The origins of gestures and language: history, current advances and proposed theories

Abstract

Investigating in depth the mechanisms underlying human and non-human primate intentional communication systems (involving gestures, vocalisations, facial expressions and eye behaviours) can shed light on the evolutionary roots of language. Reports on non-human primates, particularly great apes, suggest that gestural communication would have been a crucial prerequisite for the emergence of language, mainly based on the evidence of large communication repertoires and their associated multifaceted nature of intentionality that are key properties of language. Such research fuels important debates on the origins of gestures and language. We review here three non-mutually exclusive processes that can explain mainly great apes' gestural acquisition and development: phylogenetic ritualisation, ontogenetic ritualisation, and learning via social negotiation. We hypothesise the following scenario for the evolutionary origins of gestures: gestures would have appeared gradually through evolution via signal ritualisation following the principle of derived activities, with the key involvement of emotional expression and processing. The increasing level of complexity of socioecological lifestyles and associated daily manipulative activities might then have enabled the acquisition and development of different interactional strategies throughout the life cycle. Many studies support a multimodal origin of language. However, we stress that the origins of language are not only multimodal, but more broadly multicausal. We propose a multicausal theory of language origins which better explains current findings. It postulates that primates' communicative signalling is a complex trait continually shaped by a cost-benefit trade-off of signal production and processing of interactants in relation to four closely interlinked categories of evolutionary and life cycle factors: species, individual and context-related characteristics as well as behaviour and its characteristics. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research to improve our understanding of the evolutionary roots of gestures and language.

Connecting primate gesture to the evolutionary roots of language: A systematic review

“…Similarly, in human studies there was also a focus on specific groups: as in many fields of study (Henrich et al, 2010), there was a strong bias toward studies of human gesture in WEIRD socioeconomic cultures. Our understanding of the links between primate gesture and human language can be strengthened by more direct testing of the impact of species socio-ecology and individual lifehistory characteristics on gestural expression (e.g., Prieur et al, 2020), although doing so will take substantial large-scale data sets.…”

Sequential and network analyses to describe multiple signal use in captive mangabeys

“…The fact that such signal use was so frequent in the spontaneous communication of mangabeys may reflect their complementary roles in communication, a key argument for the "multimodal theory" of language origins, which advocates that human language emerged from the co-evolution of gestural, vocal and oro-facial communication in the primate lineage under different ecological and social constraints (e.g. Fröhlich et al, 2019;Levinson & Holler, 2014;Masataka, 2008;Meguerditchian & Vauclair, 2014;Prieur et al, 2019). Moreover, it emphasises the importance of adopting a multimodal and multicomponent approach to describe primate communication, as focussing on a unique type of signal might prevent us to grab the actual complexity of intraspecific communication events (Liebal et al 2014;Waller et al 2013).…”

Why study turn‐taking sequences in interspecies interactions?

“…), which is not surprising, as gesture plays an increasing role in the theories of language origins. The ‘vocal theory of language origins’ (according to which calls represents a precursor of human language) has long opposed the ‘gestural theory’, a dichotomy that now tends to be dialectically bridged through by the ‘multimodal theory of language origins’ (see Fröhlich et al., 2019 for a proposition, and Prieur et al., 2020, for a recent overview).…”