Study: An aspect of language looks to be hardwired in our brains

As a reader of the article kindly submitted here who speaks and reads multiple human languages from more than one language family, I'm not convinced that this article passes the linguist's or polyglot's smell test. The sample size reported in the article is wholly inadequate for showing that there is a real effect here. That the underlying study was reported in a rather minor journal is a further indication that there isn't any real-world significance behind the statistical significance claimed by the researchers. For good background reading on why you shouldn't look merely to statistical significance claims for evaluating research on human subjects like this, see the articles by Uri Simonsohn[1] and his statistically astute co-authors, who have identified phenomena called "researcher degrees of freedom" (there are a lot of researcher degrees of freedom here) and "p-hacking" (a news release that mentions "more accurately than by random chance" is almost always a sign of p-hacking) that allow many weak, underpowered studies of human behavior to be published in journals with poor statistical skills among the editorial staff.

[1] http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/

http://www.p-curve.com/

The article makes some claims about childhood language learning:

But some researchers argue that synesthesia, which appears in 4% of the general population, is actually an exaggerated manifestation of associations we all make from an early age—an ability most of us lose over time, and one that may help explain why children are so good at picking up other languages.

I clicked through to the linked paper, and I could find no evidence that synesthesia provided any specific, significant advantages during childhood language acquisition.

Now, other research supports that children do have real advantages when it comes to learning accents, and that they may have lesser advantages when learning grammar. But beyond that, the evidence becomes controversial. And adults who are socially and professionally immersed for, say, 5 years will often acquire a very solid command of a new language, especially if they're also voracious readers.

In general, English-language media often overrates the ease with which children learn languages[1], and it's insufficiently critical about scientific theories which claim to explain this advantage.

[1] Trying to raise bilingual children, for example, can be surprisingly challenging unless you live in a bilingual society.

The main problem with the nativist hypothesis is that it's breaching Occam's razor rule. Is there a simpler explanation than being hardwired with information, which would be a fairly complicated thing to explain, considering what we know of the brain today? Yes, there is: languages are related and sound symbolism could be passed from language to language, or the perfectly reasonnable explanation offered by Christine Cuskley at the end of the article. In the world we live in, some set of sounds are associated to small animals, other to big animals.

Nativist hypothesizes suffer from a lack of imagination in looking for alternative explanations. I cannot explain it? Must be innate! Or, children do it? Must be innate!

Cognitive research points to a much more promising explanation: we are really good at learning, and we can learn abstract concepts pretty quickly, even as very young children. See Stanislas Dehaene's work for instance.

Abstracting concepts for big and small from our environment and associating sounds with it is much more plausible than passing around information about abstract concepts in genes through natural selection based on random genetic mutations.

This recent publication about evidence for a proposed model for basic grammatical processing in the neocortex, was also fascinating: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11732.long

An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex

    Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose
    structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of
    “bite,” “dog,” and “man,” we can think about a dog biting a man,
    or a man biting a dog. Here, in two functional magnetic resonance
    imaging (fMRI) experiments using multivoxel pattern
    analysis (MVPA), we identify a region of left mid-superior
    temporal cortex (lmSTC) that flexibly encodes “who did what to
    whom” in visually presented sentences. We find that lmSTC
    represents the current values of abstract semantic
    variables (“Who did it?” and “To whom was it done?”) in distinct
    subregions. Experiment 1 first identifies a broad region of lmSTC
    whose activity patterns (i) facilitate decoding of
    structure-dependent sentence meaning (“Who did what to whom?”)
    and (ii) predict affect-related amygdala responses that depend on
    this information (e.g., “the baby kicked the grandfather”
    vs. “the grandfather kicked the baby”). Experiment 2 then
    identifies distinct, but neighboring, subregions of lmSTC whose
    activity patterns carry information about the identity of the
    current “agent” (“Who did it?”) and the current “patient” (“To
    whom was it done?”). These neighboring subregions lie along the
    upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral bank
    of the superior temporal gyrus, respectively. At a high level,
    these regions may function like topographically defined data
    registers, encoding the fluctuating values of abstract semantic
    variables. This functional architecture, which in key respects
    resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role
    in enabling humans to flexibly generate complex thoughts.

Here's a fascinating documentary on the phenomenon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg

I would have thought all living creatures with ears would assign the same meaning to loud/quiet or long/short sounds (i.e. loud sounds are more important as they signify a big predator, or a large object running/falling nearby. Small sound just confirm confirm 2 twigs collided when moved etc). With this common basis for sound, I don't think it is too suprising that our use of vocalisation relate in some way at the very basic level across languages.

Half the languages in the list are branches off the Indo-European tree. I have a hard time believing this is a result of "language hardware" in the brain as opposed to a much simpler explanation like the shared heritage of the words.

They don't seem to have controlled for native language; E.g. Dutch has a lot of similarities with English...

The reason I thought ca-chook meant small is because it's fairly difficult to say. When saying small vs big, there's a few incentives (physical, contextual, etc) to have one easier to say than another.

e.g. We have a big problem. We have a small problem.

did they exclude esp?

Sample size of 76....