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Bickel B, Giraud AL, Zuberbühler K, van Schaik CP. Language follows a distinct mode of extra-genomic evolution. Phys Life Rev 2024; 50:211-225. [PMID: 39153248 DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2024.08.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/01/2024] [Accepted: 08/02/2024] [Indexed: 08/19/2024]
Abstract
As one of the most specific, yet most diverse of human behaviors, language is shaped by both genomic and extra-genomic evolution. Sharing methods and models between these modes of evolution has significantly advanced our understanding of language and inspired generalized theories of its evolution. Progress is hampered, however, by the fact that the extra-genomic evolution of languages, i.e. linguistic evolution, maps only partially to other forms of evolution. Contrasting it with the biological evolution of eukaryotes and the cultural evolution of technology as the best understood models, we show that linguistic evolution is special by yielding a stationary dynamic rather than stable solutions, and that this dynamic allows the use of language change for social differentiation while maintaining its global adaptiveness. Linguistic evolution furthermore differs from technological evolution by requiring vertical transmission, allowing the reconstruction of phylogenies; and it differs from eukaryotic biological evolution by foregoing a genotype vs phenotype distinction, allowing deliberate and biased change. Recognising these differences will improve our empirical tools and open new avenues for analyzing how linguistic, cultural, and biological evolution interacted with each other when language emerged in the hominin lineage. Importantly, our framework will help to cope with unprecedented scientific and ethical challenges that presently arise from how rapid cultural evolution impacts language, most urgently from interventional clinical tools for language disorders, potential epigenetic effects of technology on language, artificial intelligence and linguistic communicators, and global losses of linguistic diversity and identity. Beyond language, the distinctions made here allow identifying variation in other forms of biological and cultural evolution, developing new perspectives for empirical research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Balthasar Bickel
- Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich, Switzerland.
| | - Anne-Lise Giraud
- Department of Basic Neurosciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Institut de l'Audition, Institut Pasteur, INSERM, Université Paris Cité, France
| | - Klaus Zuberbühler
- Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich, Switzerland; Institute of Biology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland; School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
| | - Carel P van Schaik
- Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich, Switzerland; Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Science, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, Konstanz, Germany
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Oesch N. Social Brain Perspectives on the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience of Human Language. Brain Sci 2024; 14:166. [PMID: 38391740 PMCID: PMC10886718 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci14020166] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/16/2024] [Revised: 01/30/2024] [Accepted: 02/03/2024] [Indexed: 02/24/2024] Open
Abstract
Human language and social cognition are two key disciplines that have traditionally been studied as separate domains. Nonetheless, an emerging view suggests an alternative perspective. Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of the social brain hypothesis (thesis of the evolution of brain size and intelligence), the social complexity hypothesis (thesis of the evolution of communication), and empirical research from comparative animal behavior, human social behavior, language acquisition in children, social cognitive neuroscience, and the cognitive neuroscience of language, it is argued that social cognition and language are two significantly interconnected capacities of the human species. Here, evidence in support of this view reviews (1) recent developmental studies on language learning in infants and young children, pointing to the important crucial benefits associated with social stimulation for youngsters, including the quality and quantity of incoming linguistic information, dyadic infant/child-to-parent non-verbal and verbal interactions, and other important social cues integral for facilitating language learning and social bonding; (2) studies of the adult human brain, suggesting a high degree of specialization for sociolinguistic information processing, memory retrieval, and comprehension, suggesting that the function of these neural areas may connect social cognition with language and social bonding; (3) developmental deficits in language and social cognition, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), illustrating a unique developmental profile, further linking language, social cognition, and social bonding; and (4) neural biomarkers that may help to identify early developmental disorders of language and social cognition. In effect, the social brain and social complexity hypotheses may jointly help to describe how neurotypical children and adults acquire language, why autistic children and adults exhibit simultaneous deficits in language and social cognition, and why nonhuman primates and other organisms with significant computational capacities cannot learn language. But perhaps most critically, the following article argues that this and related research will allow scientists to generate a holistic profile and deeper understanding of the healthy adult social brain while developing more innovative and effective diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments for maladies and deficits also associated with the social brain.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nathan Oesch
- Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada
- Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6, Canada
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Sayigh LS, El Haddad N, Tyack PL, Janik VM, Wells RS, Jensen FH. Bottlenose dolphin mothers modify signature whistles in the presence of their own calves. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2023; 120:e2300262120. [PMID: 37364108 PMCID: PMC10318978 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2300262120] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/05/2023] [Accepted: 05/09/2023] [Indexed: 06/28/2023] Open
Abstract
Human caregivers interacting with children typically modify their speech in ways that promote attention, bonding, and language acquisition. Although this "motherese," or child-directed communication (CDC), occurs in a variety of human cultures, evidence among nonhuman species is very rare. We looked for its occurrence in a nonhuman mammalian species with long-term mother-offspring bonds that is capable of vocal production learning, the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Dolphin signature whistles provide a unique opportunity to test for CDC in nonhuman animals, because we are able to quantify changes in the same vocalizations produced in the presence or absence of calves. We analyzed recordings made during brief catch-and-release events of wild bottlenose dolphins in waters near Sarasota Bay, Florida, United States, and found that females produced signature whistles with significantly higher maximum frequencies and wider frequency ranges when they were recorded with their own dependent calves vs. not with them. These differences align with the higher fundamental frequencies and wider pitch ranges seen in human CDC. Our results provide evidence in a nonhuman mammal for changes in the same vocalizations when produced in the presence vs. absence of offspring, and thus strongly support convergent evolution of motherese, or CDC, in bottlenose dolphins. CDC may function to enhance attention, bonding, and vocal learning in dolphin calves, as it does in human children. Our data add to the growing body of evidence that dolphins provide a powerful animal model for studying the evolution of vocal learning and language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Laela S. Sayigh
- Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Falmouth, MA02543
- Hampshire College, Amherst, MA01002
| | - Nicole El Haddad
- Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Falmouth, MA02543
- Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, University of Milano Bicocca, Milano20126, Italy
| | - Peter L. Tyack
- Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Falmouth, MA02543
- Sea Mammal Research Unit, Scottish Oceans Institute, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, KY16 8LB, United Kingdom
| | - Vincent M. Janik
- Sea Mammal Research Unit, Scottish Oceans Institute, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, KY16 8LB, United Kingdom
| | - Randall S. Wells
- Chicago Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, c/o Mote Marine Laboratory, Sarasota, FL34236
| | - Frants H. Jensen
- Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Falmouth, MA02543
- Marine Mammal Research, Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University, Roskilde4000, Denmark
- Biology Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY13244
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Welch D, Reybrouck M, Podlipniak P. Meaning in Music Is Intentional, but in Soundscape It Is Not-A Naturalistic Approach to the Qualia of Sounds. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH 2022; 20:269. [PMID: 36612591 PMCID: PMC9819651 DOI: 10.3390/ijerph20010269] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/21/2022] [Revised: 12/14/2022] [Accepted: 12/21/2022] [Indexed: 06/17/2023]
Abstract
The sound environment and music intersect in several ways and the same holds true for the soundscape and our internal response to listening to music. Music may be part of a sound environment or take on some aspects of environmental sound, and therefore some of the soundscape response may be experienced alongside the response to the music. At a deeper level, coping with music, spoken language, and the sound environment may all have influenced our evolution, and the cognitive-emotional structures and responses evoked by all three sources of acoustic information may be, to some extent, the same. This paper distinguishes and defines the extent of our understanding about the interplay of external sound and our internal response to it in both musical and real-world environments. It takes a naturalistic approach to music/sound and music-listening/soundscapes to describe in objective terms some mechanisms of sense-making and interactions with the sounds. It starts from a definition of sound as vibrational and transferable energy that impinges on our body and our senses, with a dynamic tension between lower-level coping mechanisms and higher-level affective and cognitive functioning. In this way, we establish both commonalities and differences between musical responses and soundscapes. Future research will allow this understanding to grow and be refined further.
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Affiliation(s)
- David Welch
- Audiology Section, School of Population Health, University of Auckland, Auckland 2011, New Zealand
| | - Mark Reybrouck
- Faculty of Arts, University of Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
- Department of Art History, Musicology and Theater Studies, IPEM Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
| | - Piotr Podlipniak
- Institute of Musicology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, 61-712 Poznan, Poland
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Casillas M. Learning language in vivo. CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES 2022. [DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12469] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/06/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- Marisa Casillas
- Department of Comparative Human Development University of Chicago Chicago Illinois USA
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Pérez-Navarro J, Lallier M, Clark C, Flanagan S, Goswami U. Local Temporal Regularities in Child-Directed Speech in Spanish. JOURNAL OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND HEARING RESEARCH : JSLHR 2022; 65:3776-3788. [PMID: 36194778 DOI: 10.1044/2022_jslhr-22-00111] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/16/2023]
Abstract
PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. METHOD Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also read aloud (CDS vs. adult-directed speech [ADS]). We compared CDS and ADS speech productions using a spectrotemporal model (Leong & Goswami, 2015), obtaining three temporal metrics: (a) distribution of modulation energy, (b) temporal regularity of stressed syllables, and (c) syllable rate. RESULTS CDS was characterized by (a) significantly greater modulation energy in the lower frequencies (0.5-4 Hz), (b) more regular rhythmic occurrence of stressed syllables, and (c) a slower syllable rate than ADS, across both spontaneous and read conditions. DISCUSSION CDS is characterized by a robust local temporal organization (i.e., within utterances) with amplitude modulation bands aligning with delta and theta electrophysiological frequency bands, respectively, showing greater phase synchronization than in ADS, facilitating parsing of stress units and syllables. These temporal regularities, together with the slower rate of production of CDS, might support the automatic extraction of phonological units in speech and hence support the phonological development of children. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21210893.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jose Pérez-Navarro
- BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
- University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
| | - Marie Lallier
- BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
| | - Catherine Clark
- BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
- University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
| | - Sheila Flanagan
- Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
| | - Usha Goswami
- Centre for Neuroscience in Education, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
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The Ontogeny of Vocal Sequences: Insights from a Newborn Wild Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). INT J PRIMATOL 2022. [DOI: 10.1007/s10764-022-00321-y] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/15/2022]
Abstract
AbstractObservations of early vocal behaviours in non-human primates (hereafter primates) are important for direct comparisons between human and primate vocal development. However, direct observations of births and perinatal behaviour in wild primates are rare, and the initial stages of behavioural ontogeny usually remain undocumented. Here, we report direct observations of the birth of a wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in Budongo Forest, Uganda, including the behaviour of the mother and other group members. We monitored the newborn’s vocal behaviour for approximately 2 hours and recorded 70 calls. We categorised the vocalisations both qualitatively, using conventional call descriptions, and quantitatively, using cluster and discriminant acoustic analyses. We found evidence for acoustically distinct vocal units, produced both in isolation and in combination, including sequences akin to adult pant hoots, a vocal utterance regarded as the most complex vocal signal produced by this species. We concluded that chimpanzees possess the capacity to produce vocal sequences composed of different call types from birth, albeit in rudimentary forms. Our observations are in line with the idea that primate vocal repertoires are largely present from birth, with fine acoustic structures undergoing ontogenetic processes. Our study provides rare and valuable empirical data on perinatal behaviours in wild primates.
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