Evolution of Language

One of the oldest puzzles in psychology is the question of how language evolved. The problem is that several interlocking pieces needed to co-evolve. But how could this have happened given that evolution has no foresight? Alfred Russell Wallace was so frustrated in trying to answer this that he felt compelled to invoke divine intervention.

More recently, even Chomsky, the founding father of modern linguistics, has expressed the view that, given the complexity of language, it could not have possibly evolved through natural selection.

Our solution to the riddle of language origins comes from synaesthesia. To understand this argument, we need to put together several ideas.


Figure 7. Demonstration of kiki and bouba. Because of the sharp inflection of the visual shape, sub-jects tend to map the name kiki onto the figure on the left, while the rounded contours of the figure on the right make it more like the rounded auditory inflection of bouba.

First, consider stimuli like those shown in figure 7, originally developed by Köhler (1929; 1947) and further explored by Werner (1934; 1957; Werner & Wapner, 1952). If you show fig. 7 (left and right) to people and say 'In Martian language, one of these two figures is a "bouba" and the other is a "kiki", try to guess which is which', 95% of people pick the left as kiki and the right as bouba, even though they have never seen these stimuli before." The reason is that the sharp changes in visual direction of the lines in the right-hand figure mimics the sharp phonemic inflections of the sound kiki, as well as the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate.

from--

V.S. Ramachandran
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 12, 2001, pp. 3-34

V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubbard
Synaesthesia - A Window into Perception, Thought and Language