How did primitive people start talking to each other? This process developed gradually – at first communication took place with the help of body language and body language. In addition, sounds “similar” to what they mean played a significant role in the origin of the language.
The similarity of an object or phenomenon and the sign that denotes it is called iconicity in linguistics. It is widely believed that iconicity is almost never found in oral speech, with the exception of onomatopoeia like “meow” or “woof”. For sign language, on the contrary, iconicity is very characteristic.
Researchers Marcus Perlman and Gary Lupyan from the University of Wisconsin (USA) together with Rick Dale from the University of California at Merced (USA) conducted a series of experiments. Volunteers were asked to try to convey the meaning of certain words using meaningless sounds, while not using gestures or facial expressions. Participants were divided into nine couples who played “vocal charades”, trying with sounds to make it clear to the partner which of the eighteen words (“up”, “down”, “big”, “small”, and so on) they mean.
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The researchers recorded the sounds made and compared the results of the game in different pairs. Patterns were found – for example, when trying to convey the meaning of the word “up”, the volunteers made sounds of a higher tone (and vice versa for the word “down”). It was found that after several rounds of the game, mutual understanding improved and eventually the partners began to understand what was meant (82,2% of cases).
In the second experiment, the recorded sounds were asked to be listened to by anonymous users on the Internet, who were then asked to select a word corresponding to the sound from a list. Users correctly guessed the meaning of the sounds about 36% of the time – much more accurate than random guessing (in this case, about 10%).
The researchers emphasize that it will most likely never be possible to accurately establish the process of the emergence of speech in primitive people (it is assumed that this happened in the Upper Paleolithic – about 50 thousand years ago, or even earlier). However, their results show how different sounds could play in this process, which were originally iconic, and over time evolved into more complex sound structures that were already equally understood by large groups of people.
Подробнее см. M. Perlman at el. «Iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols», Royal Society Open Science, August 2015.