The Origins Of Language Unraveling Evolutionary Forces

Description

Debate on the origins of language has a long—and primarily speculative—history.Perhaps its most signifi cant milestone occurred in 1866, when the Société deLinguistique de Paris banned further papers on the subject, because fossil recordscould provide no evidence concerning linguistic competence. This view haspersisted until recently, with investigators who deal with language empiricallyremaining largely on the sidelines.Contemporary developments in cognitive science, however, indicate thathuman and nonhuman primates share a range of behavioral and physiologicalcharacteristics (e.g., perceptual and computational) that speak to this issue oflanguage origins. Rather than indicating a discontinuity between humans andother animals, studies concerning communicative, neurological, and social aspectsof language behavior suggest that the view of language as determined by biologicallyinnate abilities in conjunction with exposure to language in an environmentis amenable to both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels of analysis. This crossdisciplinarybook has been edited to review and integrate the latest research inthis area. Various chapters examine which aspects of language (and its foundations)were directly inherited from the common ancestor of humans and nonhumanprimates, which aspects have undergone minor change, and which arequalitatively new in Homo sapiens sapiens.