Morten Christiansen: Cornell University Department of Psychology

Language is undoubtedly governed by innate constraints. Otherwise, it is difficult to account for the close match between the intricate structure of languages and the mechanisms involved in acquiring and processing them. Innate constraints are also needed to explain the existence of language universals; that is, why languages tend to be structured and used in certain ways and not others. Moreover, no other animal communication system appears to have the same kind of complex linguistic properties as found in human language. But does this necessarily mean that humans have evolved genes specifically to encode innate constraints on language? In this talk, I argue that such ‘language genes’ are an unlikely outcome of human evolution. Instead, corroborated by a series of language evolution simulations, I suggest that the exquisite fit between humans and language has arisen because languages themselves have evolved to fit human learning mechanisms existing prior to the emergence of linguistic communication. On this account, the apparently ‘idiosyncratic’ language universals derive from non-linguistic constraints on learning and processing in these mechanisms, many of which have evolved specifically to support complex human cognition.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Christiansen_6.6.05_1.pdf