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

2. Organisms Evolve Rhythmic Protolanguage Communication

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. What Animals can Teach us About Human Language: The Phonological Continuity Hypothesis. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 21/68, 2018. In another special issue on The Evolution of Language, the University of Vienna cognitive biologist continues his project to trace an evolutionary lineage from biosignals rudimentary to loquacious human capacities. As the Abstract notes, a thread may be a working system of relations between speech sounds, aka phonology, which ramify and embellish as animals advance in neural circuitry and behavioral repertoire. See also his chapter The Biology and Evolution of Speech in the Annual Review of Linguistics (4/255, 2018).

Progress in linking between the disparate levels of cognitive description and neural implementation requires explicit, testable, computationally based hypotheses. One such hypothesis is the dendrophilia hypothesis, which suggests that human syntactic abilities rely on our supra-regular computational abilities, implemented via an auxiliary memory store (a ‘stack’) centred on Broca's region via its connections with other cortical areas. Because linguistic phonology requires less powerful computational abilities than this, at the finite-state level, I suggest that there may be continuity between animal rule learning and human phonology, and that the circuits underlying this provided the precursors of our unusual syntactic abilities. (Abstract)

Fitch, W. Tecumseh and Erich Jarvis. Birdsong and Other Animal Models for Human Speech, Song, and Vocal Learning. Arbib, Michael, ed. Language, Music, and the Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. In a Strungmann Forum volume, an extensive chapter by University of Vienna and Duke University Medical Center neurobiologists and linguists which merits notice for several reasons. First to register findings of innate evolutionary affinities between parakeets and people – nature surely uses the same pattern over and ever. A recent citation of this as “deep homology” (search Shubin) is thus seen to be confirmed. As a consequence, a persistent “convergence” must be an inherent quality of life’s development, which then implies an “independent” agency at work. Such a correspondence can be traced not only to an original ancestor, but also should be seen to imply a common genetic source. And at once might one wonder who are we persons that arise from and are able to reconstruct all this scenario, as if a singular cosmic genesis trying to sing, speak, remember, and learn whom she and he might become?

This chapter highlights the similarities and differences between learned song, in birds and other animal models, and speech and song in humans, by reviewing the comparative biology of birdsong and human speech from behavioral, biological, phylogenetic, and mechanistic perspectives. Our thesis is that song-learning birds and humans have evolved similar although not identical, vocal communication behaviors due to shared deep homologies in nonvocal brain pathways and associated genes from which the vocal pathways are derived. The convergent behaviors include complex vocal learning, critical periods of vocal learning, dependence on auditory feedback to develop and maintain learned vocalizations, and rudimentary features for vocal syntax and phonology. The lesson learned from this analysis is that by studying the comparative behavioral neurobiology of human and nonhuman vocal-learning species, greater insight can be gained into the evolution and mechanisms of spoken language than by studying humans alone or humans only in relation to nonhuman primates. (Abstract excerpts)

This repeated, independent evolution of a functionally similar trait – complex vocal learning – means that convergent evolution could be a powerful route for understanding constraints on evolved systems and for testing hypotheses about evolution. (503) In this sense, deep homology is similar to the independent evolution of wings from the upper limbs. That is, the brain pathways for vocal learning among distantly related species are apparently not homologous in that they were not inherited from a common ancestor, but the motor pathway circuit from which they may have independently emerged may be a homolog, inherited from their common ancestor. (504) Finally, and surprisingly, it appears that some aspects of birdsong depend on similar genetic and developmental mechanism, providing an example of deep genetic homology. (505)

Frohlich, Marlen, et al. Multimodal Communication and Language Origins: Integrating Gestures and Vocalizations. Biological Reviews. Online June, 2019. As the Abstract notes, University of Zurich, Basel, and Geneva behavioral anthropologists including Carel van Schaik gather altogether many modes of signed contact between creatures from somatic to semiotic conveyance. Overall one gets a sense of life’s regnant evolution ever try to gain its expressive voice and vision.

The presence of independent research traditions in the gestural and vocal domains of primate communication has led to discrepancies in how cognitive concepts came to be. Recent evidence from behavioural and neurobiological research now implies that both human and primate communication is inherently multimodal. We review evidence that there is no clear difference between primate gestures and vocalizations for language intentionality, reference, iconicity and turn‐taking. We note that in great apes, gestures seem to fulfill an informative role in close communication, whereas the opposite holds for human interactions. This suggests an evolutionary transition in the carrying role from the gestural to the vocal stream. (Abstract edits)

Genter, Timothy, et al. Recursive Syntactic Pattern Learning by Songbirds. Nature. 440/1204, 2006. The ability to embed phrases and sentences within themselves, defined as recursive, iterative grammar, has heretofore been attributed as a uniquely human feature. For the first time this University of Chicago study reports that European starlings can equally achieve “self-embedding, context-free grammar.” Could we so imagine the whole evolutionary kingdom might be trying to learn to sing and speak?

Gil, David and Yeshayahu Shen. Metaphors: The Evolutionary Journey from Bidirectionality to Unidirectionality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Volume 1824, 2021. In this issue about our past linguistic lineages (how peoples came to sing, speak, write, and read), as the Abstract cites, MPI Science of Human History and Tel Aviv University scholars parse and identify this communicative transition as a salient trend and advantageous advance.

Metaphors, a ubiquitous feature of human language, reflect mappings from one conceptual domain onto another. Although founded on bidirectional relations of similarity, their linguistic expression is typically unidirectional, governed by conceptual hierarchies pertaining to abstractness, animacy and prototypicality. The unidirectional nature of metaphors is a product of various asymmetries characteristic of grammatical structure, in particular, those related to thematic role assignment. This paper argues that contemporary metaphor unidirectionality is the outcome of an evolutionary journey whose origin lies in an earlier bidirectionality. Invoking the Complexity Covariance Hypothesis governing the correlation of linguistic and socio-political complexity, the Evolutionary Inference Principle suggests that simpler linguistic structures are evolutionarily prior to more complex ones, and accordingly that bidirectional metaphors evolved at an earlier stage than unidirectional ones. (Abstract excerpt)

Goldin-Meadow, Susan and Charles Yang. Statistical Evidence that a Child can Create a Combinatorial Linguistic System without External Linguistic Input. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 81/B, 2017. University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania psychologists study youngsters with impaired hearing to investigate if languages occur by happenstance, or arise from a universal source. Indeed, the presence of an innate “productive grammar” is once more confirmed. In so doing, a tacit recapitulation between childhood and hominid to human cultures is suggested.

Can a child who is not exposed to a model for language nevertheless construct a communication system characterized by combinatorial structure? We know that deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from acquiring spoken language, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language, use gestures, called homesigns, to communicate. In this study, we call upon a new formal analysis that characterizes the statistical profile of grammatical rules and, when applied to child language data, finds that young children’s language is consistent with a productive grammar rather than rote memorization of specific word combinations in caregiver speech. Our findings thus provide evidence that a child can create a combinatorial linguistic system without external linguistic input. (Abstract excerpt)

Gontier, Nathalie. Defining Communication and Language from a Pluralistic Evolutionary Worldview. Topoi. 41/3, 2022. In this special issue (Gontier) the University of Lisbon polyscholar (herein and website) continues to provide a conceptual basis and innovative lead for these broad fields of study. At present, a global humankind sapience reflects back to wonder and retrace the steps and paths to informative speech, many dialects, cumulative content, and growing repositories on the way to our hopeful worldwide edification.

New definitions are proposed for communication and language as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange. Language then becomes a social discourse whereby such conversations comprise individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs. These results are enacted, narrated, and conveyed by rule-based symbol systems grounded, and interpreted within embodied, cognitive, ecological, and sociocultural niches. In contrast to older versions, the sense proposed here makes up a pluralistic evolutionary worldview that allows a multitude of units, levels, mechanisms and processes which further bring forth communication and language. (Abstract)

Gontier, Nathalie. What are the Levels and Mechanisms/Processes of Language Evolution? Languages Sciences. 63/12, 2017. The University of Lisbon philosopher of science continues her mission (search) to formulate a theoretical basis for a universal Darwinism by way of an Applied Evolutionary Epistemology. With notice of the Extended Synthesis project, in this entry this later phase of linguistic communication is considered. What might the salient genetic, cognitive, behavioral units be, and how they could be arrayed into nested hierarchical scales? See also her What are the Units of Language Evolution? in Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy (August 2017).

Modern evolutionary biology is currently characterized by epistemological divergence because, beyond organisms and genes, scholars nowadays investigate a plurality of units of evolution, they recognize multilevel selection, and especially from within the Extended Synthesis, scholars have identified a plurality of evolutionary mechanisms that besides natural selection can explain how the evolution of anatomical form and functional behavior occur. Evolutionary linguists have also implicated a multitude of units, levels and mechanisms involved in (aspects of) language evolution, which has also brought forth epistemological divergence on how language possibly evolved. Here, we examine how a general evolutionary methodology can become abstracted from how biologists study evolution, and how this methodology can become implemented into the field of Evolutionary Linguistics. Applied Evolutionary Epistemology (AEE) involves a systematic search and analysis of the units (that what evolves), levels (loci where evolution takes place), and mechanisms (means whereby evolution occurs) of language evolution, allocating them into ontological hierarchies, and distinguishing them from other kinds of evolution. (Abstract)

Gontier, Nathalie, et al. Introduction to Evolving (Proto)Language/s. Lingua. 305/103740, 2024. In this premier journal, University of Lisbon, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland, Dalarne University, Sweden and Rutgers University, USA system linguists describe wider and deeper sources now being found of informative creaturely conveyance, broadly conceived, based on interdisciplinary studies. A typical entry is Emergence and evolution of language in multi-agent systems by Dorota Lipowska and Adam Lipowski.

Long considered uniquely human, today scholars argue for evolutionary continuity between human language and animal communication systems. While it is recognized that language is an evolving communication system, it is not well known from which species language evolved, and what behavioral and cognitive features are precursors. This special issue on Evolving (Proto)Language/s bundles several current protolanguage theories to provide overviews from (paleo)anthropology, genetics, physiology, developmental, evolutionary, ecological, and pragmatic research lines. (Excerpt)

Griesser, Michael, et al. From Bird Calls to Human Language: Exploring the Evolutionary Drivers of Compositional Syntax. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 21/6, 2018. In this language issue, Jagiellonian University, Uppsala University, and Kyoto University animal ecologists add further proof of recurrent similarities across widely separate species. Bird and human brains are seen to quite converge in both function and communication.

Gyori, Gabor, ed. Language Evolution: Biological, Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001. A selection of papers from meetings of the Language Origins Society which cover three areas of language evolution: its resultant structure, function and communication, and the views of philosophers on these subjects. A typical paper is “Symbolic Cognition” by Gyori which discusses the phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cognitive development of knowledge.

Hagoort, Peter, ed. Human Language: From Genes and Brains to Behavior. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019. The MPI Psycholinguistics director and mentor gathers 49 authoritative chapters into eight sections: Cognitive Architectures, The Development of Language, Communication Before and With Language, Modeling Language, Functional Meurobiology of Language, Neuroanatomy of Language,The Genetics of Language, and Animal Models of Language. We note for example The Genetic Bases of Brain Lateralization by Clyde Francks, Mental Representations for Language by Ray Jackendorf, and The Comparative Approach to the Biology and Evolution of Language by Tecumseh Fitch. A consummate volume about the past and present appearance of creaturely and human articulation as a genesis ecosmos tries to gain its communicative voice and informed, perceptive vision.

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