Abstract
The paper proposes that the understanding of human language evolution requires the comprehensive understanding of language in terms of language types, formations, and learnings and the comprehensive understanding of human biological evolution in terms of the emergences of various hominin species with various language capacities. This paper proposes language neuromechanics and the human biological-language evolution. Language is derived from bodily movement. Language neuro-mechanics combines neuroscience to study language brain and biomechanics to study language movement. Language neuromechanics consists of language type, language formation, and language learning. Language types for advanced animals include gestural language verse vocal language, instinctive language verse controllable language, and symbolic language verse iconic language. Language formation involves the developments of the different types of languages from different bodily movements phylogenetically and ontogenetically. Language learning involves the learning of controllable language to adapt to communicative environment through language brain regions and language genes. This paper proposes a gradual and step-by-step human language evolution from the language of great apes to the human language through the human biological evolution which chronologically and geographically consists of early hominins, early Homos, middle Homos, and late Homos with different language capacities. For hominins, vocal language and gestural language were evolved together. In conclusion, combining neuroscience and bio-mechanics, language neuromechanics provides the comprehensive understanding of language. The combination of language neuromechanics and the human biological-language evolution provides the clear evolutionary path from great apes’ articulate gestural language without articulate speech to human articulate gestural language and articulate speech.
Highlights
In the last 45 years, there has been an extensive study in human language evolution, but human language evolution still remains as a mystery [1]
This paper proposes language neuromechanics and the human biological-language evolution
Language neuromechanics consists of language type, language formation, and language learning
Summary
In the last 45 years, there has been an extensive study in human language evolution, but human language evolution still remains as a mystery [1]. The paper proposes that the understanding of human language evolution requires the comprehensive understandings of language in terms of language types, formations, and learnings and the comprehensive understanding of human biological evolution in terms of the emergences of various hominin species with various language capacities. This paper proposes that language neuromechanics consists of language type, language formation, and language learning [4]. Human language consists of articulate gestural language and articulate vocal language (speech) sharply different from great apes’ languages. This paper proposes a gradual and step-by-step human language evolution from the language of great apes to the human language through the human biological evolution which chronologically and geographically consists of early hominins, early Homos, middle Homos, and late Homos with different language capacities.
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