ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Restrictions on biological adaptation in language evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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32 citing papers in PubMed, 158 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Critical Perspective on the (Neuro)biological Foundations of Language and Linguistic Cognition.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Review
- From emotional signals to symbols.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Diachronic semantic change in language is constrained by how people use and learn language.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Syntax Acquisition in Healthy Adults and Post-Stroke Individuals: The Intriguing Role of Grammatical Preference, Statistical Learning, and Education.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- How Culture and Biology Interact to Shape Language and the Language Faculty.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Using experiential optimization to build lexical representations.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Review
- An integrated model of gene-culture coevolution of language mediated by phenotypic plasticity.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Biology-Culture Co-evolution in Finite Populations.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Article
- Culture shapes the evolution of cognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Influence of Perceptual Saliency Hierarchy on Learning of Language Structures: An Artificial Language Learning Experiment.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
- Commentary: Cultural recycling of neural substrates during language evolution and development.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
- Article
- Individual biases, cultural evolution, and the statistical nature of language universals: the case of colour naming systems.PloS one · 2015Article
- The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Review
- Evolution of speech-specific cognitive adaptations.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Review
- Article
- Simplicity and Specificity in Language: Domain-General Biases Have Domain-Specific Effects.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Review
- Subtle Implicit Language Facts Emerge from the Functions of Constructions.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Language acquisition and processing are governed by genetic constraints. A crucial unresolved question is how far these genetic constraints have coevolved with language, perhaps resulting in a highly specialized and species-specific language "module," and how much language acquisition and processing redeploy preexisting cognitive machinery. In the present work, we explored the circumstances under which genes encoding language-specific properties could have coevolved with language itself. We present a theoretical model, implemented in computer simulations, of key aspects of the interaction of genes and language. Our results show that genes for language could have coevolved only with highly stable aspects of the linguistic environment; a rapidly changing linguistic environment does not provide a stable target for natural selection. Thus, a biological endowment could not coevolve with properties of language that began as learned cultural conventions, because cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes. We argue that this rules out the possibility that arbitrary properties of language, including abstract syntactic principles governing phrase structure, case marking, and agreement, have been built into a "language module" by natural selection. The genetic basis of human language acquisition and processing did not coevolve with language, but primarily predates the emergence of language. As suggested by Darwin, the fit between language and its underlying mechanisms arose because language has evolved to fit the human brain, rather than the reverse.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.