ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
Animal cognition and the evolution of human language: why we cannot focus solely on communication.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Investigating the role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in language evolution: insights from comparative neuroscience.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- Listen to Us: Perceptions of Animal Voice and Agency.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Comparative physiological anthropogeny: exploring molecular underpinnings of distinctly human phenotypes.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Lessons learned in animal acoustic cognition through comparisons with humans.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Human language evolution: a view from theoretical linguistics on how syntax and the lexicon first came into being.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Cross-modal perception of identity by sound and taste in bottlenose dolphins.Science advances · 2022Article
- A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Aping Language: Historical Perspectives on the Quest for Semantics, Syntax, and Other Rarefied Properties of Human Language in the Communication of Primates and Other Animals.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- What can animal communication teach us about human language?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
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Abstract
Studies of animal communication are often assumed to provide the 'royal road' to understanding the evolution of human language. After all, language is the pre-eminent system of human communication: doesn't it make sense to search for its precursors in animal communication systems? From this viewpoint, if some characteristic feature of human language is lacking in systems of animal communication, it represents a crucial gap in evolution, and evidence for an evolutionary discontinuity. Here I argue that we should reverse this logic: because a defining feature of human language is its ability to flexibly represent and recombine concepts, precursors for many important components of language should be sought in animal
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