#35. Children Invented Language

I contend here that children’s play, over many generations, was the force that created human language.

Credit: Atlanta Parents

Dear friends,

I have been thinking and reading recently about the emergence of human language. Language, without question, is the magic that distinguishes us, for better or worse, from all other animals. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1994) once put it, “Comparing our brains with bird brains or dolphin brains is almost beside the point, because our brains are in effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others. They are joined by an innovation that has invaded our brain and no others: language.”

Other species have fascinating means of communication, but none have means that are anything close to human language in complexity and ability to communicate almost anything—not just about the immediate present but about the past, the future, the far away, and the hypothetical. Our language enables us to share knowledge, ideas, values, and everything else that goes into human culture. We share both horizontally, from person to person and community to community, and vertically, from one generation to the next. The result is that each new generation can acquire and build upon the discoveries and ideas of previous generations. No other species does that to anything close to the degree that we do.

But language itself is a cultural invention. Who invented it and how? Nobody knows for sure, and there are lots of theories. The theory I’ve been working on is this: Language was invented gradually, over thousands of years in our evolutionary history, by children in play. To introduce the theory, I begin with a true story about children in modern times inventing language, as documented primarily by Ann Senghas and her colleagues (2005).

How Deaf Nicaraguan Children Invented What Is Now Nicaragua’s Official Sign Language for the Deaf

The overthrow of the Somoza regime by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, in the late 1970s, led to numerous social changes. One of them was a concerted effort to wipe out illiteracy, and as part of that the new regime opened, for the first time, schools for the deaf. Previously, deaf Nicaraguans had little opportunity to meet one another. There was no deaf community or common sign language. The deaf were generally treated as though they were mentally handicapped.

The first Nicaraguan public school for deaf children, age 4 to 16, opened in Managua in 1977. For the first time, a large group of deaf children came into extended contact with one another. Based on outmoded ideas, the school did not at first teach any sign language but, instead, attempted to teach children to speak and lip-read the nation’s vocal language (Spanish), an outmoded approach that rarely succeeds. The lip-reading instruction largely failed, but real language learning occurred on the playground.

All children, deaf or not, are highly motivated to play, and social play requires communication. Even if they could lip-read a little, mouthing words and reading lips is too slow, cumbersome, and private to be effective in group play. Hand signals and gestures, made so everyone can see them, are far more effective. At first the children communicated using an unstructured and variable mix of signs and gestures they either made up or had been using to communicate with family members at home. But over the course of a few years, the signs became increasingly regularized and efficient, and a system of grammar emerged. All this occurred naturally, with no formal teaching, simply through the students’ needs and desires to communicate with one another as they played and in other ways interacted with one another outside the classroom.

Of most significance for our discussion, the new grammar was produced not by the oldest, wisest members of the community but by the youngest. In fact, those who were more than about 10 years old when the deaf community was formed not only failed to contribute to the development of a grammar but learned relatively little of the one that did develop. As new young children entered the school, they quickly mastered the most sophisticated form of the newly developing language and added to it.

By the mid 1980s, school authorities recognized that the sign language the children had invented worked far better than the lip-reading they were trying to teach in classes, and the new language was integrated into the curriculum. That language, invented by children in play, is now the official sign language of Nicaragua. It is a true language, comparable to American Sign Language, with not only nouns and verbs and prepositions but grammatical rules governing how the signs can be combined and sequenced into larger meaningful units.

Another Example: Children Turned Pidgins into Creole Languages

Children are geniuses not just at learning an established language, but also at creating a new language if enough children are in regular contact and no common language already exists. This is illustrated not just by the Nicaraguan example but also by research on the development of creole languages, which arise when people from several different language cultures simultaneously colonize an area and begin to communicate with one another.

At first, such groups communicate through a primitive, grammarless collection of words taken from their various native languages—a system referred to as a pidgin language. Over time, the pidgin develops into a true language, with a full range of grammatical rules, at which point it is called a creole language. Derek Bickerton (1984) studied creole languages from around the world and found that at least some were developed into full languages within one generation by the children of the original colonists. Apparently, the children imposed grammatical rules on the pidgin they heard and used those rules consistently in their own speech.

Children’s Play as Likely Evolutionary Origin of the Human Capacity for Language

Archeological evidence suggests that language emerged in our Homo sapiens ancestors somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 50,000 years ago. That is also a period in which our species underwent an evolutionary change that resulted in a slower rate of brain development, a prolonged juvenile period, and delayed adulthood. My theory (not just mine) is that the prolonged juvenile period, with the accompanying prolonged period of brain plasticity, set the occasion that enabled the evolution of human language.

In a chapter of a new book I’m working on, I present multiple reasons to believe that children of our long-ago ancestors were the primary inventors of human language, and they did it in play. Of course, they didn’t do it over just a few years, as the deaf Nicaraguan children did. Today’s children have brain mechanisms that evolved over tens of thousands of years of human language use, so they are beautifully designed for learning language and even creating it where none exists. The earliest inventors of language would not have had such an advantage.

My thesis is that over many generations Homo sapiens children gradually developed increasingly language-like means of communication (we’ll call them protolanguages); that these means continued into adulthood for all sorts of practical uses as the children grew up; and that each new generation of children learned the existing protolanguage of their community and added to it, resulting eventually, over many generations, in full-blown human language. As linguistic communication became ever more common and essential for social acceptance and cooperation, natural selection would result gradually in changes in the brain making it ever easier for each generation to acquire the extant language.

Here are some lines of support for this thesis:

• Social play, which would have already characterized childhood at the time we are considering, has language-like characteristics even without actual language. There is sequential turn-taking: Each player attends to what the other does and then responds. There is communication: Each player’s action is a signal to the other that guides an appropriate response. I chase you —> you run away in a game of tag. I turn and run from you —> you now chase me. I act like a monkey —> you act like a monkey. So, social play, even without spoken or gestured words, is a kind of protolanguage. We might well imagine that enterprising children would have augmented the communicative effectiveness of their actions in play by adding vocalized sounds to drew attention to and maybe even symbolize actions and expected responses. These might be the very first human spoken words. Gurrrr means I’m going to chase you now, so start running away.

• Several theorists have argued, quite plausibly, that fantasy play may have been especially crucial to the early development of language. They suggest that early forms of fantasy play, or at least precursors of such play, exist even in some non-human primates. Juvenile female monkeys and apes of various species, for example, have been observed holding stones or sticks in the same way that their mothers hold infants. Whether or not the young female thinks of the stone or stick as an infant, as a modern human child would, is arguable. But it seems quite reasonable that early human children, with their bigger brains, would think consciously of the connection—the stone or stick represents a baby. The ability to represent something with a symbol is clearly an early step in the development of language. Words are symbols.

• Another reason to hypothesize that evolutionary beginnings of human language coincided with advances in fantasy play derives from observations of the co-development of fantasy and language in today’s children. Research shows that by the time young children can use words to communicate at all, they are also capable of fantasy; they distinguish readily between real and pretend. For example, a toddler who pours pretend water from an empty cup onto a doll and says, “Dolly wet,” knows perfectly well that the doll is not actually wet. At such a young age, children already know the difference between pretend and real and also understand the difference between pretending and lying. Also relevant to the argument here is that children born far out on the autism spectrum fail to develop language normally and also fail to engage naturally in fantasy play. In fact, throughout life they have difficulty understanding the difference between pretense and lying. All this points to an intimate connection between pretend play and language and indicates that similar brain mechanisms are involved in the two.

Further Thoughts

In Letter #32 I contended that play, not necessity, is the mother of invention. New ideas, practices, and products come about in play and then some of them get engineered for non-play purposes (necessity). Now I have argued that this applies to the truly greatest human invention of all, the invention of language. It didn’t happen all at once; it happened over time after an evolutionary change that expanded the period of childhood and adolescence and thereby expanded the length of time for play. What caused this expansion of childhood and adolescence? That’s the topic I plan to discuss in my next letter.

Here's a thought not directly related to this letter’s thesis but one I hope is not lost on you: Thank goodness, the Nicaraguan educators who developed the school for deaf children were not so stupid as to deprive the children of plenty of recess time with free play. If the children had been confined to the classroom, with little or no recess, Nicaraguan sign language might never have been invented. Our children today need free play to develop their potentials and contribute to the culture as much as children ever did, but we are foolishly allowing ever less of it. And, if my theory is correct, we can thank the adults of our evolutionary ancestors for enabling plenty of play time for their children, or you and I would be completely out of touch with one another (if we existed at all). Not only no Internet, but no language.

As always, I invite you to share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below. These increase the value of the letters for me and other readers.

If you are enjoying these letters, please recommend them to others who might enjoy them. If you are not yet a subscriber, please subscribe. If you have a free subscription, please consider upgrading to paid—at just $50 for a year. Paid subscriptions are evidence to me that the letters are valued, and they encourage me to keep at it. I use all funds received through paid subscriptions to support nonprofit organizations I’m involved with that are aimed at bringing more play and freedom to children’s lives.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Bickerton, D. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 173-174.

Dennett, D. C. (1994). Language and intelligence. In J. Khalfa (Ed.), What is intelligence? Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Senghas, R.J., Senghas, A., & Pyers, J.E. (2005). The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language: Questions of development, acquisition, and evolution. In J. Langer, C. Milbrath & S.T. Parker (Eds.), Biology and knowledge revisited: From neurogenesis to psychogenesis (pp. 287–306). Erlbaum.