Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: why we cannot focus solely on communication

Fitch, W. Tecumseh

doi:10.1098/rstb.2019.0046

Cited by 63 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 95 publications

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“…In roughly the past 2 million years, most of the basic steps of human language acquisition and the formation of their neuronal bases have occurred ( Fitch 2017 , 2020 ). Here, we examine potential correspondence of the evolution of language functions to that of specific features of human brain connectivity.…”

Section: Introduction: the Hominization Of The Brainmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain

2020

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Cognitive abilities of the human brain, including language, have expanded dramatically in the course of our recent evolution from nonhuman primates, despite only minor apparent changes at the gene level. The hypothesis we propose for this paradox relies upon fundamental features of human brain connectivity, which contribute to a characteristic anatomical, functional, and computational neural phenotype, offering a parsimonious framework for connectomic changes taking place upon the human-specific evolution of the genome. Many human connectomic features might be accounted for by substantially increased brain size within the global neural architecture of the primate brain, resulting in a larger number of neurons and areas and the sparsification, increased modularity, and laminar differentiation of cortical connections. The combination of these features with the developmental expansion of upper cortical layers, prolonged postnatal brain development, and multiplied nongenetic interactions with the physical, social, and cultural environment gives rise to categorically human-specific cognitive abilities including the recursivity of language. Thus, a small set of genetic regulatory events affecting quantitative gene expression may plausibly account for the origins of human brain connectivity and cognition.

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Section: Introduction: the Hominization Of The Brainmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain

2020

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“…Contrary to our initial prediction, a possibility that move-grunts are not completely decoupled from the specific affective state could also explain the difficulty in its production in a novel context. In other words, we cannot discount the possibility that monkeys might have understood the task by watching the demonstration video; however, they were not equipped to perform it [67].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Socially learned arbitrary call use in a wild primate

Deshpande

Zuberbühler

2022

Preprint

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Human speech is an unusually flexible form of primate communication. A limited repertoire of phonemes is assembled into morphemes whose combinations are linked to referents by social learning in culturally specific ways. Non-human primate vocal utterances, in contrast, are drastically less flexible at every level, i.e., acoustic diversity, combinatoriality and referential function. Here, we were interested in whether primate vocal behaviour, despite its inflexible nature, is still amenable to social learning, a well-documented, powerful mechanism in many other aspects of primate behaviour. We provided wild vervet monkeys with social learning opportunities to operate a food dispensing apparatus by uttering specific vocalisations, 'move-grunts', that were contextually inappropriate. In two separate experiments, subjects witnessed how another group member produced move-grunts whilst operating a food dispenser. In experiment 1, subjects only heard playbacks of the calls, followed by food release; in experiment 2, they witnessed a complete demonstration video of conspecific including the calls, followed by food release. None of the subjects learned the task in experiment 1, but 1 of 39 subjects, a juvenile female, succeeded in experiment 2 by producing move-grunts at the food dispenser to obtain food rewards. We discuss our results and behavioural observations in relation to the current theory and its eventual implications for reconstructing the evolutionary pathway to human speech.

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“…As discussed in Section 4 for great ape gestures, there are indeed animal communication systems that exhibit polysemy. In addition, research in language acquisition demonstrates that polysemous words with multiple related meanings are indeed easy for children to acquire, and are in fact easier to acquire than homonyms with unrelated meanings (Floyd & Goldberg 2020).…”

Section: Ariel 2015 P 605 and Passim)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Construction grammar for monkeys?

Pleyer

Hartmann

2020

ELT

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In recent years, multiple researchers working on the evolution of language have put forward the idea that the theoretical framework of usage-based approaches and Construction Grammar is highly suitable for modelling the emergence of human language from pre-linguistic or proto-linguistic communication systems. This also raises the question of whether usage-based and constructionist approaches can be integrated with the analysis of animal communication systems. In this paper, we review possible avenues where usage-based, constructionist approaches can make contact with animal communication research, which in turn also has implications for theories of language evolution. To this end, we first give an overview of key assumptions of usage-based and constructionist approaches before reviewing some key issues in animal communication research through the lens of usage-based, constructionist approaches. Specifically, we will discuss how research on alarm calls, gestural communication and symbol-trained animals can be brought into contact with usage-based, constructionist theorizing. We argue that a constructionist view of animal communication can yield new perspectives on its relation to human language, which in turn has important implications regarding the evolution of language. Importantly, this theoretical approach also generates hypotheses that have the potential of complementing and extending results from the more formalist approaches that often underlie current animal communication research.

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Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: why we cannot focus solely on communication

Cited by 63 publications

References 95 publications

A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain

A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain

Socially learned arbitrary call use in a wild primate

Construction grammar for monkeys?

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