ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2017
Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
64 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Genome-wide investigation of prosody perception: Shared genetic influences between speech rhythm, musical rhythm, and reading traits.HGG advances · 2026Article
- Tuned to language: the influence of musicality on phonaesthetic judgments.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- What can language creation tell us about language evolution?The American psychologist · 2025Article
- The prefrontal operculum, a human-specific hub for the cognitive control of speech.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Flexible use of multimodal communicative strategies in adult chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Generative vocal plasticity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2025Article
- The shared genetic architecture and evolution of human language and musical rhythm.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Birds of a song sing together: adaptive choices in the use of shared vocalizations that indicate age.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Idiosyncratic gesture use in a mother-infant dyad in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the wild.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Chimpanzee utterances refute purported missing links for novel vocalizations and syllabic speech.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Perception of vocoded speech in domestic dogs.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Article
- Genetic Modifications of Developmental Dyslexia and Its Representation Using In Vivo, In Vitro Model.Global medical genetics · 2024Review
- Music and verbal ability - a twin study of genetic and environmental associations.Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts · 2023Article
- The shared genetic architecture and evolution of human language and musical rhythm.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Vocal tract shape variation contributes to individual vocal identity in African penguins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The study of language evolution, and human cognitive evolution more generally, has often been ridiculed as unscientific, but in fact it differs little from many other disciplines that investigate past events, such as geology or cosmology. Well-crafted models of language evolution make numerous testable hypotheses, and if the principles of strong inference (simultaneous testing of multiple plausible hypotheses) are adopted, there is an increasing amount of relevant data allowing empirical evaluation of such models. The articles in this special issue provide a concise overview of current models of language evolution, emphasizing the testable predictions that they make, along with overviews of the many sources of data available to test them (emphasizing comparative, neural, and genetic data). The key challenge facing the study of language evolution is not a lack of data, but rather a weak commitment to hypothesis-testing approaches and strong inference, exacerbated by the broad and highly interdisciplinary nature of the relevant data. This introduction offers an overview of the field, and a summary of what needed to evolve to provide our species with language-ready brains. It then briefly discusses different contemporary models of language evolution, followed by an overview of different sources of data to test these models. I conclude with my own multistage model of how different components of language could have evolved.
Indexed as
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Registered trials
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.