VI. Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

2. Organisms Evolve Rhythmic Protolanguage Communication

Bichakjian, Bernard. Language Evolution: How Language was Built and Made to Evolve. Languages Sciences. Online March, 2017. The Radboud University linguist enters a timely expansion of this field of study, akin to other areas, which extends across life’s developmental course to its earliest rudiments. As brain asymmetry and clever behavior is evident from the outset, audible communications can also be traced to deep origins. A further case is made for markings and writings, broadly conceived, much earlier than thought. Once again an initial right hemisphere image phase is seen to precede alphabetic notation in the left brain.

Today's mainstream research in language evolution leaves from the assumption that language is an exclusively human feature, a steady-state entity like our biological organs, and endeavors to discover the phylogenetic event that endowed us with this mental “organ” or the clinching moment language became possible. The fossil evidence from the development of central and peripheral speech organs provides, however, no support for the alleged existence of a fateful event that would have dubbed a speechless ancestor into a speech-vested mutant; instead, it outlines a gradual development of speech organs from the hints detected on the endocranial casts of the most archaic member of the genus Homo to the full-blown apparatus of modern humans. Far from being a steady-state accessory, language has evolved to become an ever more efficient instrument of thought and communication. This paper will argue that it started with implements improvised on the basis of a sensory mapping of the outside world and gradually developed into a set of mentally created alternatives properly crafted for linguistic operations. (Abstract excerpts)

The foregoing was not an attempt to reconstruct the ultimate prototypical vernacular and describe how its features derived to become those of today’s languages. Such a prototypical language never existed, nor was there a discrete biological event, such as the descent of the larynx, or a mental development, such as the computational mechanism of recursion, that made us fit for language. Much like the evolution of biological species, which stretches from a unicellular prototype to humans, the evolution of language is a continuum that extends from the first conventionalized grunt to the most proficient linguistic systems. (10)

Bolhuis, Johan, et al. Birdsong, Speech, and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. With co-editor Martin Everaert, and Forewords by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky a significant study of the many forms, stages, and articulations of creaturely and human conversations. Typical sections are Phonology and Syntax and Neurobiology of Song and Speech and for chapters The Design Principles of Natural Language, Convergence and Deep Homology in the Evolution of Spoken Language, Behavioral Similarities between Birdsong and Spoken Language, and Building Bridges between Genes, Brains, and Language. Notable authors are Irene Pepperberg, Tecumseh Fitch, Simon Fisher, Moira Yip, and Gary Marcus.

Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. They examine the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong learning and speech and language acquisition, considering vocal imitation, auditory learning, an early vocalization phase ("babbling"), the structural properties of birdsong and human language, and the striking similarities between the neural organization of learning and vocal production in birdsong and human speech. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language. (Publisher)

Brown, Steven. A Joint Prosodic Origin of Language and Music. Frontiers in Psychology. October 30, 2017. A McMaster University, Canada psychologist and director of the NeuroArts Lab advances the view that creaturely and primate communications have a common gestural musilanguage origin. Akin to Ma, Weiyi, et al herein, this initial phase evolved into dual, complementary rhythmic and linguistic modes, broadly conceived. So once more every instance natural and social phenomena can be seen to take on dual connective flow and discrete detail archetypes. See Brown’s publication list on the NeuroArts site for other articles such as The Narration/Coordination Model (2019).

Vocal theories of the origin of language rarely make a case for the precursor functions that underlay the evolution of speech. The vocal expression of emotion is unquestionably the best candidate for such a precursor, although most evolutionary models of both language and speech ignore emotion and prosody altogether. I present here a model for a joint prosodic precursor of language and music in which ritualized group-level vocalizations served as the ancestral state. This precursor combined not only affective and intonational aspects of prosody, but also holistic and combinatorial mechanisms of phrase generation. From this common stage, there was a bifurcation to form language and music as separate, though homologous, specializations. (Abstract)

Chemla, Emmanuel, et al. Constraints on the Lexicons of Human Languages have Cognitive Roots Present in Baboons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116/14926, 2019. Four French linguists proceed to identify a relative “connectedness” between words or signs as the methodic quality by which a meaningful message can be perceived. By virtue of these broadly conceived associations, non-human simians can similarly be seen to form a relative lexical array. See also Assessing the Uniqueness of Language: Animal Grammatical Abilities by Carel ten Cate in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (24/91, 2017). In all, by our late vantage life’s long emergent evolution seems intent on gaining a linguistic, expressive capacity.

Universals in language are hard to come by, yet one candidate is that words across the lexicons of the world’s languages are, by and large, connected: When a word applies to two objects, it also applies to any objects “between” those two. A natural hypothesis is that the source of this regularity is a learning bias for connected patterns, a hypothesis supported by recent experimental studies. Is this learning bias typically human? Is it language related? We ask whether other animals show the same bias. We present an experiment that reveals that learning biases for connectedness are present in baboons, suggesting that the shape of the world’s languages (both content and logical words) has roots in general, nonlinguistic, cognitive biases. (Significance)

Chen, Zhuo and John Wiens. The Origins of Acoustic Communication in Vertebrates. Nature Communications. 11/369, 2020. Henan Normal University, China and University of Arizona behavioral ecologists parse ways that animals of every phylum chatter in one form or another to convey semiotic signals. In my New England migrating geese keep honking to each other. Dolphins constantly whistle to maintain pods. In some broader way it may seem that an animate nature is trying to say something to itself, which now involves our planetary selves.

Acoustic communication is crucial to humans and other tetrapods including birds, frogs, crocodilians, and mammals. However, large-scale patterns in its evolution are largely unstudied. Here, we study the origins of acoustic communication in terrestrial vertebrates using phylogenetic methods and show they are much associated with nocturnal activity and is strongly conserved over time. Finally, we find that acoustic communication evolved independently in most major tetrapod groups, often with ancient origins (~100–200 million years ago). (Abstract excerpt)

Cuffari, Elena, et al. From Participatory Sense-Making to Language. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Online November, 2014. We note this paper by Worcester State University and University of the Basque Country philosophers based on the enactive view of Humbereto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and others for its perception of human agency as most of all a “languaging” project. In such a view, one might add, phenomenal peoples could be seen as the universe’s way of describing, translating and expressing itself into conscious recognition, and co-creation.

Dornbierer-Stuart, Joanna. The Origins of Language: An Introduction to Evolutionary Linguistics. Switzerland: Springer, 2024. A Birmingham City University, UK linguist provides an initial book-length study whose ten chapters proceed to gather and review many factors from ecologies to anatomical, social, gestural utterances and onto meaningful speech which trace and define our distinctive human articulations.

This book offers an introduction to the multidisciplinary subject of evolutionary linguistics which seeks to explain the biological origins of language and its subsequent occasion in humans. Some six million years ago, hominids in East Africa started to thrive in the drier environment of the East African Rift System. Influenced by a more complex social organisation, communication signals became diverse and dependent on memory and learning mechanisms makes language a biological, social, cultural and cognitive phenomenon all at once. The book uniquely introduces and covers this novel. insightful perspective. (Book)

This chapter looks at the various environmental conditions that led to language. It is concerned with geological timescales and changes in the physical environment that led to anatomical, physiological and neural adaptations in Homo. These, in turn, initiated an immense increase in cognitive capacities that favoured the development of language. The chapter starts with tectonics and climate and goes on to their effects on the body, vocal tract and brains of early humans. (How the Physical Environment Shaped Language)

Engesser, Sabrina, et al. Seeds of language-like generativity in bird call combinations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. October, 2024. Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution, University of Zurich including Simon Townsend are now able to empirically plumb avian twitterings so to indeed discern the presence of language-like constructions. So once more into these 2020s, a deep continuity is being traced for all manner of intelligent, communicative behaviors to minimal origins.

Language is unbounded in its generativity, enabling the flexible combination of words into novel sentences. These constructions are intelligible due to our ability to derive a sentence’s compositional meaning from semantic relationships. Using long-term data and playback experiments on pied babblers, we find that they can also process modified and novel call combinations and a capacity for deriving meaning compositionally. Our results show that animal combinatorial systems can be have a perceptual flexibility which represents a precursor of human language-like generativity. (Excerpt)

Everaert, Martin and Johan Bolhuis. The Biology of Language. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 81/B, 2017. Utrecht University linguists introduce a special issue with 17 papers as this linguistic evolutionary retrospective becomes increasingly amenable to study. Some paper titles are The Growth of Language, A Biolinguistic Perspective, Prosody in Birdsong, Rhythm in Language Acquisition, and Brains for Birds and Babies. Among the authors are Noam Chomsky, Charles Yang, Stephen Crain, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Robert Berwick, Angelica Friederici, and Marina Nespor.

Human infants develop language remarkably rapidly and without overt instruction. We argue that the distinctive ontogenesis of child language arises from the interplay of three factors: domain-specific principles of language (Universal Grammar), external experience, and properties of non-linguistic domains of cognition including general learning mechanisms and principles of efficient computation. (Yang, et al, Growth of Language)

Ferretti, Francesco, et al. Origin and Evolution of Language: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Topoi. 37/291, 2018. Roma Tre University, Italy and Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany linguist philosophers introduce a special issue on this title subject. Along with a review of the papers such as What are the Units of Language Evolution by Nathalie Gontier and An Updated Evolutionary Research Programme by Francisco Suman, it scopes out a preferred embodied, action-oriented premise.

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. Preface to the Special Issue on the Biology and Evolution of Language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 24/1, 2017. As our worldwide retrospect learns how linguistic capacities arose over life’s long, episodic creaturely and cerebral advance, the University of Vienna cognitive biologist introduces 19 papers that span many conceptual and empirical approaches. We note, for example, Lessons from the Genome by Simon Fisher, Evolution of the Neural language Network by Angela Friederici, How can we Detect When Language Emerged by Ian Tattersall, and Darwinian Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Languages by Mark Pagel.

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. The Biology and Evolution of Language: “Deep Homology” and the Evolution of Innovation. Gazzaniga, Michael, ed. The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. The University of Vienna theoretical linguist draws upon these new insights (search Shubin) into developing life’s tendency to repeat basic forms and motifs at every scale and for each creature to claim that our human grammatical speech and discursive content must be similarly endowed and understandable by this deep context.

The last decade has seen rapid and impressive progress in understanding the biology and evolution of complex “innovative” traits (e.g., insect wings or vertebrate eyes, and the fruits of this understanding are beginning to have an impact on our understanding of that most innovative of human trait: language. Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) has added a new twist to this distinction, with the discovery that traits shared due to convergent evolution (such as vocal learning in humans and birds) may nonetheless be based on homologous genes and developmental pathways. Such “deep homologies” may involve convergence at the phenotypic level and homology at the genotypic level, and illustrate the need to rethink traditional ideas about homology. Here I suggest that language is also likely to have its share of deep homologies, and that the possibility provides a powerful rationale for investigations of convergently evolved traits in widely separated species. (Abstract)

The discovery of deep homology provides an exciting new range of empirical possibilities for scientists interested in the evolution of complex innovations, including human language. The very concept of deep homology would have been considered fanciful 20 years ago, and its reality has profound consequences for both the concept of homology and our understanding of the evolution of complex innovations. (874) In this new era, the identification of deep homologies may play a central role. This is excellent news for comparative biologists, because it suggests that a far broader range of vertebrates, and even nonchordates, may offer valuable windows into the genetic basis of that most human of traits: language. (881)

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