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

344other members of society. This crucial distinction should not be forgotten whencomparing ape and child mental abilities. According to the existing literature, childrenstart using correctly pronounced question intonation and asking their first simplequestions at the babbling period of their development (Ferguson, 1977; Crystal,1987:235, 243, 248; Moskowitz, 1991:147). Despite my deep appreciation of thelinguistic achievements of our closest relatives, unless it is demonstrated that apes canlearn to ask questions, we should conclude that even the mental abilities of one-yearoldchild has a unique element that is beyond the mental ability of the mostadvanced of our closest relatives.I suggest designing a special set of experiments to encourage apes to askquestions, and I cordially wish them success in this endeavor. Kanzi and Panbanishaproved many times that their mental abilities are beyond our expectations, and it ispossible that they have the ability to ask their human friends some simple questions (like“Where banana?”) as well. I want to repeat again that asking questions is not a matterof constructing syntactic structures (questions do not need any syntactic structures),but it is a matter of cognitive abilities.• Questions and ProtolanguageBefore we discuss the means that help infants learn the art of asking questions, letus very briefly discuss the notion of “protolanguage”, suggested in the works of DerekBickerton (Bickerton, 1981, 1990, 2000, 2003). The idea of protolanguage rightfullybecame very popular, although discussions about what is the nature of protolanguage stillcontinue (see, for example, Mithen, 2005:3).Bickerton suggested that for a long period of time during the hominid evolutionour human ancestors were using a very simple surrogate of contemporary language,where the words were present, but no or very little grammar was involved. Inappreciation of this simple and very useful suggestion I agree with the many scholarswho view the notion of protolanguage as one of the central elements of the evolutionarydevelopment of human language. Here I want to concentrate on one specific problem:According to Bickerton, protolanguage is present among four different categories:(1) trained apes, (2) children under two, (3) Genie and “wolf children”, and (4) users of“pidgin” languages.In my opinion these four categories of protolanguage users should be divided intotwo very different groups, (1) those who do not use questions in their speech and (2)those who use questions. Although syntactically they might look alike, the differencebetween these two groups on a cognitive level is enormous. Those who cannot askquestions are locked inside their own mental world and cannot develop further. Thosewho can ask questions have the ability to develop mentally and to become a part of thegreat information web of humanity. To say this more simply, the members of the secondgroup are in the human cognitive family, whereas the members of the first group are not.So, according to this criterion, the four groups nominated by Bickerton as protolanguageusers must be divided into two very different groups:(1) Trained apes and “wolf children” – who do not ask questions, and