Question: how would you summarise your work and what do you think the benifits would be to society

Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

My research is focused around the question: Why is it that humans have language while no other species seems to? I am specifically interested in changes to the human brain relative to other apes and monkeys that may be important for language.

Lots of people immediately note that animals can definitely communicate and anyone whose owned a pet will agree to this. In fact, some animals communicate in pretty sophisticated ways (I’m thinking about some dolphins and whales, vervet monkeys, some singing birds, and bees, to name a few) but what is interesting, is that none of the use language — as far as we can tell (and we’ve looked pretty hard). In this sense, language is a structured communication — that is, we used phrases and sentences and paragraphs and those types of things to organize our communication and try as we might, we can’t find any evidence of that in other species. So even when people have tried to raise great apes in a human-like envirnoment with lots of communication with the ape, they never get beyond about a 2-3 year’s ability to use language. They can do some amazing things like using sign language to ask for food – Nim Chimsky would sign “me, banana, banana” but that’s not true language. In contrast, kids can’t help producing language, even when raised in the most awful environments without proper language around them. Given half a chance, a group of kids in that situation will invent their own language (called a creole) and a new language is born. This happens more often that you might expect. Just a few years ago, Nicaraguan Sign Language was born this way as was a new Bedouin language.

But my point here is that there is massive difference between animals and humans: animals can’t seem to learn language despite our best efforts while it’s incredibly difficult to prevent kids from learning language. Why is that? What is it in our brains that makes us different from other species — particularly from other primates? That’s what I’d like to know and that’s where my research is focused.

As for it’s importance, it’ll probably have several spin-offs. For instance, if we understood how language worked in normal healthy adults we’d have a much better understanding of how it goes wrong in patients with brain damage and that may help with assisting recovery. But even just having a clearer picture of who we are as humans and how this came about would be valuable, to my mind. We’re all curious about about ourselves and would love to know more.