who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

15‣ Discussion of the historical processes and dynamics of weakeningand gradual disappearance of the tradition of vocal polyphony (appearance of thedivision of the society on “singers” and “listeners”; advancement of individualismand the beginning of professionalism; replacement of polyphonic songs bymonophonic developed melodies comprising the most important points fromdifferent parts of the polyphonic texture; increasing the role of instrumentalpolyphony and the appearance of double wind instruments)‣ Suggestion of the particular importance of responsorial form ofgroup singing as one of the strongest universals of human musical culture andvocal communication, and the acknowledgement of the importance ofresponsorial singing in the emergence of the ability of asking questions;‣ The new idea that the ability to ask questions is possibly theuniquely human feature of our intelligence, and that the emergence of this abilitywas the most revolutionary change over the course of the evolution of humanlanguage and intelligence;‣ With the emergence of the uniquely human ability of askingquestions human brains turned into a self-developing and collectively organisedsystem;‣ I’ll try to demonstrate that the ability to answer questionsevolutionary preceded the ability to ask questions. The ability to answer questionsexists in the animal kingdom. Ground-breaking studies on apes” intelligenceproved that they are able to properly answer human questions and evenunderstand the meaning of some question words, although they does not seem touse these words themselves in “conversations” and they do not ask questions;‣ Suggestion that the ability of asking questions is a genetic trait ofthe human brain, but it does need an early development through communicativeinteraction with adult humans to develop this ability; There are some indicationsthat after the “critical period” the ability of asking questions may not develop in ahuman brain;‣ According to my model, the unification of the “languages” of apes,children under two, “wolf children”, and Creole languages under the notion of“protolanguage” (Bickerton, 1990, 2000) must be critically reviewed, becauseunlike the language of young children and Creole languages, wolf children’s andapes’ “language” does not contain a critically important feature of humanintelligence - asking questions;‣ In the same way I suggest that the critical difference between theintellectual development of human babies and the apes arises as soon as childrenstart asking their first questions, using the question intonation, long before theappearance of any syntactic structures in their speech;‣ According to my model, the appearance of human intelligence andhuman language (and consequently appearance of Homo sapiens) happened onthe musical communicative stage of development, long before the advance ofarticulated speech as the dominating medium of language.As for the development of articulated speech, most of the ideas on thisaccount were already part of my 1989 book.