Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This article focuses on the evolution of phonology over the years. The most comprehensive investigation of the innateness hypothesis in phonology is that undertaken by Mielke regarding the common claim that there is a small finite set of universal innate distinctive features that can describe the sound patterns participating in what are called phonological processes of all languages. He points out that the multiple sounds often participate in the same sound pattern. When a group of these sounds exhibits the same behavior it is often the case that these sounds are phonetically similar to each other. This type of grouping of sounds is termed a natural class. Syllabic sonority is considered to be an innate mental principle revealed by the fact that the loudest sound in a syllable is the vowel, and sonority then tends to decrease as the distance from the vowel of a preceding or a following consonant in the same syllable increases. The pattern can be attributable to peripheral biomechanics rather than mental structure. The concept of markedness is considered to involve another innate mental principle. The discipline of phonology has contributed an enormous amount of valuable information about the sound patterns of language.

This book explores the origin and evolution of speech. The human speech system is in a league of its own in the animal kingdom and its possession dwarfs most other evolutionary achievements. During every second of speech we unconsciously use about 225 distinct muscle actions. To investigate the evolutionary origins of this prodigious ability, Peter MacNeilage draws on work in linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and animal behaviour. He puts forward a neo-Darwinian account of speech as a process of descent in which ancestral vocal capabilities became modified in response to natural selection pressures for more efficient communication. His proposals include the crucial observation that present-day infants learning to produce speech reveal constraints that were acting on our ancestors as they invented new words long ago. This important and original investigation integrates the latest research on modern speech capabilities, their acquisition, and their neurobiology, including the issues surrounding the cerebral hemispheric specialization for speech. It will interest a wide range of readers in cognitive, neuro-, and evolutionary science, as well as all those seeking to understand the nature and evolution of speech and human communication.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Introduction
1. Background: The Intellectual Context
2. Getting to the Explanation of Speech
Part 2 Speech and its origin: The Frame/Content Theory
3. The Nature of Modern Hominid Speech
4. Speech in Deep TIme: How Speech Got Started
Part 3 The Relation Between Ontogeny and Phylogeny
5. Ontogeny and Phylogeny 1: The Frame Stage
6. Ontogeny and Phylogeny 2: The Frame/Content Stage
7. The Origin of Words: How Frame-Stage Patterns Acquired Meanings
Part 4 Brain Organization and the Evolution of Speech
8. Evolution of brain Organization for Speech: Background
9. A Dual Brain System for the Frame/Content Mode
10. Evolution of Cerebral Hemispheric Specialization for Speech
Part 5 The Frame/Content Theory and Generative Linguistics
11. Generative Phonology and the Origin of Speech
12. The Generative Approach to Speech Acquisition
Part 6 A Perspective on Speech From Manual Evolution
13. An Amodal Phonology? Implications of the Existence of Sign Language
Part 7 Last Things
14. Ultimate Causes: Genes and Memes
15. Conclusions

This study shows that a corpus of proto-word forms shares four sequential sound patterns with words of modern languages and the first words of infants. Three of the patterns involve intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence: labial (lip) consonants with central vowels, coronal (tongue front) consonants with front vowels, and dorsal (tongue back) consonants with back vowels. The fourth pattern is an intersyllabic preference for initiating words with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant sequence (LC). The CV effects may be primarily biomechanically motivated. The LC effect may be self-organizational, with multivariate causality. The findings support the hypothesis that these four patterns were basic to the origin of words.

The basic internal structure of a word consists of an alternation between consonants and vowels. Words tend to begin with a consonant and end with a vowel. The fundamental evolutionary status of the consonant-vowel alternation is indicated by its presence in rhythmically organized pre-linguistic vocalizations of 7 month-old babbling infants. We have argued that the basic alternation results from a mandibular cyclicity (``The Frame'') originally evolving for ingestive purposes. Here, we consider beginnings and endings of words. We conclude that preferences for consonantal beginnings and vocalic endings may be basic biomechanical consequences of the act of producing vocal episodes between resting states of the production system. Both the characteristic beginning-end asymmetry and some details of the choice of individual sounds in the non-preferred modes (vocalic beginnings and consonantal endings) are mirrored in babbling and early words. The presence of many of these properties in modern words, even though they are delivered in running speech, as well as in a proto-language corpus, indicates retention, for message purposes, of properties originally associated with the single word stage of language evolution.

The species-specific organizational property of speech is a continual mouth open-close alternation, the two phases of which are subject to continual articulatory modulation. The cycle constitutes the syllable and the open and closed phases are segments - vowels and consonants respectively. The fact that segmental serial ordering errors in normal adults obey syllable structure constraints suggests that syllabic ``Frames'' and segmental ``Content'' elements are separately controlled in the speech production process. The frames may derive from cycles of mandibular oscillation, present in humans from babbling onset, which are responsible for the open-close alternation. These communication-related frames perhaps first evolved when the ingestion-related cyclicities of mandibular oscillation (associated with mastication (chewing) sucking and licking) took on communicative significance as lipsmacks, tonguesmacks and teeth chatters - displays which are prominent in many nonhuman primates. The new role of Broca's area and its surround in human vocal communication may have derived from its evolutionary history as the main cortical center for the control of ingestive processes. The frame and content components of speech may have subsequently evolved separate realizations within two general-purpose primate motor control systems: (1) A motivation-related medial ``intrinsic'' system, including anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, for self-generated behavior, formerly responsible for ancestral vocalization control and now also responsible for frames, and (2) a lateral ``extrinsic'' system, including Broca's area and surround, and Wernicke's area, specialized for response to external input (and therefore the emergent vocal learning capacity) and more responsible for Content.