Humans picked up sophisticated language 'pretty quickly': Study

A new study has recently revealed that humans quickly started speaking in a now-familiar form of language.

At some point, probably 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began talking to one another in a uniquely complex form. It was easy to imagine this epochal change as cavemen grunting, or hunter-gatherers mumbling and pointing.

But in the latest paper, an MIT linguist contended that human language likely developed quite rapidly into a sophisticated system: Instead of mumbles and grunts, people deployed syntax and structures resembling the one that is used today.

Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics and the Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor in Japanese Language and Culture at MIT, said that the hierarchical complexity found in present-day language was likely to have been present in human language since its emergence.

However, this was not a universally accepted claim: Many scholars believe that humans first started using a kind of "proto-language," a rudimentary, primitive kind of communication with only a gradual development of words and syntax.

But Miyagawa thought this was not the case. Single words, he believed, bear traces of syntax showing that they must be descended from an older, syntax-laden system, rather than from simple, primal utterances.

Miyagawa had an alternate hypothesis about what created human language: Humans alone, as he has asserted in papers published in recent years, have combined an "expressive" layer of language, as seen in birdsong, with a "lexical" layer, as seen in monkeys who utter isolated sounds with real-world meaning, such as alarm calls.

Miyagawa's "integration hypothesis" holds that whatever first caused them, these layers of language blended quickly and successfully.

Miyagawa's integration hypothesis was connected intellectually to the work of other MIT scholars, such as Noam Chomsky, who have contended that human languages are universally connected and derive from our capacity for using syntax. In forming, this school of thought holds, languages have blended expressive and lexical layers through a system Chomsky has called "Merge."

The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.