Learning About Language: Annemarie Kocab, PhD
Language is a fundamental part of our everyday lives. Even though we constantly use it, we don’t spend much time thinking about it. But as we saw in the last two blog posts, language can be a powerful tool. Both Diane and Jeff used language to adapt to foreign environments, allowing them to embrace the new career opportunities in front of them. After listening to their stories and hearing how they emphasized the role of language in their endeavors, I was reminded of how important language is. But I didn’t know much about the fundamentals of language. Where does language comes from? How does it evolve in a society?
I wanted to find some answers and try to learn more about the concepts that underpin this vital component of our lives, one that many of us take for granted.
Annemarie Kocab, PhD
Thankfully, I have access to an excellent resource for these questions. Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to talk with my sister, Annemarie Kocab, and discuss her research on language.
Language has been a major interest for Annemarie throughout her entire academic career. She double majored in Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences and English at Wellesley College before earning her PhD in Psychology at Harvard. She has continued to expand on her body of work and is currently a postdoc at Harvard in the laboratories of Jesse Snedeker and Kathryn Davidson in the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, respectively.
Annemarie studies language emergence and language acquisition, two related, but different aspects of language. In simplified terms, language emergence is the creation of a new language, while language acquisition is the learning of an existing language.
She studies language creation in individuals, as well as language emergence within a community, by studying the deaf population in Nicaragua and tracking the rise of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). She and her colleagues have focused on sign languages because they represent a large number of case studies for language emergence in recent times. In some of these cases, the emergence of sign languages was delayed by political and historical conditions – these countries often lacked resources and access to schools, both of which would be needed to properly foster the development of sign languages and the deaf communities. As these limitations started to be addressed, sign languages started to emerge. Nicaraguan Sign Language in particular has proven fruitful for researchers because of its relative newness, having only started to appear since the 1970s, as well as its relative isolation, which limits the influences of foreign sign languages and allows researches to study how the language develops de novo.
Photo by Misha Tulek
To study language emergence on an individual level, Annemarie looks at home signers, who are deaf individuals who have never been exposed to a formal language that they can acquire. Notably, these home signers are not socially isolated individuals and are part of their families, but they just don’t have access to a language. Generally speaking, many deaf people are born to hearing parents, which isn’t the optimal initial environment to acquire a sign language. While many hearing parents can learn a sign language and help foster its acquisition by the deaf individual, in cases where this doesn’t occur, the individual comes up with “home signs,” gestures that are used within the household to communicate with family members. Annemarie is interested in the properties of these “home signs” gestures systems and what properties they may share with existing languages.
With the home signers, Annemarie tries to answer a fundamental question about language: where do the properties of language come from? Do they originate in the human mind or are they a cultural innovation? Or is it a combination? The home signers are important because whatever gestures and properties they invent originate from their own minds, since they have not acquired an existing language. By studying these properties, Annemarie attempts to separate out the aspects of language that are communal inventions versus those that come from within the mind. She and her colleagues have found that home signers’ gesture systems exhibit structure and regularity, indicating that these systems are richer and more complex than initially thought and not simply ad hoc pantomimes. Interestingly, the deaf child exhibits these patterns, but the parents do not, indicating that these properties originate from the home signer’s mind. These results suggest that there are components of language that are associated with some fundamental aspect of the human mind.
Photo by Misha Tulek
The gesture systems created by home signers aren’t technically considered a language because they aren’t shared with a wider community. However, when a group of home signers come together, as in the case of Nicaragua, you see people moving from isolation into a communal context. In these communities, you see the intermingling of ideas and communication gestures, resulting in an opportunity for a new language to emerge. In many cases, these home signers are kids, and social linguistics research – and probably your own experience – has shown that children communicate differently with other kids than they do with adults. When groups of children are together, you get an environment that combines a child’s eagerness for learning with the human drive to communicate, allowing new ideas to emerge and languages to develop. The way children learn and develop linguistic elements results in a continually evolving and growing language, with each new generation adapting and building upon the elements from their predecessors. Much like how you need the invention of computers before you can invent the internet, there are elements of language that require an earlier feature to be invented before new ways of communicating concepts can emerge. Annemarie can see these patterns of invention as she studies NSL and how they’re used by each generation.
Perhaps underscoring the idea that people are more alike than we think, there appear to be common cross-culture linguistic elements among sign languages. One field of study is “syntactic cartography,” where linguists try to identify common features in the syntax of different languages. Whey studying sign languages, researchers have found that there is a recurring pattern in how a signer uses the three-dimensional space in front of them to convey grammatical information. Facial expressions and body language also play important roles in sign language, and while the details surrounding how these features translate across languages haven’t yet been conclusively demonstrated, it remains an active realm of study. There also appears to be some commonalities across sign languages with regard to signs and meanings, such as food and eating signs being associated with the mouth. The underlying explanation for these shared elements is still being uncovered, but some of these elements may simply be a feature of being human.
Annemarie and I discussed a number of language elements, including how people express temporal relationships between actions, as well as how reading, learning, and language are associated, but throughout our discussion, my sister’s ultimate message was around the amazing capacity of the human mind. Humans seem to have an innate desire to communicate, and there is something unique about human cognition that allows us to develop and use language as we do. Children, in particular, are primed to learn and may be uniquely suited to acquiring language. If a language doesn’t exist, then a child will invent one. Importantly, this ability to develop and use language seems to be relatively unique among human skills, as we don’t have an innate ability to read, write, do math, or cook. Language may also represent a defining feature that separates humans from other species. While we often mention communication between animals, there is a level of complexity – a combinatorial ability to create new things instead of just using a limited set of calls or noises – that separates human language from animal communication.
As Annemarie’s work has shown, language is fascinating. It represents a key feature of what it means to be human and is a fundamental building block of society. While we may not have found all the answers, Annemarie and her colleagues are working to continually discover more about how we create, build, and use language to communicate with each other, working to reveal a new understanding of how we learn, how we think, and what it means to be human.
Special thanks to:
Annemarie Kocab, PhD, Post-doctoral researcher, Snedeker and Davidson labs, Harvard (kocab@fas.harvard.edu)