ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Language evolution: examining the link between cross-modality and aggression through the lens of disorders.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- Survival of the wittiest (not friendliest): The art and science behind human linguistic and cognitive evolution.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Swearing as a catalyst of technological development.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The cognitive science of language diversity: achievements and challenges.Cognitive processing · 2025Review
- Bridging consciousness to our narrative brain: evolutionary insights.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Syntax and the brain: language evolution as the missing link(ing theory)?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- An evolutionary account of impairment of self in cognitive disorders.Cognitive processing · 2023Article
- The prehistory of speech and language is revealed in brain damage.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Metaphors: the evolutionary journey from bidirectionality to unidirectionality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Comparing prehistoric constructed languages: world-building and its role in understanding prehistoric languages.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Constructing a protolanguage: reconstructing prehistoric languages in a usage-based construction grammar framework.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Reconstructing prehistoric languages.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Did Dog Domestication Contribute to Language Evolution?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Rigidity in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A Unified (Evolutionary) Account of Salient Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Characteristics.Autism & developmental language impairmentsArticle
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2 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We demonstrate how two linguistic phenomena, figurative language (implicating cross-modality) and derogatory language (implicating aggression), both demand a precise degree of (dis)inhibition in the same cortico-subcortical brain circuits, in particular cortico-striatal networks, whose connectivity has been significantly enhanced in recent evolution. We examine four cognitive disorders/conditions that exhibit abnormal patterns of (dis)inhibition in these networks: schizophrenia (SZ), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), synaesthesia and Tourette's syndrome (TS), with the goal of understanding why the two phenomena altered reactive aggression and altered cross-modality cluster together in these disorders. Our proposal is that enhanced cross-modality (necessary to support language, in particular metaphoricity) was a result, partly a side-effect, of self-domestication (SD). SD targeted the taming of reactive aggression, but reactive impulses are controlled by the same cortico-subcortical networks that are implicated in cross-modality. We further add that this biological process of SD did not act alone, but was engaged in an intense feedback loop with the cultural emergence of early forms of language/grammar, whose high degree of raw metaphoricity and verbal aggression also contributed to increased brain connectivity and cortical control. Consequently, in conjunction with linguistic expressions serving as approximations/'fossils' of the earliest stages of language, these cognitive disorders/conditions serve as confident proxies of brain changes in language evolution, helping us reconstruct certain crucial aspects of early prehistoric languages and cognition, as well as shed new light on the nature of the disorders. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.
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