Full Description
The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence, augmented by insights from sister disciplines. The chapters all reflect new speculation, discoveries and more refined research methods leading to a more focused understanding of the range of possibilities and how we might choose among them. There is much that we do not yet know, but the outlines of the path ahead are ever clearer.
Contents
1. Preface; 2. Introduction; 3. Part 1. General perspectives and issues on language origins; 4. Historical, Darwinian, and current perspectives on the origin(s) of language (by Cohen, Henri); 5. The origin of language as seen by eighteenth-century philosophy (by Auroux, Sylvian); 6. Cognitive and social aspects of language origins (by Barnard, Alan); 7. Part 2. At the roots of language; 8. Reconstructed fossil vocal tracts and the production of speech: Phylogenetic and ontogenetic considerations (by Boe, Jean-Louis); 9. Paleoanthropology and language (by Tattersall, Ian); 10. Material culture and language (by Dubreuil, Benoit); 11. Gestural theory of the origins of language (by Corballis, Michael C.); 12. Part 3. Communication and language origins; 13. Primate communication (by Zuberbuhler, Klaus); 14. FoxP2 and vocalization (by White, Stephanie); 15. Brain lateralization and the emergence of language (by Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie); 16. Sensorimotor constraints and the organization of sound patterns (by Menard, Lucie); 17. Symbol grounding and the origin of language: From show to tell (by Masse, Alexandre Blondin); 18. Part 4. Linguistic views on language origins; 19. Sound patterns and conceptual content of the first words (by MacNeilage, Peter F.); 20. Brave new words (by Bancel, Pierre J.); 21. On the origin of Grammar (by Heine, Bernd); 22. Arbitrary signs and the emergence of language (by Bouchard, Denis); 23. On the relevance of pidgins and creoles in the debate on the origins of language (by Lefebvre, Claire); 24. Part 5. Computational modeling of language origins; 25. Modeling cultural evolution: Language acquisition as multiple-cue integration (by Christiansen, Morten H.); 26. How language emerges in situated embodied interactions (by Steels, Luc); 27. Emergence of communication and language in evolving robots (by Nolfi, Stefano); 28. Evolving a bridge from praxis to language (by Arbib, Michael A.); 29. Index
