Schedule 75. StuTS

Language, whether signed or spoken, leaves no trace once it have been produced, making a direct investigation of the origins of human language impossible. Scientists therefore have to draw on indirect methods in order to gather evidence on how
language may have evolved. In this talk I provide an overview of the main kinds of evidence available to language evolution research, including evidence from hominid fossils, comparative studies with non-human primates, lab experiments, modern child
language acquisition research, and study of pidgins and home signs. I then discuss two main theories of language evolution, the gesture-first and vocal-first theories. The gesture-first theory dates back to at least the 18th century (Rousseau, 1781). Support for this theory comes from i.a. evidence from laboratory experiments in which participants perform various communication tasks using gestures or vocalisations (e.g. Fay
et al. (2014)) and research on non-human primates (primates have been able to learn new gestures but not new vocalisations from humans (Tomasello, 2008)). However the gesture-first theory faces the challenge of explaining why language developed in the vocal modality (and indeed why the vocal modality is the most common linguistic
modality today), rather than remaining in the signed modality only. Advocates of a vocal origin of language also cite evidence for continuity between modern human spoken language and primate vocalisations (Seyfarth, 2005) and the (overlooked) capacity of the vocal modality for iconicity (see Perlman (2017) for an overview). I conclude
by considering more conciliatory approaches to language origin, which emphasise a multimodal view of language and language origins (e.g. Masataka (2020), Fröhlich et al. (2019)).

Info

Day: 2024-05-10
Start time: 16:40
Duration: 00:30
Room: Squid (33.0.008)
Track: Neuro- and Psycholinguistics
Language: en

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