ReviewPrimates; journal of primatology2022
The evolution of hierarchical structure building capacity for language and music: a bottom-up perspective.
Review in Primates; journal of primatology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Embodying Time in the Brain: A Multi-Dimensional Neuroimaging Meta-Analysis of 95 Duration Processing Studies.Neuropsychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Anatomically distinct cortical tracking of music and speech by slow (1-8Hz) and fast (70-120Hz) oscillatory activity.PloS one · 2025Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Hierarchical structures emerge from the cultural transmission: an iterated learning experiment using a non-linguistic task.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2023Article
- Hierarchical object combination and tool use in the great apes and human children.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Article
- On the representation of hierarchical structure: Revisiting Darwin's musical protolanguage.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Environment-Friendly Vocal Music Ecological Education: Sustainable Development of Vocal Music Education from the Perspective of Building.Journal of environmental and public health · 2022Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
A central property of human language is its hierarchical structure. Humans can flexibly combine elements to build a hierarchical structure expressing rich semantics. A hierarchical structure is also considered as playing a key role in many other human cognitive domains. In music, auditory-motor events are combined into hierarchical pitch and/or rhythm structure expressing affect. How did such a hierarchical structure building capacity evolve? This paper investigates this question from a bottom-up perspective based on a set of action-related components as a shared basis underlying cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates and humans. Especially, I argue that the evolution of hierarchical structure building capacity for language and music is tractable for comparative evolutionary study once we focus on the gradual elaboration of shared brain architecture: the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits for hierarchical control of goal-directed action and the dorsal pathways for hierarchical internal models. I suggest that this gradual elaboration of the action-related brain architecture in the context of vocal control and tool-making went hand in hand with amplification of working memory, and made the brain ready for hierarchical structure building in language and music.
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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.