Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

What purposes, other than facilitating the sharing of information, can language have served? First, it may not have evolved to serve any purpose at all. It is possible that language is just a side effect of the large human brain—a spandrel or exaptation—that only became useful ...

The emergence of language in populations of primates that initially lacked language can be simulated with artificial organisms controlled by neural networks and living, evolving, and learning in artificial environment. Some simulations have already been done but most are a task for the future. We dis-cuss language evolution under two topics: language is learned from others on the basis of genetically inherited predispositions, and language has important influences on human cognition. We propose an evolutionary sequence accord-ing to which bipedalism and the emergence of the hands represent a selective pressure for developing an ability to predict the consequences of one's actions, this ability is the basis for learning by imitating other individuals, learning by imitating other individuals is applied to learning to imitate their communicative behaviour. The second topic include the consequences of language for various aspects of human cognition, especially when language is used to talk to oneself.