What's Going On in the Minds of Babies?

Babies know more than they can say.

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Many human ideas do not exist without words—for example, the idea of a center of gravity, or a limited liability company, or a criminal indictment. For most of us, it's hard to picture life without language; our inner worlds are full of these completely virtual things that seem as real as physical objects.

Almost all people learn their first language as children and don’t remember themselves before that point; childhood amnesia subsides around age 4, by which point children usually speak pretty well. Rare accounts of those who learned their first language in adulthood imply a sharp line separating their life into two completely different parts.

But there clearly is some thought before language. Just ask any parent about their baby, and you will probably hear how clever they are.

What exactly infants can understand before they start speaking, though, remains a matter of debate. Just how far can human thought go without words?

The question is important not only because we want to know more about our children (although that, too), but because the relationship between language and the mind is one of the most pressing questions of our time, as it is at the center of the debate about artificial intelligence and whether or not it could ever become conscious or malicious.

There are, of course, lots of things that prelingual infants can’t do. For instance, until 18 months, most can’t recognize themselves in a mirror. Another classic example is the so-called A-not-B task. An experimenter repeatedly hides a toy in location A within the infant’s reach, and the infant successfully retrieves it. Then, the experimenter moves the toy to location B while the infant watches. Most infants under a year old, however, continue to look for the toy in location A, unable to process the thought that the location has changed.

But sometimes an infant can surprise you. For example, many languages have this odd association between round shapes and “round” sounds. Words that describe smooth, round things also tend to sound kind of round: ball, round, amoeboid; whereas words that describe pointy things often sound sharp and jagged: spike, knife, pincers.

You would think that this is cultural: As we learn language, we learn to associate its sounds with meanings, and so words describing sharp objects start sounding sharp. Except that infants have the same associations before they know what knives or pincers are: They think that jagged shapes are congruent with the sound kiki, and round shapes with the sound bouba, as would we all. This might be rooted in an association between the sound and the shape of the mouth making that sound, and the association itself might either be innate or learned very shortly after birth.

This example shows how studies on prelingual infants can tell us which parts of our cognition are derived from culture, and which ones from biology.

New research by Jean-Rémy Hochmann’s lab in Lyon shows that the cognition of prelingual infants is more complicated than we give them credit for. There are apparently signs of grammar before there’s any sign of words: a primordial, foundational grammar of abstract thought. The study, led by Liuba Papeo, showed that infants assign pictures of humans engaged in various interactions (kissing, kicking, helping) to one of two roles—agent or patient, and are surprised when the roles are unexpectedly reversed. This is equivalent to assigning words in a sentence the roles of subject and object.

So, based on this, you could say that the idea of “subject” and “object” is built into our brain on a deeper level than words are. It’s likely that there are many other ideas similarly built in.

I think this study would please Noam Chomsky, whose central thesis has always been that what we call “language” is an externalization of innate cognition. According to this view, words—what we learn from culture—populate a pre-existing scaffold of thought, which does not depend on culture, but instead on genes and evolution.

Surely dogs can think, too?

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Language, Chomsky has always said, is not for communication; it is for thinking. I always have a hard time getting this point across to my students. Surely dogs and infants can also think, they say?

The new study is a good way to address this question. You could say there’s “communication language"—grammar plus words, which we use to exchange thoughts with others—and “Chomskyan language,” the broader, abstract grammar of cognition that we use internally. Infants don’t yet have communication language, but, as this study shows, they have Chomskyan language.

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Figuring out where exactly the lines are drawn between these two forms of language is a key task for neuroscience. It might be that a large part of our inner world is derived not from culture, as one would expect, but from physical, biological factors (such as the shape of the mouth pronouncing kiki or bouba).

If this turns out to be true, then artificial intelligence, which lacks this grounding in physical reality, would prove to be fundamentally deficient compared to the embodied brains of humans and other animals—as indeed some neuroscientists argue.

If, on the other hand, we learn most of our conception of the world from words—as linguistic relativists and sci-fi authors suggest—then maybe AI can eventually match and even exceed our understanding of reality.

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