You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 33–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3.
The Facility for Verbal Language
A
Animal language works through rather limited vocabularies of calls, postures and sometimes scents that appear to convey concrete meanings. Konrad Lorenz, the great ethologist, has paraphrased the most universal animal signal as: ‘I am here; where are you?’ Animals clearly remember the past and sometimes plot elaborately to manipulate the behavior of others in their social group. Monkeys have been observed to give an alarm call, indicating that a predator is near when it is not, in order to distract other monkeys from a favorite food source. However, non-human animals apparently cannot discuss the distant past, the remote future, or abstract or hypothetical ideas.
B
True or full language must include two specific categories of words, according to linguist Derek Bickerton. First there are those words that refer to concrete objects, perceptible attributes, and real actions – what linguists call ‘lexical items’. At least some animals use lexical items in their language. In addition, true or full language includes a number of words that are primarily relational, numerical, referential, temporal, directional, and so on – which linguists call ‘grammatical items’. It is the grammatical items that allow us to express complex thoughts in a single sentence without confusing our listeners; they eliminate ambiguities or, as linguists say, they ‘disambiguate our utterances’.
C
In contrast to full language users, individuals who have missed the opportunity to learn language normally, and indeed apes who have undergone considerable training, all use much simplified language. There is only one tense, the present tense. Moreover, grammatical items are rudimentary or often completely absent. This restricted or ‘bare bones’ language is what Bickerton calls proto-language. He believes it is the first means of verbal communication that we learn as children and is probably a fair approximation of the first means of verbal communication that we developed evolutionarily too. It is the form of language that we share with a few talented and trained apes. Bickerton suggests that proto-language is a robust if limited means of communication that survives even horrendous deprivation. It is the fallback rudimentary type of language also used by people fully adept in one language who are trying to express themselves in another; thus, proto-language lies at the root of pidgin language. Proto-language is the sort of language we can readily envision as developing by small increments from the extant oral and gestural utterances of many social species.
D
Bickerton argues that proto-language and full language are two systems separated not only by their modes of expression but also by their genesis. In his view, proto-language and true language developed independently to serve different purposes, and they probably have different neurological bases. This is why proto-language does not become full language as the speaker matures or learns more. A trained ape, for example, does not suffer from arrested development of language; it is capable of fully developed proto-language but will never develop the other system that is full language. Under normal conditions, proto-language is supplemented and eventually supplanted by full language in humans.
E
Why have apes failed to learn full language? It is not because they are physically ill-adapted for speech (which they are), nor is it because they cannot grasp the use of symbols. Experiments conducted by Allen and Beatrice Gardner, working with a chimpanzee called Washoe, by Penny Patterson with the gorilla Koko, and by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh with the pygmy chimp named Kanzi have all demonstrated that apes have an impressive ability to learn symbols. Savage-Rumbaugh’s work with Kanzi has effectively demolished the criticism that ape language was a product of wishful thinking on the researchers’ part. Clearly, apes exposed to appropriate language opportunities learn to combine symbols into multi-word utterances and to participate in meaningful dialogues. The problem, according to Bickerton, is that apes do not have the elaborate representational system that humans possess and so they never progress from proto-language to full language. There is an absolute limit to the complexities of their utterances, a limit that is both grammatical and conceptual.
F
Bickerton hypothesizes that proto-language developed as a communication system, based on the neurological template that we share with apes. However, he believes that the neurological basis for full language evolved as a complex system for taking in sensory information about the environment, processing it, storing it, and perhaps evaluating it as a basis for future actions. The basis for full language, argues Bickerton, was a sort of mapping function, a means of representing the world internally. While all creatures map their world to some extent, humans have developed a stunningly intricate representational system that far exceeds that of other organisms in complexity and subtlety. In order to make a highly detailed and accurate map, one that changes minute by minute as new information is added, we interpose a tremendous amount of mental processing between the experience and our mental representation of it. This permits us to think about circumstances or events that are not occurring and may never occur. Without a detailed mental symbol that represents yourself, you cannot think about yourself in any complex way. Apes seem to have only a rudimentary sense of self and a limited degree of consciousness, and they lack the elaborate representational system that would enable them to develop truly complex thoughts and full language.