Articlegreen2008

A biological infrastructure for communication underlies the cultural evolution of languages

11 citations0/0 files storedBehavioral and Brain Sciences

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Language and cultural evolution Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation Language Development and Disorders

Abstract

Abstract Universal Grammar (UG) is indeed evolutionarily implausible. But if languages are just “adapted” to a large primate brain, it is hard to see why other primates do not have complex languages. The answer is that humans have evolved a specialized and uniquely human cognitive architecture, whose main function is to compute mappings between arbitrary signals and communicative intentions. This underlies the development of language in the human species.

Citations in this library

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References

1983Pragmatics 2000Presumptive Meanings 1997Primate cognition 1977Thinking; Readings in Cognitive Science 2001Children Creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar 2001Language, Cognition, and the Brain: Insights From Sign Language Research 2005An Experimental Study of the Emergence of Human Communication Systems 1988Speech Physiology, Speech Perception, and Acoustic Phonetics

Cited by

2012Socio-cultural selection and the sculpting of the human genome: Cultures’ directional forces on evolution and development

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