ArticleFrontiers in psychology2024
How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pros and cons of sociality across ecological niches: a swarm robotics approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Swearing as a catalyst of technological development.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Bridging consciousness to our narrative brain: evolutionary insights.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
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Abstract
This paper aims to re-examine the problem of the emergence of present-day languages from the specific perspective of the self-domestication account of human evolution. According to this view, our species went through an evolutionary process that parallels the changes experienced by domesticated mammals. Relying on evidence of diverse kind (from paleogenetic to clinical), the paper argues that our self-domestication might have potentiated the cognitive and behavioral features of the human phenotype with an impact on language acquisition and use. Specifically, it might have facilitated the creation of the cultural niche that favors the complexification of languages via a cultural mechanism. The paper further proposes a model of language complexification in the past under the effects of human self-domestication, including the complexification of the structural aspects of language (grammar, prosody, and semantics) and the potentiation of its functional properties (pragmatics). The paper concludes with some suggestions for any future research aimed to test and improve this view.
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