How Did Language Evolve? Biological, Psychological, and Linguistic Perspectives

The topic of language origin and evolution has been consideredfor a long time as a difficult question to address scientifically because of poverty of empirical data and limitations in methodology (Müller, 1861). These considerations have led to the well-known edicts by the Société de Linguistique de Paris in 1866 and the Philological Society of Londonin 1872 that forbade all members from presenting speeches on the topic

Time and Narrative: An Investigation of Storytelling Abilities in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study analyzed the relation between mental time travel (MTT) and the ability to produce a storytelling focusing on global coherence, which is one of the most notable characteristics of narrative discourse. As global coherence is strictly tied to the temporal sequence of the events narrated in a story, we hypothesized that the construction of coherent narratives would rely on the ability to mentally navigate in time. To test such a hypothesis, we investigated the relation between one component of MTT—namely, episodic future thinking (EFT)—and narrative production skills by comparing the narratives uttered by 66 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with those produced by 66 children with typical development. EFT was assessed by administering a task with minimal narrative demands, whereas storytelling production skills were assessed by administering two narrative production tasks that required children to generate future or past episodes with respect to the target stimuli. The results showed that EFT skills were impaired only in a subgroup of children with ASD and that such subgroup performed significantly worse on the narrative production task than ASD participants with high EFT skills and participants with typical development. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed

Formulaic Language: A Living Linguistic Fossil for a Holistic Protolanguage

Humans today have the ability to use language. The common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans probably did not. During recent decades evolutionary linguists have attempted to explain how the gap between a non-linguistic ancestor and our linguistic species was bridged. In this direction, it has become common to invoke the notion of a protolanguage as a stable intermediary stage in the evolution of language. A key dispute among the currently-available hypotheses of protolanguage is represented by the distinction between holistic and synthetic accounts: did human protolanguage consist of holistic utterances – later segmented into single words – or did it start with simple units that were added together into more complex structures? The synthetic account is generally recognized as “the standard model,” thus assuming that the earliest forms of a presumed protolanguage were compositional, that is built up from single words, where one word corresponds to one concept. However, recent years have seen the consolidation of the alternative idea: each element of a protolanguage would have been linguistically unanalyzable and referred to a whole situation. This paper presents the case of formulaic language as evidence – a living linguistic fossil – which corroborates arguments in support of a holistic protolanguage account

Linguaggio, tempo e narrazione

L’assunto alla base di questo articolo è che le caratteristiche essenziali della comunicazione umana siano individuabili sul piano del discorso. Nello specifico, la nostra proposta è che il linguaggio abbia una natura eminentemente narrativa. Nell’ottica cognitiva in cui si colloca la nostra riflessione, il riferimento al piano narrativo comporta due ordini di considerazioni: la prima è che la capacità di elaborare la struttura in costituenti della frase (microanalisi) non possa essere considerata condizione sufficiente a garantire il funzionamento corretto del processo comunicativo; la seconda è che le proprietà e i sistemi cognitivi che presiedono alla produzione-comprensione del discorso (macroanalisi) debbano essere di natura molto diversa da quelli ipotizzati dai fautori del primato accordato all’analisi in costituenti della frase. Seguendo questo ordine di considerazioni, l’ipotesi che avanziamo è che la narrazione abbia un carattere intrinsecamente temporale e che l’elaborazione narrativa sfrutti le capacità di proiezione nel tempo di uno specifico dispositivo cognitivo: il Mental Time Travel