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

2. Organisms Evolve Rhythmic Protolanguage Communication

Langus, Alan, et al. Rhythm in Language Acquisition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 81/B, 2017. Akin to a prosody flow between objects and words being newly integrated into bicameral brain function, here SISSA International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste linguists AL, Jacques Mehler, and Marina Nespor (see each website) show how “universal rhythmic principles” serve to initially guide infants and young language learners across a wide array of ethnic dialects. In so doing, it is alluded that an independent source seems in effect during this “ontogenetic emergence.”

Spoken language is governed by rhythm. Linguistic rhythm is hierarchical and the rhythmic hierarchy partially mimics the prosodic as well as the morpho-syntactic hierarchy of spoken language. We identify three universal levels of linguistic rhythm – the segmental level, the level of the metrical feet and the phonological phrase level – and discuss why primary lexical stress is not rhythmic. We survey experimental evidence on rhythm perception in young infants and native speakers of various languages to determine the properties of linguistic rhythm that are present at birth, those that mature during the first year of life and those that are shaped by the linguistic environment of language learners. We conclude with a discussion of the major gaps in current knowledge on linguistic rhythm and highlight areas of interest for future research that are most likely to yield significant insights into the nature, the perception, and the usefulness of linguistic rhythm. (Abstract)

Lyon, Caroline, et al, eds. Emergence of Communication and Language. London: Springer, 2007. Co-editors are Chrystopher Nehaniv and Angelo Cangelosi. A large state of the art volume as authorities such as Alison Wray, Tecumseh Fitch, Luc Steels, Eors Szathmary, and many others seek to articulate how cerebral life learned to speak, convey, express, and remember.

Ma, Weiyi, et al. Spontaneous Emergence of Language-like and Music-like Vocalizations from an Artificial Protolanguage. Semiotica. Online April, 2019. Behavioral linguists WM, University of Arkansas, Anna Fiveash, University of Lyon, France, and William Forde Thompson, Macquarie University, Sydney experimentally show how cognitive streams innately tend to divide into dual language-like and prosodic musical modes. By a different approach and measure, once again neural nature seems to ever seek these distinctive, reciprocal script and/or score phases, which altogether compose life’s dramatic dance.

How did human vocalizations come to acquire meaning in the evolution of our species? Charles Darwin proposed that language and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in nature. This protolanguage is thought to have diverged into two separate systems, with speech prioritizing referential functionality and music prioritizing emotional functionality. However, there has never been an attempt to empirically evaluate the hypothesis that a single communication system can split into two functionally distinct systems that are characterized by music- and language like properties. Here, we demonstrate that when referential and emotional functions are introduced into an artificial communication system, that system will diverge into vocalization forms with speech- and music-like properties, respectively. (Abstract)

Massip-Bonet, Angels, et al, eds. Complexity Applications in Language and Communication Sciences. International: Springer,, 2019. Systems linguists A M-B and Albert Bastardas-Boada, University of Barcelona, and Gemma Bel-Enguix, National Autonomous University of Mexico (search each) gather diverse essays about how to perceive human conversant and literary discourse as a complex adaptive, self-organizing network similar to everywhere else. Their Introduction reviews this scientific and conceptual advance through the 2010s as it grows in breath and veracity. Again we may note that by turns, an inherent textual quality across natural and social realms becomes evident. Sample chapters could be The Paradigm of Complexity in Sociology, How and Why to Model the Complexity of Thought Systems, and Amazing Grace: An Analysis of Barack Obama’s Raciolinguistic Performances.

This book offers insights on the study of natural language as a complex adaptive system. It discusses a new way to tackle the problem of language modeling, and provides clues on how the close relation between natural language and some biological structures can be very fruitful for science. The book examines the theoretical framework and then applies its main principles to various areas of linguistics. It discusses applications in language contact, language change, diachronic linguistics, and the potential enhancement of classical approaches to historical linguistics by means of new methodologies used in physics, biology, and agent systems theory. It shows how studying language evolution and change using computational simulations enables to integrate social structures in the evolution of language, and how this can give rise to a new way to approach sociolinguistics.

In their Science as a Social Self-organizing Extended Cognitive System chapter, Robert Hristovsky, Natalia Balagué and Pablo Vázquez develop the idea that sciences are social self-organizing adaptive cognitive systems. They explain the rise of unifying themata in science overcoming the fragmentation of scientific language and illustrate the diversification and unification of scientific language with examples of different disciplines such as cosmology, chemistry, psychology and physics, among others. (8)

McElreath, Richard. The Coevolution of Genes, Innovation, and Culture in Human Evolution. Kappeler, Peter and Joan Silk, eds. Mind the Gap. Berlin: Springer, 2010. The whole book is reviewed in Homo Sapiens. The University of California, Davis, anthropologist presses the thesis that the molecular genetic program and public informational knowledge are in fact similar in kind and instructional result. By these lights, life’s evolutionary development can appear as one grand learning process, lately rising to its collaborative, cumulative societal phase. Human beings, by drawing upon external repositories, are able to keep it going by appropriate innovative creativity. View the author’s publications at http://xcelab.net/rm/?page_id=12 for more papers about such “heuristics” of problem solving and better living.

In light of these plausible (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, symbolic) “inheritance systems," it appears that human culture may not be so special or surprising at all, in the sense of being a non- genetic system of inheritance. Organisms as diverse as Arabidopsis (a small plant related to mustard that is a favorite of geneticists), common fruit ies and single-celled microscopic animals such as paramecia exhibit heritable differences due at least in part to mechanisms other than the sequence of nucleotides in their DNA. The existence of social learning as a system of inheritance and adaptation that functions in complement to DNA may turn out to be unremarkable. (459)

Mehr, Samuel, et al. Origins of Music in Credible Signaling. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Online August, 2020. With some 300 references into the 20th century, Harvard, UCLA, and Washington State University (Edward Hagen) paleolinguists propose this latest clarification of how primate and hominin sing and sign fostered relative familial and communal communications. With a nod to Robin Dunbar and others, the vital presence of a nested scale of social groupings becomes evident. See Music as a Coevolved System for Social Bonding by Patrick Savage, et al in this journal issue.

How did music evolve? We show that prevailing views on the evolution of music are inadequate. We argue that music evolved as a credible signal in at least two contexts: coalitional interactions and infant care. Specifically, we propose that (1) the production and reception of coordinated, entrained rhythmic displays is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling coalition strength, size, and coordination ability; and (2) the production and reception of infant-directed song is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling parental attention to secondarily altricial infants. The adaptations provide a foundation for the cultural evolution of music in its actual domain, yielding the diversity of musical forms and musical behaviors found worldwide. (Abstract excerpt)

Mehr, Samuel, et al. University and Diversity in Human Song. Science. 366/eaao868, 2019. Some 19 researchers posted in the USA, Germany, and Canada including Stephen Pinker report upon a comprehensive, cross-cultural study of the past and present occasion of melodious communication, with and without words, which well confirms its personal and societal significance. See also a commentary The World in a Song by Tecumseh Fitch and Tudor Popescu in the same issue.

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music varies along three formality, arousal, and religiosity aspects, more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. In addition, acoustic features of tonality are almost universal; music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws. (Abstract excerpt)

Mithen, Stephen. The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million-Year Story of How Words Evolved. New York: Basic Books, 2024. The author is a professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading with many academic articles and several books (search) such as  After the Ice and The Singing Neanderthals. This latest work proposes an iconic vocal origins hypothesis whereby rudimentary languages were mainly vocal and iconic in kind, rather than gestural, with symbol use emerging later on.

The emergence of language began with the apelike calls of our earliest hominid ancestors. Today, the world is home to thousands of complex expressions.   In his latest volume, renowned archaeologist Steven Mithen puts forward a novel account which synthesizes research across archaeology, psychology, linguistics, genetics, and neuroscience. A step-by-step explanation of how our human ancestors transitioned from grunts to words and grammar. He explores how language shaped our cognition and vice versa; how metaphor advanced Homo sapiens’ ability to formulate abstract concepts, develop agriculture, and shape the world.

Oller, D. Kimbrough and Ulrike Griebel, eds. Evolution of Communication Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. A broad survey of how animal signals evolved into primate and hominid cries and chatter, from which arose human linguistic representations. Philosophy, theory, and method for the project are considered along with attention to primitive vocal or symbolic modes of discourse and societal contexts. A good entry to the players – Irene Pepperberg, Morten Christiansen, Luc Steels, Peter Gardenfors, Ruth Garrett Millikan, Richard Dunbar and colleagues. From a humankind vista, the long course of a developmental evolution appears as a grand learning and naming experience, by which the universe may gain its voice and self-expression.

Pellegrino, Francois, et al, eds. Approaches to Phonological Complexity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. A typical chapter such as “Scale-Free Networks in Phonological and Orthographic Wordform Lexicons” by Christopher Kello and Brandon Beltz traces a regnant pathway from thermodynamic and statistical mechanic realms to human dynamical conversation and textual discourse. How might we then imagine this long course as a cosmic genetic code rising to its own voice, cognizance and personhood?

Complexity approaches, developed in physics and biology for almost two decades, show today a huge potential for investigating challenging issues in Humanities and Cognitive Sciences and obviously in the study of language(s). Theoretical approaches that integrate self-organization, emergence, non linearity, adaptive systems, information theory, etc., have already been developed to provide a unifying framework that sheds new light on the duality between linguistic diversity on the one hand and unique cognitive capacity of language processing on the other hand. (Publisher’s website)

Prather, Jonathan, et al. Brains for Birds and Babies: Neural Parallel between Birdsong and Speech Acquisition. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 81/B, 2017. Akin to Prosody in Birdsong by Carien Mol, et al, in this issue (Abstract below), University of Wyoming, University of Tokyo, and Utrecht University (quite global) find deep commonalities from avian to sapient classes. As the quotes note, similar lateral, asymmetric divisions, periodic syntax, melodious meanings and more are present in these widely separate entities. An “evolutionary convergence” of “behavioral parallels between birdsong learning and speech acquisition” are seen to suggest a basic, independent source. And as in many such papers, a recapitulative theme courses through.

Language as a computational cognitive mechanism appears to be unique to the human species. Here we review important neural parallels between birdsong and speech. In both cases there are separate but continually interacting neural networks that underlie vocal production, sensorimotor learning, and auditory perception and memory. As in the case of human speech, neural activity related to birdsong learning is lateralized, and mirror neurons linking perception and performance may contribute to sensorimotor learning. In songbirds that are learning their songs, there is continual interaction between secondary auditory regions and sensorimotor regions, similar to the interaction between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas in human infants acquiring speech and language. (Prather abstract excerpt)

There is brain lateralization in speech and language in human babies, infants and adults. Roughly, the left hemisphere is involved in syntax and semantics, while the right hemisphere is activated during processing of prosodic structure. More generally, lateralization of neural structure and function are prominent features in humans and a broad range of other species. (233) Language is associated with a network of specialized spanning frontal, temporal and parietal areas, and there is a stark asymmetry in the contributions of the left and right hemispheres. For example, areas in the left hemisphere are associated with focal syntax, temporal properties of speech, and the brief transitions that are present in the sounds. In contrast, corresponding in the right hemisphere are more associated with prosody, spectral properties of speech, and emotional valence of the vocal sounds. (234)

Birdsong shows striking parallels with human speech. Previous comparisons between birdsong and human vocalizations focused on syntax, phonology and phonetics. We consider the similarities between birdsong structure and the prosodic hierarchy in human speech and between context-dependent acoustic variations in birdsong and the biological codes in human speech. Moreover, we discuss songbirds’ sensitivity to prosody-like acoustic features and the role of such features in song segmentation and song learning in relation to infants’ sensitivity to prosody and the role of prosody in early language acquisition. Finally, we make suggestions for future comparative birdsong research, including a framework of how prosody in birdsong can be studied. (Mol abstract excerpt)

Prieur, Jacques, et al. The Origins of Gestures and Language: History, Current Advances and Proposed Theories. Biological Reviews. Online December, 2019. Free University of Berlin and University of Rennes, CNRS animal ethologists scope out multimodal and multicausal influences for an array of primate forebears to reconstruct how our emergent result came to have such conversational facilities.

Investigating the mechanisms underlying human and non‐human primate communication systems (gestures, vocalisations, facial expressions) 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. We review three processes that can explain great apes' gestural acquisition: phylogenetic ritualisation, ontogenetic ritualisation, and learning via social negotiation. We thus propose a theory of language origins which postulates that primates' communicative signalling is a complex trait shaped by a cost–benefit trade‐off of signal production and processing of interactants in relation to four interlinked categories of evolutionary and life cycle factors: species, individual and context‐related characteristics as well as behavior. (Abstract excerpt)

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