Joint attentional scenes, stone tools, language and event simulation

Abstract

The present article proposes that the integration of the capacity to comprehend communicative intentions with hierarchical segmentation skills comprises the contribution from tool-making pedagogical interactions to the origins of the hierarchical character of language. The article also hypothesizes about which kind of representations language is mapped to, following Mandler's (1991) idea that language is not mapped directly to the “continuously varying physical parameters of the movement”, but to a “conceptual summary” of events. It is predicted that the inference of intentions – either communicative intentions or non-communicative ones – would result in peaks of brain activity in common brain areas whose functioning such inference processes would depend on.