; he writes that the strength of Deacon’s proposal is that it “[describes] a mechanism for the brain changes that support language”:

The old view that language functions are confined to a few regions like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, or even the left hemisphere can no longer stand. Language processing involves complex coordination between multiple systems. But the modern human brain is a relatively recent acquisition. How did all that complexity evolve and become coordinated?

Deacon has some persuasive thoughts on this. Birdsong, some of you will be happy to hear, features quite a lot. The talk lasts about an hour, with a short Q&A at the end.

A mouthful of [d]

In an essay about The King’s Speech for the Fortnightly Review, I wrote that the very familiarity of speech means we easily overlook how amazing its mechanics are. This occurred to me often while reading J.D. O’Connor’s superb Phonetics, a Pelican Original from 1973.

The book has a lovely paragraph on how the [d] sound in do is articulated. Complete description of such a sound is impossible because it would require mentioning an infinite number of features, so in general we note only those features that “seem to contribute substantially to the sound”.

Some of the following terminology might be unfamiliar, in which case refer to this diagram of the human vocal tract. Here, then, is [d]:

the lips are somewhat rounded (ready for the following vowel); the teeth are close together; the soft palate is raised; the tongue-tip is firmly in contact with the alveolar ridge and the sides of the tongue are in continuous contact with the sides of the palate; the back of the tongue is raised to approximately the close vowel position (again ready for the vowel); air under pressure from the lungs is compressed within the completely stopped mouth cavity and pharynx; the tongue-tip (but not the sides or the back) then lowers suddenly allowing the compressed air to escape with a slight explosion; just before the explosion the vocal cords start to vibrate in normal voice and continue to do so into the vowel.

Professor O’Connor says that although this description may seem quite comprehensive, it is very far from complete. But it serves its basic and practical purpose. [Edit: Note the two references to readiness for the following vowel. The mouth assumes different shapes for [d] depending on what comes next. To see (or feel) this for yourself, prepare to speak do, da and dee but stop before the vowel.]

It’s also a very pleasing account of an act most of us perform more or less identically, yet uniquely, every day without a moment’s thought. Think of how much exquisite unconscious coordination goes into a full sentence, or a week’s worth of conversation. How fortunate we are to have this facility.

O’Connor (1919–1998), known familiarly as “Doc”, taught phonetics at University College London; John Wells’s obituary in the Guardian describes his lectures as “witty and effortlessly informative”, which I can believe, and his writing as “elegant and readable”, to which I can attest.

A list of O’Connor’s many publications may be found on Jack Windsor Lewis’s website.

A world of fragmented words

The Man with a Shattered World (1972) is a short, extraordinary book about a Russian soldier, “Zasetsky”, who at 23 was shot in the head in World War II and spent the rest of his life “in a kind of fog all the time, like a heavy half-sleep”, trying to put his mind and life back together.

He suffered great pain and confusion as a result of his injury. Memory loss was severe, physical coordination and proprioception much impaired. He forgot how to gesture to a nurse for help, how to speak with doctors, how to kiss his family when he finally got home. Vision and movement were gravely problematic; thought was torturous.

In spite of these daunting difficulties, he taught himself to read and write again, and wrote a journal of his experience that grew to 3000 pages painstakingly written (and rewritten) over 25 years. The Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria adapted it for the aforenamed book, adding context to extracts from his patient’s notebooks.

A passage from Luria:

Intricate turns of speech that are so routine to us that we fail to notice their complexity are, in fact, codes that have taken centuries to develop. We readily employ them, because we have mastered linguistic patterns – our most basic means of communication. . . .

The man who wrote this journal no longer had the capacity for such an instantaneous grasp of intricate patterns (whether of spatial or linguistic relationships). The damage to his cerebral cortex had affected precisely those parts of the brain that enable one to evaluate what he has seen (as neurologists would say, to ‘simultaneously synthesize separate parts into a complete whole’).

All Zasetsky’s vision to the right of centre was gone; on the left were large gaps. This, coupled with aphasia and other cognitive disabilities, made reading intensely difficult. He was horrified to discover that he couldn’t understand the sign on a bathroom door, and that the text of a newspaper looked like gibberish.

But he made progress:

When I begin to read a word, even a word like golovokruzheniye [dizziness], and look at the letter k, the upper right point, I only see the letters on the left (v–o). I can’t see anything on the right of the letter k or around it. To the left of it I can see the two letters v and o but nothing further to the left. If someone were to trace the letters further to the left with a pencil, I’d see where the movement of the pencil began, but not the letters.

Writing too was onerous. It was easier for him to write automatically, so he learned to do this and would then read over, letter by letter, what he had written to see if it made sense and to work out what came next.

Sometimes he would strain over a page for a week or two, trying to find the right words for an idea and remember them long enough to fit them together and arrange them in writing.

I have some peculiar kind of forgetfulness or amnesia with almost any word, or else I’m very slow. I can’t remember a word or, if I can, I don’t know what it means. . . . If I hear the word table I can’t work out what it is right away, what it is related to. I just have a feeling the word is somewhat familiar . . .

Even a short paragraph read aloud to Zasetsky quickly broke into meaningless fragments. Hearing it repeatedly was of little help, because his sense of syntax was lost. It was a generalised problem: he had lost his understanding of what things meant and how they worked, how they fit together and related to one other: the world he experienced was shattered.

Zasetsky was tormented by his brain injury but determined to communicate it as best he could. Narrating his struggle to make sense of things became a full-time occupation – an obsession. The Man with a Shattered World is a very sad tale, but no reader can fail to feel deep admiration for its subject’s dedication to his task, and for his unfaltering humanity.

Here is Oliver Sacks speaking about Luria and the book:

Memory of syntax and semantics

Jean Aitchison’s The Articulate Mammal describes and evaluates many interesting psycholinguistic experiments, one of which I want to draw attention to here:

a number of psychologists have found that all memory of syntax and vocabulary normally fades very fast indeed, unless subjects are specifically told that they will be asked to recall the sentence. Memory for syntax of any kind is near to chance approximately half a minute after a sentence has been spoken (Sachs 1967). In normal circumstances, it seems, people remember only the gist of what has been said, and they often confuse this with a number of extra beliefs and expectations about the topic under discussion (Fillenbaum 1973).

Jacqueline Strunk Sachs, speaking subsequently (PDF) about her experiment, said it showed that we forget “the specific wording of an utterance . . . within seconds”, though we might retain its meaning for a very long time.

Her 1967 paper (“Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse”) was based on her doctoral dissertation and can be downloaded here.* It’s a short and clear account of a smartly designed study, well worth reading if you’re into this sort of thing and you don’t mind the Chomskyan terminology.

The abstract concludes:

The results suggest that the original form of the sentence is stored only for the short time necessary for comprehension to occur. When a semantic interpretation has been made, the meaning is stored. Thus the memory of the meaning is not dependent on memory of the original form of the sentence.

I imagine this rings true for most people. What say you? Have you noticed the rapid divergence between memory of what is said and memory of exactly how it is said?
 

* Typo fans will enjoy SpringerLink’s mangled paper title, “Recopition memory”, and the suggestion that some of the data were presented at a meeting held in April, 1066.

Stephen Fry’s Planet Word: Babel

A new documentary about language, Fry’s Planet Word, began on BBC2 yesterday with an episode about linguistic origins and evolution. Its host, Stephen Fry, looked into evolutionary-linguistic concerns such as how languages are related, how they are acquired (the Wug test was demonstrated), the significance of the FOXP2 gene, and why other primates haven’t developed language.

One sequence looked at sign languages: how they work and how they differ from speech and from each other. Fry watched a drama group sign (and reinterpret) Little Red Riding Hood, then asked them what signs are used for famous people like Obama, Hitler, and Madonna, noting how expressive and humorous a form it can be. The theatrical theme continued with Fry participating in a Klingon performance of Hamlet, hurting his throat on its harsh phonology.

The episode’s title, Babel, struck its final symbolic note at a UN session where Fry met a translator who sang the praises of linguistic variety. You could say “Well, she would”, but her sincere delight in the beauty of languages was obvious, and was music to Fry’s ears. Mine too.

Each of the areas touched upon would have benefited from a dedicated show, or even a series, rather than the few minutes allotted before we were whisked off to the next location on the whistle-stop tour. But language is a dauntingly broad and complex subject, and the show seems designed as an introductory guide; on that basis it did fine.

The programme featured interviews with the likes of Wolfgang Klein (see par. 1, second link), Jean Berko Gleason, Stephen Pinker, and Michael Tomasello, who proposed that language emerged in functional tandem with group coordination, perhaps in hunting. Their contributions were regrettably too brief to convey much more than generalities.

All in all, though, it was an enjoyable programme, and I plan to keep watching it if I can. As you might expect, Fry stressed the importance of creativity and pleasure in our linguistic gift, but he didn’t overdo it. His geniality and enthusiasm will attract and retain the interest of viewers who might not otherwise wonder about some of the marvels and mysteries of language.

Here he is talking about language and Fry’s Planet Word:

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On an unrelated note, Sentence first has been nominated for a grammar blog contest at Grammar.net. Since it depends wholly on votes, it is in effect a contest of popularity and self-promotion.

Though I’m honoured to be included, I do not aspire to compete. But I won’t object if you want to do me (or someone else) the honour of a vote, and you might enjoy browsing the list of language blogs.