The evolution of language: a comparative review

For many years the evolution of language has been seen as a disreputable topic, mired in fanciful "just so stories" about language origins. However, in the last decade a new synthesis of modern linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has begun to make important contributions to our understanding of the biology and evolution of language. I review some of this recent progress, focusing on the value of the comparative method, which uses data from animal species to draw inferences about language evolution. Discussing speech first, I show how data concerning a wide variety of species, from monkeys to birds, can increase our understanding of the anatomical and neural mechanisms underlying human spoken language, and how bird and whale song provide insights into the ultimate evolutionary function of language. I discuss the ‘‘descended larynx’ ’ of humans, a peculiar adaptation for speech that has received much attention in the past, which despite earlier claims is not uniquely human. Then I will turn to the neural mechanisms underlying spoken language, pointing out the difficulties animals apparently experience in perceiving hierarchical structure in sounds, and stressing the importance of vocal imitation in the evolution of a spoken language. Turning to ultimate function, I suggest that communication among kin (especially between parents and offspring) played a crucial but neglected role in driving language evolution. Finally, I briefly discuss phylogeny, discussing hypotheses that offer plausible routes to human language from a non-linguistic chimp-like ancestor. I conclude that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of our most distinctively human trait: language

Lexical viability constraints on speech segmentation by infants

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The development of word recognition : The use of the possible-word constraint by 12-month-olds

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12-month-olds show evidence of a Possible word Constraint

Item does not contain fulltextThe Possible-word Constraint (PWC) limits the number of lexical candidates considered for a given input by stipulating that the input should be parsed into a string of feasible words (Norris et. al., 1997). Any segmentation resulting in impossible word candidates (i.e. an isolated single consonant) is disfavored. Four experiments using the head-turn preference procedure investigated whether 12-month-olds observe the PWC to aid them in word recognition. In the first two experiments, infants were familiarized with lists of words (e.g. "rush"), then tested on lists of nonsense items containing these words in "possible" or "impossible" positions (e.g. "niprush" [nip+rush - possible] or "prush" [p+rush - impossible]). In the other experiments, 12-month-olds were similarly familiarized with lists of words, but test items occurred in sentential contexts; this condition more readily taxed online segmentation abilities. In the first 2 experiments, 12-month-olds listened significantly longer to targets in "possible" versus "impossible" contexts when targets occurred at the end of nonsense items, but not when they occurred at the beginning. In Experiments 3 and 4, infants listened significantly longer to words in the "possible" condition regardless of target location. These results suggest that 12-month-olds, like adults, use the PWC during online word recognition

Cross-language word segmentation by 9-month-olds

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