My hypothesis is that when two humans meet, they do a Turing Test to see if their respective “theory of mind” are close enough that they can understand each other and communicate. If they are not close enough, then xenophobia is triggered via the uncanny valley effect.

If you fail the Turing Test, it is as if you are not a human being. Having a compatible “theory of mind” that is sufficient to understand the other is the implicit definition of humanity that people unconsciously use. This is why some humans can treat those they hate as objects. To bigots and racists, the objects of their bigotry are non-human objects who lack the capacity to express human attributes such as love, respect, trust, honor.

http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2010/03/physiology-behind-xenophobia.html

My own research concerns iconicity in language. The diehard Chomskyan will declare that Language is symbolic (because of Saussurean arbitrariness delinking form from semantic content). But even in languages as poor in ‘sound symbolism’ as English and most European languages still have tons of other iconic formations not involving sound-meaning.

There are languages by the hundreds out there where iconicity far outweighs symbolicity, as well as those where Peircean indexicality outweighs both symbolicity and iconicity. Chomsky didn’t bother in any real sense to try to gauge the real range of properties across the spectrum of currently living human languages- he simply assumed, from his limited knowledge base, that all languages MUST be similar underlyingly, and then tried to get the rest of the world to believe it too. Most successfully, I might add. For a while…. But when you flip-flop intellectually as much as Chomsky has (which would put Mitt Romney to shame had he been a linguist and not a politician), you start to lose adherents. Trying to destroy your students who see things a bit differently doesn’t win you fans either.

But I digress. Some of the iconic properties of human languages point in an interesting direction with regard to the origins and evolution of same. The first has to do with the nature of phonemic mappings to meaning. If one examines many thousands of onomatopes and ideophones across different languages, language families, language types, and geographical regions some mapping preferences emerge. One set links articulatory positions to meanings, and interestingly this relates to the anatomy and function of the articulators at those positions nonlinguistically. Thus it appears that humans exapted the existing materials processing functions of the oral and airway passages to communication- this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, since this is seen with other animals when they adapt existing external articulators to communication (usually this involves physical reduction of the organ, rendering it less able to perform its original function, but this also facilitates its use in the new one).

Secondly, the form/meaning mappings form a coherent system, in terms of the phonological features of the phonemes- labials and dentals (diffuse feature) oppose velars and palatals (compact), labials and velars (grave) oppose dentals and palatals (acute). Interestingly, labials then connect to palatals, and dentals to velars, indicating a tetrahedral symmetry here. There is also an opposition depending on even/odd syllable count- a phoneme in the first will have a partially opposite sense to the same phoneme in the second. This all begins to look like the result of a set of matrix operations.

In language typology, we see different ways of packing information into roots, words, phrases and clauses, and so on. Linguistics has discovered that such packing preferences evolve cyclically over time. This involves not just whether a language has affixes or clitics, but also word order, prosody, even the size and composition of the phonological system, and much else. More matrix mechanics??

All this then ties together with iconicity, symbolicity, indexicality- Index-heavy languages, those with the most elaborate derivational and grammatical morphological systems (the latter esp. the case when there is a great amount of intermorphemic fusion) have the fewest numbers of ideophones and onomatopoeias. Conversely, the languages that are most icon-heavy have the least amount of fusion, and the fewest affixes. Symbol-heavy languages tend to be a mix of icons, symbols, and indexes. What is most interesting to me is that functionally, icons seem to oppose indexes. Thus this isn’t some cline from primitive to advanced- it is a binary opposition constantly in flux. Icons focus on the external content of amessage, and tend to break up chunked transmissions. Indexes on the other hand help to chunk messages for transmission and efficient processing, and focus on the internal structure of the carriers of the messages.

Obviously a great deal had to have happened to create the neuroanatomical backdrop for all of the above, and not all of it likely happened at the same time. But we have millions of years between our split from the other apes to account for. It would be fascinating to know if our ancestors had all these capacities- perhaps in a few years we can clone some of these from old fossil bones or blood and find out.

Even the octopus might be as well.

And these are just the few species we have managed to test so far.

The “radical” hypothesis about the nature and origin of human language described in this piece seems to contradict well-established ideas about language acquisition in cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics. Since the Chomskyean revolution, it is now widely accepted that there is a system of principles, rules, conditions, and properties common to all human languages. A knowledge of this “universal grammar” (UG) is hard-wired into us: it is part of our innate, genetic endowment as human beings. Moreover, the language faculty is unique to human beings; no other organisms are known to possess this mental organ.

So, it seems highly unlikely that “spoken language got structured via cultural evolution to sound like the events occurring among solid objects.” Our knowledge of language has properties that are unique to language and are not shared by other aspect of human thinking. For example, the syntax of all human languages shows structure-dependency. This means that operations on sentences (like the formation of a question) requires a knowledge of structural relationships within a sentence and not merely their linear order. But, structure-dependency is not a property of other aspects of human thinking. The uniqueness of linguistic principles like this suggests that our capacity for language comes from a distinct faculty that is, at least in some respects, qualitatively different from our other cognitive architecture.