Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

In the last ten years, researchers have accepted that language is the outcome of normal evolutionary processes. This has led to a flurry of new work, resulting in some important steps forward in our understanding of language origin. This paper outlines the highlights. The location of proto-humans has been confirmed as Africa, and African hominids are more widely scattered than was previously assumed. Some probably moved out of Africa earlier than was once thought likely. Evolutionary theory has also been explored in more depth. The probable date of language origin has moved earlier, and the precursors of language have been examined, resulting in a more sophisticated understanding of symbolic communication. Mirror neurons have been proposed as relevant to the neurological underpinnings of mind-reading, which may underlie the naming insight. A proto-language stage probably preceded full language, and this proto-language may have involved several layers, which are still visible in language today.

Human language is qualitatively different from animal communication systems in at least two separate ways. Human languages contain tens of thousands of arbitrary learned symbols (mainly words). No other animal communication system involves learning the component symbolic elements afresh in each individual's lifetime, and certainly not in such vast numbers. Human language also has complex compositional syntax. The meanings of our sentences are composed from the meanings of the constituent parts (e.g. the words). This is obvious to us, but no other animal communication system (with honeybees as an odd but distracting exception) puts messages together in this way. A recent theoretical claim that the sole distinguishing feature of human language is recursion is discussed, and related to these features of learned symbols and compositional syntax. It is argued that recursive thought could have existed in prelinguistic hominids, and that the key step to language was the innovative disposition to learn massive numbers of arbitrary symbols