Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T22:42:41.370Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

19 - The Evolution of Language

A Darwinian Approach

from Part V - Evolution and Cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Michael C. Corballis
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
Get access

Summary

It is commonly assumed that expressive language is a secondary consequence of an abrupt change in human thought that emerged uniquely in humans within the past 100,000 years. This is difficult to reconcile with the theory of evolution by natural selection. An alternative view is that human thought evolved gradually over many millennia and has properties shared with other species. Some of these properties are critical to language; they include mental time travel, which underlies the linguistic properties of generativity and displacement, and theory of mind, which is critical to meaningful discourse. What does seem to be unique to humans is the ability to communicate our thoughts, rather than the nature of the thoughts themselves. Expressive language depended on the relatively late emergence of output systems flexible enough to map onto internal experience. I argue here that it was built first on manual gesture, with the gradual addition of vocalization.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 233 - 240
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Addis, D. R., Wong, A. T., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1363–1377.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Arbib, M. A. (2005). From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 28, 105–168.Google Scholar
Arbib, M. A. (2012). How the Brain Got Language: The Mirror System Hypothesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Blasi, D. E., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., Stadler, P. F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2016). Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 10808–10823.Google Scholar
Buckner, R. L. (2010). The role of the hippocampus in prediction and imagination. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 27–48.Google Scholar
Burling, R. (1999). Motivation, conventionalization, and arbitrariness in the origin of language. In King, B. J., ed., The Origins of Language: What Human Primates can Tell Us. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 307–350.Google Scholar
Call, J., & Michael Tomasello, M. (2008). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12, 187–192.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (2007). Biolinguistic explorations: design, development, evolution. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 15, 1–21.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (2010). Some simple evo devo theses: How true might they be for language? In Larson, R. K., Déprez, V., & Yamakido, H., eds., The Evolution of Human Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 45–62.Google Scholar
Clayton, N. S., Bussey, T. J., & Dickinson, A. (2003). Can animals recall the past and plan for the future? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 685–691.Google Scholar
Corballis, M. C. (2002). From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Corballis, M. C. (2004). The origins of modernity: Was autonomous speech the critical factor? Psychological Review, 111, 543–552.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Corballis, M. C. (2013). Mental time travel: A case for evolutionary continuity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 5–6.Google Scholar
Darwin, C. (1859). On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Dor, D. (2015). The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, Cognition, and Brain: Insights from Sign Language Research. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Evans, N. (2009). Dying Words. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 32, 429–492.Google Scholar
Everett, D. L. (2005). Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology, 46, 621–646.Google Scholar
Foster, D. J., & Wilson, M. A. (2006). Reverse replay of behavioural sequences in hippocampal place cells during the awake state. Nature, 440, 680–683.Google Scholar
Fujita, K. (2009). A prospect for evolutionary adequacy: Merge and the evolution and development of human language. Biolinguistics, 3, 128–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardner, R. A. & Gardner, B. T. (1969). Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee. Science, 165, 664–672.Google Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Widening the lens: what the manual modality reveals about language, learning and cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 369, 20130295.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gupta, A. S., van der Meer, M. A. A., Touretzky, D. S., & Redish, A. D. (2010). Hippocampal replay is not a simple function of experience. Neuron, 65, 695–705.Google Scholar
Hewes, G. W. (1973). Primate communication and the gestural origins of language. Current Anthropology, 14, 5–24.Google Scholar
Hobaiter, C., & Byrne, R. W. (2011). Serial gesturing by wild chimpanzees: Its nature and function for communication. Animal Cognition, 14, 827–838.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hockett, C. F. (1960). The origins of speech. Scientific American, 203, 88–96.Google Scholar
Hoffecker, J. F. (2005). Innovation and technological knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic. Evolutionary Anthropology, 14, 186–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, W. D., Taglialatela, J. P., & Leavens, D. A. (2007). Chimpanzees differentially produce novel vocalizations to capture the attention of a human. Animal Behaviour, 73, 281–286.Google Scholar
Janmaat, K. R. L., Polansky, L., Ban, S. D., & Boesch, C. (2014). Wild chimpanzees plan their breakfast time, type, and location. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 16343–16348.Google Scholar
Kaminski, J., Call, J., & Fischer, J. (2004). Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for “fast mapping”. Science, 304, 1682–1683.Google Scholar
Karlsson, F. (2007). Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses. Journal of Linguistics, 43, 365–392.Google Scholar
Klein, R. G. (2008). Out of Africa and the evolution of human behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology, 17, 267–281.Google Scholar
Knott, A. (2012). Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Krupenye, C., Fumihiro, K., Hirata, S., & Call, J. (2016). At apes anticipate that other individual will act according to false beliefs. Science, 354, 110–116.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lakoff, G. (2014). Mapping the brain’s metaphor circuitry: Metaphorical thought in everyday reason. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 958.Google Scholar
Martin, V. C. Schacter, D. L., Corballis, M. C., & Addis, D. R. (2011). A role for the hippocampus in encoding simulations of future events. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 13858–13863.Google Scholar
McBrearty, S., & Brooks, A. S. (2000). The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution, 39, 453–563.Google Scholar
Mellars, P. A. (2009). Origins of the female image. Nature, 459, 176–177.Google Scholar
Moser, M. B., Rowland, D. C., & Moser, E. I. (2015). Place cells, grid cells, and memory. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, 7, a021808.Google Scholar
Newton, I. (1675). Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, August 7, 2016. https://discover.hsp.org/Record/dc-9792/Description#tabnav.Google Scholar
Niles, J. D. (2010). Homo narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
O’Keefe, J., & Nadel, N. (1978). The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Patterson, F. G. P., & Gordon, W. (2001). Twenty-seven years of project Koko and Michael. In Galdikas, B. M. F., Briggs, N. E., Sheeran, L. K., & Goodall, J., eds., All Apes Great and Small, Vol. 1: African Apes. New York: Kluver, pp. 165–176.Google Scholar
Penn, D. C., Holyoak, K. J., & Povinelli, D. J. (2008). Darwin’s mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 31, 108–178.Google Scholar
Pepperberg, I. M. (1999). The Alex Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pfeiffer, B. E., & Foster, D. J. (2013). Hippocampal place-cell sequences depict future paths to remembered goals. Nature, 497, 74–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pfenning, A. R., Hara, E., Whitney, O., et al. (2014). Convergent specializations in the brains of humans and song-learning birds. Science, 346, 1333–1346.Google Scholar
Pietrandrea, P. (2002). Iconicity and arbitrariness in Italian Sign Language. Sign Language Studies, 2, 296–321.Google Scholar
Pilley, J. W., & Reid, A. K. (2011). Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents. Behavioural Processes, 86, 184–195.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 13, 707–784.Google Scholar
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 4, 515–526.Google Scholar
Raffaele, P. (2006). Speaking bonobo. Smithsonian Magazine. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/speaking-bonobo-134931541.Google Scholar
Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2001). Synaesthesia – A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 3–34.Google Scholar
Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. A. (1998). Language within our grasp. Trends in Neurosciences, 21, 188–194.Google Scholar
Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2010). The functional role of the parieto-frontal mirror circuit: Interpretations and misinterpretations. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 264–274.Google Scholar
Rosati, A. G., & Santos, L. R. (2016). Spontaneous metacognition in rhesus monkeys. Psychological Science, 27, 1181–1191.Google Scholar
Sassoon, S. (1920). Limitations. In Sassoon, S, ed., Picture-Show. New York: E.P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Savage-Rumbaugh, S., Shanker, S. G., & Taylor, T. J. (1998). Apes, Language, and the Human Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). Speaking Our Minds: Why Human Communication Is Different, and How Language Evolved to Make It Special. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1960). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”. In Gumperz, J & Levinson, S. C., eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–96.Google Scholar
Slocombe, K. E., & Zuberbühler, K. (2007). Chimpanzees modify recruitment screams as a function of audience composition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 17228–17233.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading. Mind and Language, 17, 3–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Studdert-Kennedy, M. (2005). How did language go discrete? In Tallerman, M., ed., Language Origins: Perspectives on Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 48–67.Google Scholar
Suddendorf, T. (2013). Mental time travel: Continuities and discontinuities. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 151–152.Google Scholar
Suddendorf, T., & Corballis, M. C. (1997). Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind. Genetic, Social, & General Psychology Monographs, 123, 133–167.Google Scholar
Suddendorf, T., & Corballis, M. C. (2007). The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 30, 299–351.Google Scholar
Suddendorf, T., & Corballis, M. C. (2010). Behavioural evidence for mental time travel in nonhuman animals. Behavioural Brain Research, 215, 292–298.Google Scholar
Tattersall, I. (2012). Masters of the Planet: The Search for Human Origins. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2008). The Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2009). Universal grammar is dead. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 32, 470–471.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Villa, P., & Roebroeks, W. (2014). Neandertal demise: An archaeological analysis of the modern human superiority complex. PLoS ONE, 9, e96424.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×