Question

What are the similarities and differences between the acquisition of language in human infants and the evolution of language in the human species? Answer this question in terms of Tomasello’s theory.

Answer 1

Tomasello theory states that, for an infant to able to learn the language (acquisition of language in human infants) spoken around him/her, the infant must:

# understand that he/she have the ability to produce actions, the action he/she produces is the result of his/her own intentions and be able to derive an analogy between ownself and others,

# understand that the active choices he/she performs to attain goal is among the possible actions, and how and what he/she have to direct his choices to attain goal,

# reason by analogising that others have intentions motivating their actions, and that actions are chosen to pursuit their own particular goals,

# be able to jointly attend with another individual to a third one; and can predict another's unfamiliar actions; he/she would be able to act relevantly in the current joint attentional frame, taking account of the perspective, knowledge, and expectations of others in that joint frame,

# be motivated to act helpfully towards other individuals, assuming the mutual benefit in cooperating communicatively,

# be able to recognize that actors can substitute other in acts of imitation, and in turn able to to imitate the actions of others,

# be able to to construct mental representation of communicative devices to hear speech of others, possess a sense of group identity, being able to recognize and respect social norms by imitating the linguistic convention of others in social interactions.

Tomasello's theory can be applicable to the extent if we consider it likely for pre-linguistic human infants who are able and motivated to engage in these complex mental behaviours.

The parallels that links Infants Language Acquisition to Language Evolution in human species are:

a] Gesturing (aspect of non-verbal communication) in human beings, plays an important role in infant language acquisition. Gesturing is evident in human communication; they are often regarded as precursor to spoken language, in both language evolutionary sense and infant language acquisition. In other side, there is a conflict whether language emerged from vocalizations or manual gestures.

b] There is an existing theory (Mimesis to Speech Theory) that seems to fit well with idea of using child language acquisition to explain language evolution. It explains that spoken communication was advantageous in the sense that speech helped free up the hands to enable them to perform other function; there is also a possibility that speech allowed for communication in the dark.