The evolution of human language, and the kind of thought the communication of which requires it, raises considerable explanatory challenges. These systems of representation constitute a radical discontinuity in the natural world. Even species closely related to our own appear incapable of either thought or talk with the recursive structure, generalized systematicity, and task-domain neutrality that characterize human talk and the thought it expresses. W. Tecumseh Fitch’s proposal (2004, in press) that human language is descended from a sexually selected, prosodic (...) proto-language that approximated its syntactic complexity, and later acquired semantics thanks to kin selection for its use as a means of pedagogical transmission, has the promise of meeting these explanatory challenges. However, Fitch’s theory raises two problems of its own: (1) according to Boyd and Richerson (1996, Proc. Br. Acad. 88: 77–93), circumstances in which pedagogy is adaptive are inevitably rare in nature, and (2) it is unlikely that our non-discursive precursors had generally systematic, task-domain neutral thoughts to communicate to their offspring. I propose solutions to these problems. Pedagogy would be favored in a population where complex rituals dominated diverse aspects of life. Prosodic proto-language could emerge as the medium of pedagogic transmission. As this medium was used to teach a greater variety of tasks, it would become increasingly general and domain neutral. The presence and importance of such a system of communication in hominid populations could then drive, via Baldwinian mechanisms, the evolution of a kind of ‘thinking for speaking’ (Slobin 1991, Pragmatics 1: 7–25) characterized by recursive structure, generalized systematicity, and task-domain neutrality. (shrink)

The set of design features developed by Charles Hockett in the 1950s and 1960s remains probably the most influential means of juxtaposing animal communication with human language. However, the general theoretical perspective of Hockett is largely incompatible with that of modern language evolution research. Consequently, we argue that his classificatory system—while useful for some descriptive purposes—is of very limited use as a theoretical framework for evolutionary linguistics. We see this incompatibility as related to the ontology of language, i.e. deriving from (...) Hockett’s interest in language as a product rather than a suite of sensorimotor, cognitive and social abilities that enable the use but also acquisition of language by biological creatures. After a reconstruction of Hockett’s views on design features, we raise two criticisms: focus on the means at the expense of content and focus on the code itself rather than the cognitive abilities of its users. Finally, referring to empirical data, we illustrate some of the problems resulting from Hockett’s approach by addressing three specific points—namely arbitrariness and semanticity, cultural transmission, and displacement—and show how the change of perspective allows to overcome those difficulties. (shrink)

In this paper it is championed that a two stages hypothesis for the evolution of language must take into account a qualified approach to heterochrony and the available information from the archaeological record. As it seems, a protracted childhood and youth was already at work in Homo erectus, but early postnatal brain growth was only available to Homo sapiens. According to these facts, the term hysteron proteron is given here to the reversal that sets off linguistic capacity during the first (...) three years of life, upon the ancient abilities for social, natural and technological knowledge, which were already established during the last 2 Mya BP. The unfolding of linguistic capacity creates the typical effect that ontogeny reverses phylogeny: since late postnatal brain growth, quite recent in evolution, launches in ontogeny before the phylogenetically old processes of playing and learning take place during childhood and youth. Full symbolic abilities may be explained as emerging from older semiotic competences based on iconicity and indexicality, which would have presumably sustained human life for millennia. Furthermore, it is argued that the formation of linguistic categories follows from that overlaying of extended connectivity linked to early postnatal brain growth, inasmuch as it entangles and transforms previous iconic and referential information: i.e. the ancient semiotic capacities for proprioception, embodiment, extended mimesis and pragmatic knowledge, shaping a sort of self-organization process that provides the formal and semantic properties we find in articulated languages. (shrink)

In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the emergence of combinatorial structure interacts with the existence of holistic iconic form-meaning mappings in a language is still unknown. The experiment presented in this paper studies the role (...) of iconicity and human cognitive learning biases in the emergence of combinatorial structure in artificial whistled languages. Participants learned and reproduced whistled words for novel objects with the use of a slide whistle. Their reproductions were used as input for the next participant, to create transmission chains and simulate cultural transmission. Two conditions were studied: one in which the persistence of iconic form-meaning mappings was possible and one in which this was experimentally made impossible. In both conditions, cultural transmission caused the whistled languages to become more learnable and more structured, but this process was slightly delayed in the first condition. Our findings help to gain insight into when and how words may lose their iconic origins when they become part of an organized linguistic system. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to consider the significance of different types of memory and non-genetic inheritance and different biosemiotic systems for the origin and evolution of language. It presents language and memory as distributed, heteronomous and system-determined processes implemented in biological and social domains. The article emphasises that language and other sign systems are both ecological and inductive systems that were caused by and always correlate with the environment and deductive systems that are inherited by and depend (...) on the internal development of organisms, individuals, and societies. The article also claims that the origin, re-occurrence and evolution of naturally-emerging sign systems presuppose their retention and accumulation in physical, biological, individual, and social types of memory and reinforcement and maintenance by conventional and deliberate social regulation and accumulation. All of this allows language and other sign systems to be situation-relevant and to be transmitted through generations without their constant reinvention. The novelty of the proposed theory of language origin and evolution is in interdisciplinary integration of biosemiotic studies, systems approaches to language and studies of inheritance systems presented by ‘Extended evolutionary synthesis’. (shrink)

Language and Theory of Mind come together in communication, but their relationship has been intensely contested. I hypothesize that pragmatic markers connect language and Theory of Mind and enable their co-development and co-evolution through a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one skill boosts the development of the other. I propose to test this hypothesis by investigating two types of pragmatic markers: demonstratives and articles. Pragmatic markers are closed-class words that encode non-representational information that is unavailable to consciousness, but (...) accessed automatically in processing. These markers have been associated with implicit Theory of Mind because they are used to establish joint attention and mark shared knowledge. Here I develop a theoretical account of how joint attention is the basis for children’s later tracking of common ground. The developmental path from joint attention to common ground parallels language change, with demonstrative forms giving rise to definite articles. This parallel opens the possibility of modelling the emergence of Theory of Mind in human development in tandem with its routinization across language communities and generations of speakers. I therefore propose that, in order to understand the relationship between language and Theory of Mind, we should study pragmatics at three parallel timescales: during language acquisition, language use, and language change. (shrink)

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses of child-directed speech showing that there is indirect statistical information useful for correct auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives and that such information is sufficient for distinguishing between grammatical and ungrammatical (...) generalizations, even in the absence of direct evidence. We further show that there are simple learning devices, such as neural networks, capable of exploiting such statistical cues, producing a bias toward correct AUX questions when compared to their ungrammatical counterparts. The results suggest that the basic assumptions of the poverty of stimulus argument may need to be reappraised. (shrink)

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate (...) the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds. (shrink)

In our opinion, the discontinuity between extant human and nonhuman minds is much broader and deeper than most researchers admit. We are happy to report that Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) target article strongly corroborates our unpopular hypothesis, and that the comparative evidence, in turn, bolsters E&L's provocative argument. Both a Universal Grammar and the “mental continuity” between human and nonhuman minds turn out to be modern myths.

Modeling of evolution and development of language has principally utilized mature units of spoken language, phonemes and words, as both targets and inputs. This approach cannot address the earliest phases of development because young infants are unable to produce such language features. We argue that units of early vocal development—protophones and their primitive illocutionary/perlocutionary forces—should be targeted in evolutionary modeling because they suggest likely units of hominin vocalization/communication shortly after the split from the chimpanzee/bonobo lineage, and because early development of (...) spontaneous vocal capability is a logically necessary step toward vocal language, a root capability without which other crucial steps toward vocal language capability are impossible. Modeling of language evolution/development must account for dynamic change in early communicative units of form/function across time. We argue for interactive contributions of sender/infants and receiver/caregivers in a feedback loop involving both development and evolution and propose to begin computational modeling at the hominin break from the primate communicative background. (shrink)

From the first months of life, human infants produce “protophones,” speech-like, non-cry sounds, presumed absent, or only minimally present in other apes. But there have been no direct quantitative comparisons to support this presumption. In addition, by 2 months, human infants show sustained face-to-face interaction using protophones, a pattern thought also absent or very limited in other apes, but again, without quantitative comparison. Such comparison should provide evidence relevant to determining foundations of language, since substantially flexible vocalization, the inclination to (...) explore vocalization, and the ability to interact socially by means of vocalization are foundations for language. Here we quantitatively compare data on vocalization rates in three captive bonobo (Pan paniscus) mother–infant pairs with various sources of data from our laboratories on human infant vocalization. Both humans and bonobos produced distress sounds (cries/screams) and laughter. The bonobo infants also produced sounds that were neither screams nor laughs and that showed acoustic similarities to the human protophones. These protophone-like sounds confirm that bonobo infants share with humans the capacity to produce vocalizations that appear foundational for language. Still, there were dramatic differences between the species in both quantity and function of the protophone and protophone-like sounds. The bonobo protophone-like sounds were far less frequent than the human protophones, and the human protophones were far less likely to be interpreted as complaints and more likely as vocal play. Moreover, we found extensive vocal interaction between human infants and mothers, but no vocal interaction in the bonobo mother–infant pairs—while bonobo mothers were physically responsive to their infants, we observed no case of a bonobo mother vocalization directed to her infant. Our cross-species comparison focuses on low- and moderate-arousal circumstances because we reason the roots of language entail vocalization not triggered by excitement, for example, during fighting or intense play. Language appears to be founded in flexible vocalization, used to regulate comfortable social interaction, to share variable affective states at various levels of arousal, and to explore vocalization itself. (shrink)

In this model consciousness is a form of memory. We are essentially “living in the past” as our experience, the qualia, is always of past events. Consciousness represents the storage of past events for use in future situations and it is altered by external experience of the organism. Psychological frameworks of conditioning and learning theory are used to explain this model along with recent neuropsychological research on synaesthesia and phantom limb pain. Consciousness results from the gradual evolutionary development of the (...) human information processing function. Language is hypothesised to have evolved at a pre-conscious stage of human development as a function of the need for ‘within-organism’ data storage. Communication with others may not have been the initial evolutionary advantage conferred by language. The later incidental use of language as a communication tool, which results in the reflecting back of one’s experience through others, is what has triggered a conscious experience. (shrink)

In their recent book, Ladyman and Wiesner (What is a complex system?, Yale University Press, 2020) delineate the bounds of the exciting interdisciplinary field of complexity science. In this work, they provide examples of generally accepted complex systems and common features which these possess to varying degrees. In this paper, I plan to extend their list to include the formal study of natural language, i.e. linguistics. In fact, I will argue that language exhibits many of the hallmarks of a complex (...) system, specifically a complex biological system. Thus, my aim is to advocate contra the the ‘Minimalist Program’ (Chomsky, The minimalist program, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995), which motivates simple underlying mechanisms (i.e. Merge) in their idealisations, that biolinguistics should embrace a ‘Maximalist Program’ in which multiple subfields contribute component explanations to an emerging whole. (shrink)

This essay explores what it means to be human in an age of infomedia. Appropriating Niklas Luhmann's systems theory/media theory in dialogue with other resources, I propose a post-Luhmannian paradigm of (1) extended media/meaning that conceives the world as world multimedia systems processing variegated meanings, and (2) an embodied, contextualized soft posthumanist anthropology that conceives the human as emergent collective phenomena of distinct meaning making by body-mind-society-technology media couplings. I argue: (1) Homo sapiens is Homo medialis distinct with mediatic communication (...) that emerged to cope with contingencies. (2) Evolution is the mediatization/codification of the world that culminated with the outcome of Homo medialis uniquely equipped to process transcendent meanings and to mediatize the world via diverse media—Mediatized Co-Mediatizer or Codified Co-Codifier. (3) This anthropic universe is possibly the most “meaningful” (full of meaning possibilities) of all possible worlds. (4) Social fragmentation could be an optimization; science-and-religion is an infomedium optimizing religion's manifest and science’ latent observation of divine manifestations. (shrink)

The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is ‘linguistic’ in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system (...) and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the embodied cognitive science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining high-level cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic ‘language’ we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself. (shrink)

Perspectives on the difficult topic of the evolution of language can be differentiated to a large extent based on how much relevant continuity or discontinuity they see between humans and nonhuman animals. In general, biologists and psychologists tend to have a broad definition of “language” that highlights significant continuities, whereas linguists tend to define “language” more narrowly, in accord with their emphasis on the uniqueness of human capacities. This article examines the value of Whitehead's innovative theory of language, which is (...) grounded in his account of the fundamental symbolic element in basic perceptual processes, mainly for understanding the continuities between animal and human perceptual and symbolic activity but also for accommodating the discontinuity, or at least the pivotal difference, evident in the full flowering of human language. It will focus particularly on applying Whitehead's approach to gain a new understanding of the emergence, with the rise of amphibians, of the first vocalization in the history of life. (shrink)

The study of human intelligence was once dominated by symbolic approaches, but over the last 30 years an alternative approach has arisen. Symbols and processes that operate on them are often seen today as approximate characterizations of the emergent consequences of sub- or nonsymbolic processes, and a wide range of constructs in cognitive science can be understood as emergents. These include representational constructs (units, structures, rules), architectural constructs (central executive, declarative memory), and developmental processes and outcomes (stages, sensitive periods, neurocognitive (...) modules, developmental disorders). The greatest achievements of human cognition may be largely emergent phenomena. It remains a challenge for the future to learn more about how these greatest achievements arise and to emulate them in artificial systems. (shrink)

Emotion scientists often take an ambivalent stance concerning the role of language in a science of emotion. However, it is important for emotion researchers to contemplate some of the consequences of current practices for their theory building. There is a danger of an overreliance on the English language as a transparent window into emotion categories. More consideration has to be given to cross-linguistic comparison in the future so that models of language acquisition and of the language–cognition interface fit better the (...) extant variation found in today’s peoples. (shrink)

When researchers think about the interaction between language and emotion, they typically focus on descriptive emotion words. This review demonstrates that emotion can interact with language at many levels of structure, from the sound patterns of a language to its lexicon and grammar, and beyond to how it appears in conversation and discourse. Findings are considered from diverse subfields across the language sciences, including cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis. Taken together, it is clear that emotional expression is (...) finely tuned to language-specific structures. Future emotion research can better exploit cross-linguistic variation to unravel possible universal principles operating between language and emotion. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate how the interactions of a robot with its environment can be used to create concepts that are typically represented by verbs in language. Towards this end, we utilize the notion of affordances to argue that verbs typically refer to the generation of a specific type of effect rather than a specific type of action. Then, we show how a robot can form these concepts through interactions with the environment and how humans can use these concepts (...) to ease their communication with the robots. We demonstrate that iCub, a humanoid robot, can use the concepts, which it has developed, to to understand what a human performs, perform multi-step planning for reaching a goal state as well as to specify a goal to the robot using symbolic descriptions. (shrink)

In this article we discuss the notion of a linguistic universal, and possible sources of such invariant properties of natural languages. In the first part, we explore the conceptual issues that arise. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the explanatory potential of horizontal evolution. We particularly focus on two case studies, concerning Zipf's Law and universal properties of color terms, respectively. We show how computer simulations can be employed to study the large scale, emergent, consequences of (...) psychologically and psychologically motivated assumptions about the working of horizontal language transmission. (shrink)

How linguistic structures evolve so as to become easier to process is addressed by Isbilen and Christiansen for the Now‐or‐Never bottleneck. The authors suggest that this fundamental challenge in language processing is coped with by rapid compression of the transient linguistic input into chunks then to be passed on. As linguistic structures that can be chunked more easily tend to stabilize and proliferate, language evolves to fit learners’ cognitive capabilities.

Imitation, deliberation, and mindreading are characteristically human sociocognitive skills. Research on imitation and its role in social cognition is flourishing across various disciplines; it is here surveyed under headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation. A model is then advanced within which many of the developments surveyed can be located and explained. The shared circuits model explains how imitation, deliberation, and mindreading can be enabled by subpersonal mechanisms of control, mirroring and simulation. It is cast at a middle, (...) functional level of description, between the level of neural implementation and the level of conscious perceptions and intentional actions. The shared circuits model connects shared informational dynamics for perception and action with shared informational dynamics for self and other, while also showing how the action/perception, self/other and actual/possible distinctions can be overlaid on these shared informational dynamics. It avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it contributes to the situated cognition movement by showing how mechanisms for perceiving action can be built on those for active perception. (shrink)

This paper will discuss the origin of the human mind, and the qualitative discontinuity between human and animal cognition. We locate the source of this discontinuity within the language faculty, and thus take the origin of the mind to depend on the origin of the language faculty. We will look at one such proposal put forward by Hauser et al. (Science 298:1569-1579, 2002), which takes the evolution of a Merge trait (recursion) to solely explain the differences between human and animal (...) cognition. We argue that the Merge-only hypothesis fails to account for various aspects of the human mind. Instead we propose that the process of lexicalisation is also unique to humans, and that this process is key to explaining the vast qualitative differences. We will argue that lexicalisation is a process through which concepts are reformatted to be able to take on semantic features and to take part in grammatical relations. These are both necessary conditions for a grammatical mind and the increased ability to express conceptual content. We therefore propose a possible explanans for the discontinuity between humans and animals, namely that merge with lexicalisation (and consequently semantic features and grammatical relations) is a minimal requirement for the human mind. (shrink)

Humans spend large portions of their time and energy talking to one another, yet it remains unclear whether this activity is primarily selfish or altruistic. Here, it is shown how parent‐of‐origin specific gene expression—or “genomic imprinting”—may provide an answer to this question. First, it is shown why, regarding language, only altruistic or selfish scenarios are expected. Second, it is pointed out that an individual's maternal‐origin and paternal‐origin genes may have different evolutionary interests regarding investment into language, and that this intragenomic (...) conflict may drive genomic imprinting which—as the direction of imprint depends upon whether investment into language is relatively selfish or altruistic—may be used to discriminate between these two possibilities. Third, predictions concerning the impact of various mutations and epimutations at imprinted loci on language pathologies are derived. In doing so, a framework is developed that highlights avenues for using intragenomic conflicts to investigate the evolutionary drivers of language. (shrink)

Languages are transmitted from person to person and generation to generation via a process of iterated learning: people learn a language from other people who once learned that language themselves. We analyze the consequences of iterated learning for learning algorithms based on the principles of Bayesian inference, assuming that learners compute a posterior distribution over languages by combining a prior (representing their inductive biases) with the evidence provided by linguistic data. We show that when learners sample languages from this posterior (...) distribution, iterated learning converges to a distribution over languages that is determined entirely by the prior. Under these conditions, iterated learning is a form of Gibbs sampling, a widely-used Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The consequences of iterated learning are more complicated when learners choose the language with maximum posterior probability, being affected by both the prior of the learners and the amount of information transmitted between generations. We show that in this case, iterated learning corresponds to another statistical inference algorithm, a variant of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. These results clarify the role of iterated learning in explanations of linguistic universals and provide a formal connection between constraints on language acquisition and the languages that come to be spoken, suggesting that information transmitted via iterated learning will ultimately come to mirror the minds of the learners. (shrink)

The growing field of evo-devo is increasingly demonstrating the complexity of steps involved in genetic, intracellular regulatory, and extracellular environmental control of the development of phenotypes. A key result of such work is an account for the remarkable plasticity of organismal form in many species based on relatively minor changes in regulation of highly conserved genes and genetic processes. Accounting for behavioral plasticity is of similar potential interest but has received far less attention. Of particular interest is plasticity in communication (...) systems, where human language represents an ultimate target for research. The present paper considers plasticity of language capabilities in a comparative framework, focusing attention on examples of a remarkable fact: Whereas there exist design features of mature human language that have never been observed to occur in non-humans in the wild, many of these features can be developed to notable extents when non-humans are enculturated through human training. These examples of enculturated developmental plasticity across extremely diverse taxa suggest, consistent with the evo-devo theme of highly conserved processes in evolution, that human language is founded in part on cognitive capabilities that are indeed ancient and that even modern humans show self-organized emergence of many language capabilities in the context of rich enculturation, built on the special social/ecological history of the hominin line. Human culture can thus be seen as a regulatory system encouraging language development in the context of a cognitive background with many highly conserved features. (shrink)

Evolutionary linguistics is methodologically inspired by evolutionary psychology and the neo-Darwinian, selectionist approach. Language is claimed to have evolved by means of natural selection. The focus therefore lies not on how language evolved, but on finding out why language evolved. This latter question is answered by identifying the functional benefits and adaptive status that language provides, from which in turn selective pressures are deduced. This article analyses five of the most commonly given pressures or reasons why presumably language evolved. I (...) demonstrate that these reasons depend on functional definitions of what language is. To undo this bias, I suggest that scholars move away from the ?why? and ?what for? questions of language evolution, and focus on how language actually evolved. The latter project inquires into the distinct evolutionary mechanisms enabling the evolution of the anatomical and sociocultural traits underlying linguistic behaviour. (shrink)

This paper contrasts two influential theoretical accounts of language change and evolution – Iterated Learning and Social Coordination. The contrast is based on an experiment that compares drawings produced with Garrod et al’s ‘pictionary’ task with those produced in an Iterated Learning version of the same task. The main finding is that Iterated Learning does not lead to the systematic simplification and increased symbolicity of graphical signs produced in the standard interactive version of the task. A second finding is that (...) Iterated Learning leads to less conceptual and structural alignment between participants than observed for those in the interactive condition. The paper concludes with a comparison of the two accounts in relation to how each promotes signs that are effi cient, systematic and learnable. (shrink)

In the field of human-animal studies, also known as anthrozoology, the question of nonhuman animal minds is central. During the first three decades of the 20th century, the social psychological G.H. Mead was among the first to take an explicitly contemporary approach to the question of mind in nature. Mead’s approach to the question of the nature of mind is consistent with contemporary science. His approach was characterized by empiricism, interdisciplinarity, comparative behavior and anatomy, and evolutionary theory. For Mead, symbolic (...) language was required for mind as he defined it. This stipulation has been called into question by scholars today. The evidence for the nature of animal minds today suggests that a symbolic language is not required for conscious awareness, deliberation, and decision making. Nonetheless, Mead has an historical relevance to the field ofhasfor both the breadth of his work on the nature of consciousness, his contemporary approach, and the fact that some of his insights could be useful to contemporary scholars who are exploring the nature of mind, both human and nonhuman. (shrink)

The following analysis demonstrates that G.H. Mead's understanding of human speech is remarkably consistent with today's interdisciplinary field that studies speech as a natural behavior with an evolutionary history. Mead seems to have captured major empirical and theoretical insights more than half a century before the contemporary field began to take shape. In that field the framework known as “Tinbergen's Four Questions,” developed in ecology to study naturally occurring behavior in nonhuman animals, has been an effective organizing framework for research (...) on human speech. It is used in this paper to organize the comparison of Mead with contemporary scholars. The analysis concludes that Mead was, in a sense, “beyond” the Four Questions by recognizing the limitations of reductionist methods in understanding the nature of conscious phenomena, especially language. Mead's socially situated model of the nature of human speech makes him relevant to today's field where some see an undervaluation of the treatment of language as a social process. (shrink)

The social psychologist George Herbert Mead and the cognitive linguist Noam Chomsky both investigated the nature of language and mind during the 20th century. They approached the issues broadly, pursuing both philosophical and scientific lines of reasoning and evidence. This comparative analysis of Mead and Chomsky identifies fourteen questions that summarize their collective effort, and which animated much of the debate concerning language and mind in the 20th century. These questions continue to be relevant to 21st century inquiries. This paper (...) identifies which questions have been resolved and which have not, and discusses each in the context of relevant literature. The net result is a set of questions that inform interdisciplinary-minded inquiries today into the nature of language and mind. (shrink)

For many years the evolution of language has been seen as a disreputable topic, mired in fanciful “just so stories” about language origins. However, in the last decade a new synthesis of modern linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has begun to make important contributions to our understanding of the biology and evolution of language. I review some of this recent progress, focusing on the value of the comparative method, which uses data from animal species to draw inferences about (...) language evolution. Discussing speech first, I show how data concerning a wide variety of species, from monkeys to birds, can increase our understanding of the anatomical and neural mechanisms underlying human spoken language, and how bird and whale song provide insights into the ultimate evolutionary function of language. I discuss the “descended larynx” of humans, a peculiar adaptation for speech that has received much attention in the past, which despite earlier claims is not uniquely human. Then I will turn to the neural mechanisms underlying spoken language, pointing out the difficulties animals apparently experience in perceiving hierarchical structure in sounds, and stressing the importance of vocal imitation in the evolution of a spoken language. Turning to ultimate function, I suggest that communication among kin (especially between parents and offspring) played a crucial but neglected role in driving language evolution. Finally, I briefly discuss phylogeny, discussing hypotheses that offer plausible routes to human language from a non-linguistic chimp-like ancestor. I conclude that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of our most distinctively human trait: language. (shrink)

Historical language change (), like evolution itself, is a fact; and its implications for the biological evolution of the human capacity for language acquisition () have been ably explored by many contemporary theorists. However, Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) revolutionary call for a replacement of phylogenetic models with glossogenetic cultural models is based on an inadequate understanding of either. The solution to their lies before their eyes, but they mistakenly reject it due to a supposed Gene/;culture co-evolution poses a series of (...) difficult theoretical and empirical problems that will be resolved by subtle thinking, adequate models, and careful cross-disciplinary research, not by oversimplified manifestos. (shrink)

I argue that an explicit distinction between cognitive characters and cognitive phenotypes is needed for empirical progress in the cognitive sciences and their integration with evolution-guided sciences. I elaborate what ontological commitment to characters involves and how such a commitment would clarify ongoing debates about the relations between human and nonhuman cognition and the extent of cognitive abilities across biological species. I use theoretical proposals in episodic memory, language, and sociocultural bases of cognition to illustrate how cognitive characters are being (...) introduced in scientific practice. (shrink)