The evolutionary origins of syntax: Event cognition in nonhuman primates

Abstract

Languages tend to encode events from the perspective of agents, placing them first and in simpler forms than patients. This agent bias is mirrored by cognition: Agents are more quickly recognized than patients and generally attract more attention. This leads to the hypothesis that key aspects of language structure are fundamentally rooted in a cognition that decomposes events into agents, actions, and patients, privileging agents. Although this type of event representation is almost certainly universal across languages, it remains unclear whether the underlying cognition is uniquely human or more widespread in animals. Here, we review a range of evidence from primates and other animals, which suggests that agent-based event decomposition is phylogenetically older than humans. We propose a research program to test this hypothesis in great apes and human infants, with the goal to resolve one of the major questions in the evolution of language, the origins of syntax.

An Agent‐First Preference in a Patient‐First Language During Sentence Comprehension

“…The human agent preference can plausibly be attributed to a general and possibly prelinguistic principle of event cognition (Kemmerer, 2012; Wilson et al., 2022). This would mean that it is a fundamental principle of language processing that operates in all languages, independently of their specific affordances, and, as such, shapes language evolution (Bickel et al., 2015).…”

“…Together, these findings suggest that the agent preference is a cross‐linguistically robust principle of sentence comprehension, following from the central role that agents play in general event perception and cognition. This central role is likely rooted in an evolutionarily old bias to detect and attend to agentive features, as it is found in great apes and many other species (e.g., in great apes' ability to assign agency to infer the goal of grasping actions, Kano & Call, 2014, see Wilson, Zuberbühler, & Bickel, 2022; Zuberbühler & Bickel, 2022 for reviews). Agents can be rapidly extracted from event depictions (Dobel, Gumnior, Bölte, & Zwitserlood, 2007; Gerwien & Flecken, 2016; Sauppe & Flecken, 2021), already in early infancy (Galazka & Nyström, 2016; Johnson, 2003).…”

Reading minds or reading scripts? De‐intellectualising theory of mind

“…In human infants, script acquisition and use are based on the early emergence of some mutually complementary perceptual and cognitive abilities for ( i ) recognising objects, agents, actions, ( ii ) recognising goals, ( iii ) segmentation and hierarchisation of event sequences, and ( iv ) generalisation and transfer (Burge, 2018; Wilson, Zuberbühler & Bickel, 2022). In subsequent development, objects turn into props, agents acquire roles, object–agent–action interrelations are constructed to realise agents' goals, and event sequences are segmented into meaningful units (scenes) based on the goal hierarchy of the script.…”

Revisiting the relation between syntax, action, and left BA44

“…A cognitive account in terms of the sequential-hierarchical structure of the prototypical transitive action scenario Why are most languages either SOV or SVO? Different explanations have been offered, but they all draw upon the notion of "subject salience" (Greenberg, 1963;Tomlin, 1986;Comrie, 1989;Song, 1991; see also Bornkessel et al, 2006;Wilson et al, 2022). One way in which this notion can be elaborated is as follows.…”