Nature-Nurture and Language Development

The interesting thing about things that evolve, is that they rarely recall what they evolved from. Nativist or empiricist, innate grammars or reinforced learning, every time a child is born, that child must start over and reacquire a language its forebears have spoken for millennia. This paper argues that humans seem innate with respect to language acquisition, because we have forgotten how far back it was learned. Perhaps we, as humans with needs like commerce and the need to record transactions, discovered that our infinite diversity of subjective perceptions required a similar diversity of ways to express it, which we call language. The bonobo Kanzi evinced that when learning is intrinsic to the species and motivated by group need and peer exchanges, animal language limits begin to vanish. Humans are not special, only familiar with how we have conversed for millennia, yet somehow amnestic about how this came to be familiar. The advent of machines capable of mimicking human verbal responses raises the age-old question of whether humans are simply machines. Yet all that speech technology has taught us, is that knowledge acquisition is a conscious effort to comprehend and express; no machine can equal what a conscious urgency can surprise us with. Building machines that can talk to one another has not resolved the nature-nurture debate, but taught us that it is in our nature to need nurture, and it is during nurture we need language to help us find it. This paper will evince that innateness is the amnestic part of nurture, and nurture the amnestic part of nature; speech technology only reinforces the insight that we learn and grow through this struggle to remember—then we forget the struggle, preserving only the learning. Each new life learns to recall what was lost, by reliving the struggle.

The Montessori method, Aboriginal students and Linnaean zoology taxonomy teaching: three-staged lesson

This research article addresses an important issue related to how teachers can support Aboriginal secondary school students' learning of science. Drawn from a larger project that investigated the study of vertebrates using Queensland Indigenous knowledges and Montessori Linnaean materials to engage Indigenous secondary school students, this article focuses on the three-staged lessons from that study. Using an Action Research approach and working with participants from one secondary high school in regional Queensland with a high Indigenous population, there were several important findings. First, the materials and the three-staged lessons generated interest in learning Eurocentric science knowledge. Second, repetition, freedom and unhurried inclusion of foreign science knowledges strengthened students' Aboriginal personal identity as well as identities as science learners. Third, privileging of local Aboriginal knowledge and animal language gave rise to meaningful and contextualised Linnaean lessons and culturally responsive practices.

A study by Umberto Eco and his colleagues on the history of early zoosemiotics: Commentary and bibliography

The article provides a commentary on Umberto Eco’s text “Animal language before Sebeok”, and an annotated bibliography of various versions of the article on ‘latratus canis’ that Eco published together with Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni.

Animal language before Sebeok

Publication of the text of Umberto Eco’s talk given at a symposium held in honour of Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001) in San Marino in 2002.

Eco’s “latratus canis”: A memory of the backstage

The paper describes the collaboration between Umberto Eco and his students Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni resulting in the joint article “Latratus canis” (“On animal language in the medieval classification of signs”).

Language, early modern philosophy of

Philosophical interest in language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was strong but largely derivative. Most thinkers shared Leibniz’s view ‘that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding’. The three most important areas of philosophical discussion about language in the modern period were the nature of signification, the origin of human language and the possibility of animal language. Signification was generally viewed as a relation between linguistic signs and ideas. There was no agreement whether signification is entirely conventional or contains a natural element, but the view is that it is entirely natural virtually disappeared. Even those who retained the belief in the possibility of a philosophically perfect language insisted that such a language should be constructed anew, rather than rediscovered as the lost language of Adam. The traditional biblical account of the origin of language was more and more contested but, as more naturalistic theories emerged, the problem of why other animals cannot talk became especially pressing. Debates about language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were highly speculative; participants in these debates often relied on simplistic biological theories, inadequate grammars or anecdotal evidence from travellers. What makes these discussions important is less their scientific contribution than their engagement with the philosophical problems concerning the relationship between the human mind and the natural world.