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

2. Organisms Evolve Rhythmic Protolanguage Communication

Tomlinson, Gary. A Million Years of Music. New York: Zone Books, 2015. The Yale University professor of music and the humanities retraces how primates and hominids came to and communicated by rhythmic compositions, broadly conceived, before all manner of linguistic utterances began. Once again an original propensity for prosodic, communicative intonations is identified to have arisen first.

What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this question has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. Starting at a period of human prehistory before Homo sapiens or music, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that led to musical gestures and soundings. He traces in Neandertals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia. Tomlinson builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, enriching current models of our deep history. He draws in other emerging human traits: language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies.

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)

Youngblood, Mason. Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. April, 2024. As his bio below says, by way of the latest computational abilities, it is now possible to find generic similarities between avian twittering and the social network Twitter. The same mathematical formats thus seem to repeat themselves in kind across each and every conversational mode.

Communication needs to be complex enough to be functional while minimizing learning and production costs. Recent work suggests that the vocalizations and gestures of some songbirds, cetaceans and great apes may conform to linguistic laws that reflect this trade-off between efficiency and complexity. In these studies, clustering signals into types cannot be done a priori, and an analysis may affect statistical signals in the data. Here we assess the language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song across three levels of granularity in syllable clustering. The results show strong evidence for Zipf's rank–frequency law, Zipf's law of abbreviation and Menzerath's law. These statistical patterns are robust and exhibit a degree of scale invariance. (Excerpt)

My name is Mason Youngblood, and I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. In my research, I apply methods from cognitive science, computational social science, and cultural evolution to questions about human and non-human animal behavior. Specifically, I’m interested in understanding how cognitive biases and population structure shape the cultural evolution of behaviors and beliefs (e.g. music, extremist ideology, birdsong, conspiracy theories).

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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