Charades Reveals a Universal Sentence Structure

In what may be a confirmation of some Chomsky's linguistic theory, researchers have discovered that there is a fairly universal language structure -- and they discovered it in the game of charades.

Charades reveals a universal sentence structure

• 22:00 30 June 2008
• NewScientist.com news service
• Ewen Callaway

If Kim Jong Il plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush's, a new study suggests. It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal communication is the same across the globe.

English, Spanish and many other Western languages build most basic sentences around a simple blueprint: a subject followed by a verb and object; for example, "mice eat cheese". Other languages, like Turkish and Korean, tend toward subject-object-verb construction, or "mice cheese eat".

"There's something pretty fundamental about these orders," says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist at the University of Chicago, who led the study.

Scientific charades

To determine whether these differences carry over to unspoken communication, Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues asked 40 native speakers of Chinese, Turkish, English and Spanish to mime scenarios shown on a computer screen using only their hands and body.

These included a boy drinking a bottle of soda and a ship's captain swinging a pail of water.

Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction.

"We actually thought we were going to get gestures that just matched your speech," Goldin-Meadow says.

In a separate experiment, she asked volunteers to reconstruct a scenario using transparencies depicting different elements. Again, people of all cultures tended to arrange the transparencies in subject-object-verb order.

Early signs

Goldin-Meadow argues that this kind of sentence syntax might therefore be etched into our brains. Languages that veer away from this form, such as English, must have been influenced by cultural forces.

"I think the results are exciting," says Carol Padden, a linguist at the University of California, San Diego, US.

Padden has documented the emergence of a new sign language in the last 70 years among a small group of Bedouins in the southern Israel.

So-called Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language also builds sentences around a subject-object-verb construction. "Consistent word order appears early in a new sign language," she says.

Journal reference: PNAS (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710060105)

Back in the early days of linguistic theory Chomsky argued for what this research seems to confirm:

Chomsky goes so far as to suggest that a baby need not learn any actual rules specific to a particular language at all. Rather, all languages are presumed to follow the same set of rules, but the effects of these rules and the interactions between them can vary greatly depending on the values of certain universal linguistic parameters. This is a very strong assumption, and is one of the most subtle ways in which Chomsky's current theory of language differs from most others.

Since then, many others have taken up this position, to the point that it has become the accepted truth. Now there is more evidence to support the idea, which is always good.

Tags: Charades, Universal Sentence Structure, Language, linguistics, Chomsky, transformational grammar, New Scientist, communication