The Vocal Tract Advantage

Language has come a long way. From the apeman's minimalist "hubba-hubba"s to the sophisticated and clipped Queen's English, it has travelled various lands and time warps to manifest in the different forms that we are familiar with. But, what is language all about? How did it all begin? These are few of the questions that can turn on any linguist and when Dr. Marcel P. R. Van Den Broecke, linguist turned statistician, was faced with them, he got talking. 

"Linguistics is trying to locate elements which are common to all languages," said Dr. Broecke, director, International Statistical Institute, the Netherlands, during his recent visit to the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta. Having begun on this note, he kept to linguistics and its implications without even veering for once into his current area of expertise. 

Asked about the human ability to pick up languages, he remarked that although the brain's left hemisphere seats the language center, it is not pre-programmed to pick up any specific language. For example, an Indian child born and brought up in another country can easily grasp the language of that country. However, he emphasised that parental influence is also central to speech development in children. 

Charting language comprehension in infants, he informed that it is around the age of six to eight months that a child demonstrates the ability to understand individual words. They start with immature consonant-vowel sounds like "ma", "pa" and so on. 

Many linguists trace this back to our prehistoric ancestors who lived close to their ape cousins. They imitated the hoots of chimps which were similarly monosyllabic and later, this developed into a language. So, why didn't the chimps learn to speak in the first place? 

"Humans took advantage of their slightly modified vocal tract, which is ideal for speech. Monkeys don't have it," answered Dr. Broecke. Over the years, humans developed a common language which branched out into all the different existing languages. And it is in the area of language descent that historical linguistics, Dr. Broecke's favourite, plays an important role. 

Almost as a signoff, Dr. Broecke mentioned how current statistics is aiding linguistics, especially in speech recognition models. "The theory of probability is one of the fundamental aspects of speech recognition systems. It determines which sound is most likely to follow another," he explained. 

Linguistics alone has certain applications. One of them is in optical speech recognition (OCR). "This is a technique employed in computers to convert printed text into its electronic counterpart through scanning," Dr. Broecke said. To run the program, linguistic details like which letters can or cannot follow other letters need to be added. 

Another area of linguistic application is automatic translation. In this process, computer programs are fed with a vocabulary. During translation, the program finds the correct alternative for a word and translates it. "But, a computer cannot always recognise the correct grammatical syntax. It will take some time before linguists and programmers can solve this problem," Dr. Broecke concluded.