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

2. Organisms Evolve Rhythmic Protolanguage Communication

Roeske, Tina. Multifractal Analysis Reveals Music-like Dynamic Structure in Songbird Rhythms. Nature Scientific Reports. 8/4570, 2018. MPI Empirical Aesthetics and Grinnell College behavioral neurobiologists apply the latest sophisticated analysis to find intrinsic mathematical patterns which suffuse and orchestrate melodious avian twitters. Once ever again, a universal self-similarity distinguish each instance and scale from cosmos to communications.

Music is thought to engage its listeners by driving feelings of surprise, tension, and relief through a dynamic mixture of predictable and unpredictable patterns, a property summarized here as “expressiveness”. Birdsong shares with music the goal to attract its listeners’ attention and might use similar strategies to achieve this. We here tested a thrush nightingale’s rhythm, as represented by song amplitude envelope (note timing, duration, and intensity), for evidence of expressiveness. We used multifractal analysis, which is designed to detect in a signal dynamic fluctuations between predictable and unpredictable states on multiple timescales. Results show that rhythm is strongly multifractal, which suggests that birdsong is more dynamic due to subtle note timing patterns, often similar to musical operations like accelerando or crescendo. (Abstract edits)

Saldana, Carmen. Compositional Hierarchical Structure Evolves through Cultural Transmission. Journal of Language Evolution. 4/2, 2019. University of Edinburgh linguists including Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith illuminate similar nested stages in both cases of evolutionary communication and human social conversation. In regard, still another glimpse of how this further phase of genomic and cerebral manifestation is achieved into the presence of this universal scale.

language learners to express and understand an infinity of meanings from finite sources (i.e., a lexicon and a grammar). Understanding how such structure evolved is central to evolutionary linguistics. Previous work combining artificial language learning and iterated learning techniques has shown how basic compositional structure can evolve from the trade-off between learnability and expressivity pressures in language transmission. In the present study we show how the same mechanisms involved in the evolution of basic compositionality can also result in a compositional hierarchical structure. (Abstract)

Scott-Phillips, Thomas and Christophe Heintz. Animal Communication in Linguistic and Cognitive Perspective. Annual Review of Linguistics. Volume 9, 2022. University of the Basque and Central European University senior scholars (see websites) gather many research studies into a retrospective synopsis which can begin to reveal a long processive evolution of all manner of grunts to gestures on the way clearer content and our alphabetic linguistics. A conclusion is then reached that our human transition (see Abstract) has a unique, advanced capability. See also Expression Unleashed: The Evolutionary and Cognitive Foundations of Human Communication by C. Heintz and Thom Scott-Phillips in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (January 2022) for another version.

Detailed comparative studies have revealed many surface similarities between human linguistic communication and nonhumans. We review the literature with a specific focus on analogy (similar function but not shared ancestry) and homology (shared ancestry) and conclude that combinatorial features of animal communication are analogous but not homologous to natural language. Homologies are found instead in cognitive capacities of attention manipulation, which are enriched in humans, making possible many distinctive forms such as language use. (Excerpt)

Searcy, William. Animal Communication, Cognition, and the Evolution of Language. Animal Behavior. Online April, 2019. An editorial introduction to a special issue with this title. As scientific realizations form that all manner of creatures from primates and birds onto invertebrate insects. See for example Evolutionary Roads to Syntax (Klaus Zuberbuhler), Rules, Rhythm and Grouping: Pattern Perception by Birds, Communication in Social Insects, and Syntactic Rules in Avian Vocal Sequences and the Evolution of Compositionality (Suzuki herein).

Smith, Andrew, et al, eds. The Evolution of Language. Singapore: World Scientific, 2010. The copious Proceedings of the 8th EVOLANG International Conference held in Utrecht, April 2010. This biannual gatherings is distinguished by presenters and commentators such as Eva Jablonka, Tecumseh Fitch, Merlin Donald, Nathalie Gontier, Michael Arbib, Kathleen Gibson, Derek Bickerton, and so on. Topics span genes, neurons, and cultures to a hominid “protolanguage” in gestural, musical, and lexical stages. Search Bouchard and Barnard for typical papers. What kind of cosmos, via its intended human phenomenon, might learn to speak, write, and read, so as to describe and narrate itself?

Steels, Luc and Eors Szathmary. The Evolutionary Dynamics of Language. BioSystems. Online November, 2017. The ICREA, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva informatics scientist and Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Munich theoretical biologist collaborate to achieve a unique insight about how linguistic forms and lore came to be. As the quotes convey, a similar apply of Darwinian cycles of candidate populations and selective retentions can just as well explain how speech, lexicons, grammar, and meaningful content evolved and developed. A further aspect is an avail of computational methods to trace and enhance an emergent intelligence. A universal evolutionism can also be applied to our definitive human trait to talk, write, read, and learn. See also Evolutionary Dynamics of Language Systems by Simon Greenhill, et al in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Online October, 2017).

The well-established framework of evolutionary dynamics can be applied to the fascinating open problems how human brains are able to acquire and adapt language and how languages change in a population. Schemas for handling grammatical constructions are the replicating unit. They emerge and multiply with variation in the brains of individuals and undergo selection based on their contribution to needed expressive power, communicative success and the reduction of cognitive effort. Adopting this perspective has two major benefits. (i) It makes a bridge to neurobiological models of the brain that have also adopted an evolutionary dynamics point of view, thus opening a new horizon for studying how human brains achieve the remarkably complex competence for language. And (ii) it suggests a new foundation for studying cultural language change as an evolutionary dynamics process. The paper sketches this novel perspective, provides references to empirical data and computational experiments, and points to open problems. (Abstract)

Human languages are the archetypal examples of a code, in the sense of "a small set of arbitrary rules selected from a potentially unlimited number in order to ensure a specific correspondence between two independent worlds." The two independent worlds in this case are the world of speech, gesture or written marks on the one hand, and the world of meaning on the other. The set of rules of a language consists of its lexicon (associating words or morphemes with meanings and functions) and its grammar (prescribing how larger units are built and how the meaning of these combinations is assembled to form the meaning of the whole). (1)

Here we suggest a novel perspective. We propose that language learning can be understood as based on similar principles as biological evolution, which contrasts with the widespread view that language learning is merely instructional, a stepwise accumulative inductive inference. Evolutionary dynamics requires that there is a population of units (genes, cells,organisms, colonies) possessing at least these features: (1) multiplication, (2) inheritance, variability, and (4) some hereditary traits affecting the survival/fecundity of the units. If these criteria are met, the population can undergo evolution by natural selection, resulting in the discovery and fixation of fitter variants. (2)

We have put forward a bold new unifying perspective on language development, namely to see it as another instantiation of the evolutionary paradigm that underlies several other biological systems, such as species evolution or the adaptive immune system. We proposed that the construction is the fundamental unit of evolution in the case of language. A construction is a usage pattern on how to relate meaning with form through the intermediary of syntactic and semantic categories. Construction schemas multiply with variation in the brains of individuals and they undergo selection, so that 'fitter' variants, i.e. variants that contribute towards adequate expressive power, steady communicative success, and a reduction of cognitive effort, become part of the preferred language. (7)

Suzuki, Toshitaka. Animal Linguistics. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. August, 2024. A University of Tokyo language researcher (see his website) describes the latest realizations that all manner of Metazoan creatures actually dopress possess an array of sophisticated communicative vernaculars in their certain vocal mode. As our Earthumanity retrospect scans across ages of utterances, might one get a sense of life’s long endeavor to gain a voice and medium by which to speak, converse and achieve descriptive expressions of itself.

Despite the traditional belief that language only arose in our ancestors, accumulating evidence suggests that many similar abilities have also evolved in nonhuman animals. For example, several species of birds and primates convey conceptual meanings through specific vocalizations and/or combine multiple meaning-bearing calls into sequences using syntactic rules. Using experimental paradigms inspired by cognitive science, animal linguistics aims to uncover the various mechanisms underlying creature communications and their evolutionary occasions.

Suzuki, Toshitaka, et al. Syntactic Rules in Avian Vocal Sequences as a Window into the Evolution of Compositionality. Animal Behavior. Online April, 2019. In a special issue on Cognition and Language, University of Tokyo, Zurich, and Uppsala neurolinguists consider how birds achieve meaningful content and communication from their rhythmic twitters. An overall message might be that life’s long evolutionary development has altogether been trying to compose itself unto our late sapience expression and hopefully, if we can come to our individual and collective senses, reprise and recognition.

Understanding the origins and evolution of language remains a deep challenge, because its complexity and expressive power are unparalleled in the animal world. One of the key features of language is that the meaning of an expression is determined both by the meanings of its constituent parts and the syntactic rules used to combine them; known as the principle of compositionality. Although compositionality has been considered unique to language, recent field studies suggest that compositionality may have also evolved in vocal combinations in nonhuman animals. Here, we discuss how compositionality can be explored in animal communication systems and review recent evidence that birds use an ordering
rule to generate compositional expressions composed of meaningful calls. (Abstract)

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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