Evolutionary Origins Of Language Research Articles

The Evolutionary Origins of Language: Validating a New Theory

The Evolutionary Origins of Language: Validating a New Theory

Atypical birdsong and artificial languages provide insights into how communication systems are shaped by learning, use, and transmission

In this article, I argue that a comparative approach focusing on the cognitive capacities and behavioral mechanisms that underlie vocal learning in songbirds and humans can provide valuable insights into the evolutionary origins of language. The experimental approaches I discuss use abnormal song and atypical linguistic input to study the processes of individual learning, social interaction, and cultural transmission. Atypical input places increased learning and communicative pressure on learners, so exploring how they respond to this type of input provides a particularly clear picture of the biases and constraints at work during learning and use. Furthermore, simulating the cultural transmission of these unnatural communication systems in the laboratory informs us about how learning and social biases influence the structure of communication systems in the long run. Findings based on these methods suggest fundamental similarities in the basic social–cognitive mechanisms underlying vocal learning in birds and humans, and continuing research promises insights into the uniquely human mechanisms and into how human cognition and social behavior interact, and ultimately impact on the evolution of language.

The evolutionary origins of language and music

Language, as well as music, is ubiquity across cultures. The evolutionary origins of language and music have been studied since Charles Darwin’s day. According to Darwin, human bodies and brains have been shaped by natural selection for language and music, and musical abilities must be ranked among the most mysterious with which endowed. However, whether language and music are targets of natural selection still remains uncertain. If language and music are unique to human society, exploring the evolutionary origins of language and music would be helpful to shed light on human evolution.

The Drosophila FoxP gene is necessary for operant self-learning: Implications for the evolutionary origins of language

Bjorn Brembs1, Diana Pauly2, Rudiger Schade3, Ezequiel Mendoza1, Hans-Joachim Pfluger1, Jurgen Rybak4, Constance Scharff1, Troy Zars5 1 Institut fur Biologie Neurobiologie, Freie Universitat Berlin; 2 Robert Koch-Institut, Berlin; 3 Institut fur Pharmakologie, Charite, Berlin; 4 Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Jena, Germany; 5 Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo, USA bjoern@brembs.net, http://brembs.net

Why we talk: The evolutionary origins of language (review)

Why we talk: The evolutionary origins of language (review)

Review of Dessalles (): Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language

Review of Dessalles (): Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language

Hagen Replies to Hirschfeld (2008)

Hirschfeld's (2008) thoughtful comments on my article on the bilingual brain are a valuable contribution to what I find to be an exciting and fruitful interdisciplinary investigation in evolutionary linguistics. I think his reply will help us flesh out both the biological and the environmental forces that have led to the human endowment for language. Even so, Hirschfeld's conclusion — that the well-known difficulties which adults face in acquiring second languages are somehow proof of an environment in which early hominid bands frequently commingled - is at variance with virtually everything we know from the many disciplines that are now involved in the debate over the evolutionary origins of language.

Why we talk: the evolutionary origins of language

PART I THE PLACE OF LANGUAGE IN HUMAN EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY 1. Animal and Human Communication 2. Culture, Languages, and Language 3. The Biological Roots of Language 4. Misapprehensions about the Origins of Language 5. Language as an Evolutionary Curiosity 6. The Local Optimality of Language PART II THE FUNCTIONAL ANATOMY OF SPEECH 7. Putting Sounds Together 8. Protolanguage 9. The Mechanics of Syntax 10. Syntax and Meaning 11. The Structure of Meanings 12. The Emergence of Meaning PART III THE ETHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE 13. Conversation Behaviour 14. Language as Information 15. The Birth of Argumentation 16. Language as an Evolutionary Paradox 17. The Political Origins of Language 18. Epilogue Bibliography Index

The Evolution of Language Out of Pre-language (review)

Reviewed by: The evolution of language out of prelanguage ed. by T. Givón and Bertram F. Malle David Golumbia The evolution of language out of prelanguage. Ed. by T. Givón and Bertram F. Malle. (Typological studies in language 53.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. ix, 392. ISBN 1588112381. $57.95. Because contemporary formalist linguistics explicitly aligns itself with a scientific approach to the study of language, it is something of a continuing surprise to find contemporary scientists, with some frequency, aligning themselves with what look like functionalist theories of language. In particular, contemporary evolutionary theorists have developed an interesting series of arguments about the development of language that partake more deeply of sociolinguistics and pragmatics than formalist syntax. This volume returns the favor, putting the minds of some of today’s foremost functionalist linguists to work on biological and physical problems in the evolution of language, and offering some methodological and evidentiary support for functionalist theories in general. As befits the fact that much of this thinking proceeds from his own work, the first paper in the volume is by Talmy Givón himself; and since the volume includes only a brief introduction, it has the effect of a statement of purpose. In ‘The visual information-processing system as an evolutionary precursor of human language’ (3–50), Givón argues that ‘the cognitive representation system that underlies human language has been recruited to language processing without major adjustments’ (39), a position that the author characterizes as resistant to what he calls ‘extreme emergentism’ (3) but which nevertheless strikes a main blow against the hallmark of innatism, namely the modularity of the language organ. There are several other significant essays in this volume. Joan Bybee’s ‘Sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure’ (109–34) is a focused exploration of what the author has come to call ‘emergent constituency’ in which ‘constituents of the type proposed for generative grammar which are described by phrase structure trees do not exist. Instead, units of language (words or morphemes) are combined into chunks as a result of frequent repetition’ (130). Brian MacWhinney’s ‘The gradual emergence of language’ (233–64) critically examines several key concepts in physiological evolution and, like several other authors here, argues that language involves a wide range of what appear to be prelinguistic phenomena like bipedalism. [End Page 457] Charles N. Li’s similarly focused ‘Missing links, issues and hypotheses in the evolutionary origin of language’ (83–108) also examines imitation and issues in neural development. Michael Tomasello’s ‘The emergence of grammar in early child language’ (309–28) is similarly noteworthy. One persistent strand of research, present as well in some of the articles mentioned above, is the idea that even certain aspects of processing and grammar might be based on what are essentially nonlinguistic capabilities. ‘On the pre-linguistic origins of language processing rates’ (171–214), by Marjorie Barker and Givón, delivers a satisfyingly technical follow-up to the editor’s initial essay, reporting on language-processing experiments that test the ‘incredibly stable temporal rate of word and event-clause processing’ (178), tying it directly to the prelinguistic rate of visual object processing, a connection the authors consider a relatively inexplicable coincidence unless these capabilities are physically related in the brain. Along similar lines, ‘The clausal structure of linguistic and pre-linguistic behavior’ (215–32), by Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon and August Fenk, more generally ties perceptual capabilities to linguistic ones. Like other essays here, it poses significant challenges to many formalist theories of the evolution of language. David Golumbia University of Virginia Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

Triadic relations and emergence of mind in nonhuman primates

When considering the evolutionary origin of language, we should attend to the social-cognitive aspects of language acquisition in addition to the linguistic competence. This view is an emphasis of Bruner's “Language Acquisition Supporting System (LASS)” and recently intensively studied from the comparative-cognitive-developmental perspective. In this article, I summarize the research project of cognitive development in chimpanzees at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University (CDC2000), with special reference to the development of social cognition. During the early infancy, chimpanzee infants showed developmental trajectories similar to human infants. Especially, the chimpanzee infants established close dyadic relationship with their mothers on the basis of mutual gaze and social smiling. However, triadic interactions on the basis of sharing attention, more important social interactions for humans, were not observed in chimpanzees even at their juvenile period. This difference in social interactions between humans and chimpanzees may be the source of more critical difference in the understanding of others. Furthermore, the problem of “enculturation” is also discussed in relation to Vygotsky's concept of “zone of proximal development”.

Auditory hallucinations as primary disorders of syntax: An evolutionary theory of the origins of language

A theory of the evolutionary origins of language is built around: (1) the notion that language is a sapiens-specific capacity that arose in the speciation event that separated modern Homo sapiens from a prior hominid species, and (2) Broca's concept of asymmetry (subsequently recognised as a “torque” from right frontal to left occipital cortices) as the defining characteristic of the human brain. The four chambers of human association cortex thus created allow the separation of “thought” from the speech output and “meaning” from the speech input, these abstractions representing the associations in the nondominant hemisphere of the motor and sensory phonological representations in the dominant hemisphere. The nuclear symptoms of schizophrenia are conceived as manifestations of the breakdown of the boundaries between these four compartments, and as indicating the necessity of the separation of motor and sensory speech engrams as the basis for the speaker-hearer distinction. They further illustrate a requirement for a “deictic core” to the cerebral organisation of language as Mueller and Buehler proposed. In this sense the nuclear symptoms are disorders of the syntax of universal grammar.

How to pursue the adaptationist program in psychology

In recent times evolutionary psychologists have offered adaptation explanations for a wide range of human psychological characteristics. Critics, however, have argued that such endeavors are problematic because the appropriate evidence required to demonstrate adaptation is unlikely to be forthcoming, therefore severely limiting the role of the adaptationist program in psychology. More specifically, doubts have been raised over both the methodology employed by evolutionary psychologists for studying adaptations and about the possibility of ever developing acceptably rigorous evolutionary explanations of human psychological phenomena. We argue that by employing a wide range of methods for inferring adaptation and by adopting an inference to the best explanation strategy for evaluating adaptation explanations, these two doubts can be adequately addressed. We illustrate how this approach can be fruitfully employed in evaluating claims about the evolutionary origins of language, and conclude with a brief discussion of the future of evolutionary psychology.

Morgan's canon, Garner's phonograph, and the evolutionary origins of language and reason

‘Morgan's canon’ is a rule for making inferences from animal behaviour about animal minds, proposed in 1892 by the Bristol geologist and zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan, and celebrated for promoting scepticism about the reasoning powers of animals. Here I offer a new account of the origins and early career of the canon. Built into the canon, I argue, is the doctrine of the Oxford philologist F. Max Müller that animals, lacking language, necessarily lack reason. Restoring the Müllerian origins of the canon in turn illuminates a number of changes in Morgan's position between 1892 and 1894. I explain these changes as responses to the work of the American naturalist R. L. Garner. Where Morgan had a rule for interpreting experiments with animals, Garner had an instrument for doing them: the Edison cylinder phonograph. Using the phonograph, Garner claimed to provide experimental proof that animals indeed spoke and reasoned.