Origins of Language - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

If identity depends on language, as I mostly failed to establish on Private Language Argument, then where does language originate?

Linda B. Smith: Vision leads to language

Linda B. Smith has some videos on this. Possibly these?

• Linda B. Smith: Word Learning From the Infant's Point of View - YouTube
• Linda Smith | Common sense and the visual experiences of toddlers - YouTube
• PsyTalks: Episode 1 - Movement and babies' learning development - YouTube

The important part she adds to the discussion is embodiment. And fundamentally the complex systems/dynamic system lens.

Smith makes the strong claim that the innate aspect of language resides in how the visual system / attention is wired in our brains. And that, of course, is fundamentally social. Babies are wired to attend, at least after the first 3 months or so, to faces. They stabilize their heads and attend to faces something like 70% of their waking time (if they can).

They learn tremendously fast, often with one trial, the name of not only one object, but they learn to categorize and generalize to a class of objects. USUALLY this is because they have a TON of SIMILAR items (bottles, spoons, stuffy) that adult around them casually label the same thing. But they almost magically generalize to the right features (e.g., ignoring colour and focusing on function). My point is that all of this learning is done in a social context from the very start. EVERYTHING is social about language from the very start...

Now here's the cool part: once joint attention comes online, around 9 months, they can point and direct OTHER PEOPLE'S attention to what they're attending to... And they do it right away (pointing madly to everything they want or are curious about).

What leads to vision?

Do Homo sapiens have vision that is unique in some way? Gut feeling: yes. Will probably need to read Evolution of the eye - Wikipedia. See Origins of Vision.