VI. Life’s Cerebral Faculties Become More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

5. Organisms Evolve Rhythmic Protolanguage Communication

Townsend, Simon, et al. Compositionality in Animals and Humans. PLOS Biology. 16/8, 2018. As this long title word gains currency (search) to describe how our language “composes” itself, University of Zurich, Warwick, UK, and of Neuchatel, Switzerland comparative linguists including Sabrina Engesser and Nalthasar Bickel elucidate how this quality can likewise be seen in formative effect across multi-faceted creaturely communications. See also Call Combinations in Birds and the Evolution of Compositional Syntax by Toshitaka Suzuki, et al, in this journal and date.

origins of language’s syntactic structure. One approach seeks to reduce the core of syntax in humans to a single principle of recursive combination for which there is no evidence in other species. We argue for an alternative approach. We review evidence that beneath the complexity of human syntax, there is an extensive layer of nonproductive, nonhierarchical syntax that can well be compared to animal call combinations. This is the essential groundwork that must be in place before we can elucidate, with sufficient precision, what made it possible for human language to explode its syntactic capacity from simple nonproductive combinations. (Abstract edits)

Zhang, Ye, et al. More than Words: Word Predictability, Prosody, Gesture and Mouth Movements in Natural Language Comprehension.. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. July, 2021. University College London and University of Konstanz, Germany psychologists add a novel experimental basis by which to understand and demonstrate that our human communications are actually made up of dual literate speech and visual movements which then compose and convey a rhythmic message.

The ecology of human language is face-to-face interaction, comprising cues such as prosody, co-speech gestures and expressions. Yet, the multimodal context is usually stripped away in experiments as dominant paradigms focus on linguistic processing only. In our studies we found that brain’s response to words were affected by the informativeness of diverse, reciprocal cues, indicating that comprehension relies on both linguistic and imagistic sights. Thus, our results show that many nonverbal, postural aspects are integral to comprehension, hence, this field of study must move beyond the limited focus on speech and linguistic processing alone. (Abstract)

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