Posted on 08/05/2019 7:53:05 AM PDT by BenLurkin
While studying acquisition of imagination in children, Dr. Vyshedskiy and his colleagues discovered a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. It became apparent that modern children who have not been exposed to full language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination essential for juxtaposition of mental objects, known as Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS).
" Flexible object combination and nesting (otherwise known as recursion) are characteristic features of all human languages. For this reason, linguists refer to modern languages as recursive languages."
Unlike vocabulary and grammar acquisition, which can be learned throughout one's lifetime, there is a strong critical period for the development of PFS and individuals not exposed to conversations with recursive language in early childhood can never acquire PFS as adults. Their language is always lacking understanding of spatial prepositions and recursion that depend on the PFS ability. In a similar manner, pre-modern humans would not have been able to learn recursive language as adults and, therefore, would not be able to teach recursive language to their own children, who, as a result, would not acquire PFS. Thus, the existence of a strong critical period for PFS acquisition creates a cultural evolutionary barrier for acquisition of recursive language.
The second predicted evolutionary barrier was a faster PFC maturation rate and, consequently, a shorter critical period. In modern children the critical period for PFS acquisition closes around the age of five. If the critical period in pre-modern children was over by the age of two, they would have no chance of acquiring PFS. A longer critical period was imperative to provide enough time to train PFS via recursive conversations.
An evolutionary mathematical model, developed by Dr. Vyshedskiy... suggests that the "PFC delay" mutation triggered simultaneous synergistic acquisition of PFS and recursive language.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
First of all it pays to read the whole fascinating article. Second, 74,000 years ago was when Toba exploded leaving a crater 18 by 65 miles, and shrinking the human population to perhaps less than 10,000 breeding pairs. The article points out that 600,000 years ago hominids had the physical apparatus to make modern speech. However it took another 1/2 million years to develop the skills explained below in the article.
“On the other hand, artifacts signifying modern imagination, such as composite figurative arts, elaborate burials, bone needles with an eye, and construction of dwellings arose not earlier than 70,000 years ago. The half million-year-gap between the acquisition of the modern speech apparatus and modern imagination has baffled scientists for decades.”
After Toba, the ability to explain objects and their relationship may have had significant survival benefit. With sapiens few and far between, lengthening the time before the ability to learn this specific skill may have made it possible to teach it to more other sapiens. It appears the young can teach it to other young. The article suggests that this enabled cooperative hunting of large animals. It may also have led to sapiens outsurviving the Neanderthals.
Toba didn't have that impact.
The Toba keyword, (mostly) chrono sort:
There seems to be some retrogression of the process in the modern world. Leftists seem to have limited or no recursive language.
“Ever notice that ancient scripts had no cursive counterparts.....................”
Cursive is hard with a chisel and hammer. /s
And hieroglyphs ain’t?...................
I’m sure they were verbally communicating long before this. And used non-verbal sign/body language before that. even dogs can communicate with each other.
“That’s real retarded, sir!”
Yep!.................Wonder where she is now?..............
Hmm, so we acquired modern language 70,000 years ago but still took another 60+ thousand years to figure out how to plant grain, domesticate animals, make mud bricks, develop written language, etc?
Color me skeptical.
Babylonian cunieform became progressively more cursive over time, and Egyptian hieroglyphs evolved into hieratic, which was a form of cursive script used by the priests for writing documents rather than inscriptions on monuments.
OK … I just re-read “The Raven”, one of my favorites. I’m not sure what ‘flexible object combination and nesting’ means … if you can point out examples of it in “The Raven” or other POEtry, that would be very helpful.
Thanks
-NM
Write like and Egyptian................
“Unlike vocabulary and grammar acquisition, which can be learned throughout one’s lifetime, there is a strong critical period for the development of PFS and individuals not exposed to conversations with recursive language in early childhood can never acquire PFS as adults.”
This would explain why so many lower-income people would seem to be unable to have complex conversations, a sense of place or history, and why they seem to live in a fog.
In short, and I will say this first, the author should prepare to be denounced as a racist.
...cuneiform tried to wedge cursive in...
__________
Cute.
Hmm, sounds like this idea of recursive parsing of language could be used to improve the current state of the art “natural language processing” approaches. Most work by inferring meaning of text by adjacencies of words within the multi-dimensional vector spaces built by training a neural network against a large corpus. Might require a few more layers to build representations of possible meanings of word “groupings”.
But that is just a guess;-)
It looks like the scientists are arguing over whether Toba had a strong influence of human survival. I have pulled up a pag of charts, many of which show world temperatures from 1/2 million years ago to present. Don’t get confused by the charts for the last 20,000 years. You will see in chart after chart that our most recent ice age started about 125,000 years ago. Then around 74,000 years ago they all take a sharp dip around 72,000 years ago and it takes a decade for the temperature to restore itself to the previous glide path.
Also thanks for all the references.
TYPO. Please delete the words “around 72,000 years ago.” in my previous comment. It’s past my bedtime.
Seems like staying up past our bedtimes is chronic. I'm giving up now and just going to bed, dammit.
I don’t know about recursive language, but I learned cursive language at a young age.
And got my mouth washed out with soap.
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