Interlocution: Linguistic structure and human interaction

Since the famous Chomsky-Skinner debate over behaviorism a half century ago, human language has been described by most linguists as a system of abstract cognitive structures existing largely independent of human interaction. This view has developed in the broader context of psychological models focusing on internal information processing and construction of abstract representations. While linguists now hold a deep understanding of these structures – by far the most complex described in any biological system – they lack satisfying explanation as to their relation to other human behavior.

The present decade has seen a shift in the focus of research in cognitive and developmental psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and computer science toward studies of humans interacting with each other and their environment. This collective effort has been identified by some as a movement spanning a range of disciplines, and by others as a new interdisciplinary field of its own. The methods and findings of this emerging field have yet to be fully extended to human linguistic communication. Findings coming out of this research – including advances in multimodal perception, emotion transmission, intention reading, phylogenetic storage of ecologically relevant information, and perception-action links – have dramatic implications for the way we think about language.

This workshop will explore language as Interlocution – that is, as a fundamentally interactive social process evolved within a human social-ecological system. Participants will work together to forge a link between the abstract structures linguists have uncovered and the many varied recent strands of knowledge about how people interact with each other and their surroundings. This workshop proposes that language, as formalist linguists have described it, may fit better into the broader scientific context of human interaction than has been previously believed, marrying traditionally functionalist considerations such as interactivity and prediction with traditionally formalist concepts such as innateness and abstractness.

A key topic of the workshop explores the function of linguistic structure in the context of human interaction. As with structure and regularity in any natural system, linguistic structures and regularities enable prediction and confirmation of expectations (in the case of language, “hypothesis testing” of an interlocutor’s communicative intent), allowing most surface details to be ignored or inferred in perception – and a great many to be omitted in production. It is proposed that this function of enhancing predictive power is a primary function of linguistic structure, without which language could not have evolved within the human perceptive and productive capacity. This theoretical position at once establishes strong links between one’s capacity for non-linguistic interaction (intention reading, emotion transmission, etc.), linguistic structure, speech perception and production, and individual and sociolinguistic variation. This topic also implies mechanisms for linguistic transmission, raising the question of whether some aspects of language may show properties of “contagion” paralleling those observed in transmission of emotion and expression.

Another focus of the workshop will be to question the status of innateness in the human language capacity in view of recent developments in fields concerned with human interaction. As such, the relevance of recent neonatal infant perception research will be closely discussed. For example, recent findings show that newborns can: selectively recognize and attend to human faces, mimic facial expressions, differentiate others’ emotions via multimodal pathways, prefer speech, respond selectively to peer- and species-specific cries, attend to, imitate, and initiate fine motor movement “dialogues”, and perceive speech multimodally - and within the first few months of life, infants selectively recognize and attend to fear-relevant stimuli (e.g., spiders and snakes). The workshop will raise for consideration the proposal that the mechanisms underlying these capabilities of newborns are effectively the ones by which humans innately attend to, structure – including linguistic structure – in the environment.

The Interlocution proposal implicates brain regions previously of little interest to linguistics, but of obvious relevance for interaction. Mirror neurons, for example, constitute an obvious recent case of a likely neural link between interaction and language, though there is little hard evidence on which to base this connection. Much less attention has been given to emotion centers like the amygdala and multimodal processing centers like the superior temporal sulcus. Brain regions relevant to human interaction will be explored for their possible relevance to language, and will be considered as possible loci for future speech-related research.

Bryan Gick

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