The Evolution of Speech
The purpose of this essay is to identify the evolutionary evidence of speech. The articles reviewed in this paper affirm the evidence of evolution of speech. Much is unknown about the evolution of speech, however, fossil evidence points to adaptations for speech appearing between 1.5 million and 500,000 years ago. Fossil evidence for the evolution of speech is shown in the earliest hominins to one of our well known ancestors, the homo erectus. There are differences between bone structure and hard tissues of living modern humans to those of chimpanzees and bonobos (Boer, 2005). Speech is a unique trait that only humans so far have developed. This trait was most likely a prerequisite for the development of culture within human society. Throughout society, it has been shown that speech can vary from being extremely complex to astonishingly simple. Finally, the way infants acquire speech has become more well known helping provide the starting point of evolution of speech.
The physical aspect of language and over time has become an interesting topic of discussion because it is difficult to track its evolution. Adaptations of speech such as the vocal tract and breathing control have left traces in fossil records that continue to be studied to this day. The capacities of speech acoustics and perception are a crucial step in the recognition of vocal tract resonances, or formants in human speech. Tract resonaances function as a bandpass filter, taking whatever sound is emanated in the larynx and shaping it into peaks and valleys (Fitch, 2000). Although all mammals have similar production of sound, only humans make heavy usage of the formants. The study of this has been investigated even to the youngest of inf...
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The aim of the present essay is to evaluate the ability of two theories, namely the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Dynamical Systems theory (DST), to explain the issues underlying the lexical development and vocabulary spurt. This essay provides an overview of both theories and compares their strengths and weaknesses in their explanation of lexical development, supported by empirical evidence. Both ANN and DST were formed in opposition to the symbol system view of cognition (Smith & Samuelson, 2003). Despite acknowledging that some of the underlying mechanisms may be innate, they see lexical development as an emergent process resulting from early social interaction and exposure to linguistic input (Poveda & Vellido, 2006). The main aim of ANN is to construct computational models of various cognitive processes based on biological details of neural brain functioning (Poveda & Vellido, 2006)....
Hill, Jane H., P. J. Mistry, and Lyle Campbell. The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright. Berlin [etc.: Mouton De Gruyter, 1998. Print.
The mind of an infant and toddler is a sponge to language. Whether or not the child is able to speak, their brain is rehearsing and affirming the linguistic structures they hear, and the period of baby talk—called “babbling”—is a crucial time of experimentation with sound. During this time, the child will babble while in social situations in order to see which phonological structures receive positive responses from their parents—i.e. which combinations of sounds elicit responses. If a child cannot hear the sounds that their language offers, the child does not have the opportunity to babble. A child with significant hearing loss will still make sounds in infancy, but will quickly cease due to the lack of response and the fact that they cannot hear the sounds they are making and so cannot affirm them for themselves.
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9. Research on the language capabilities of apes clearly demonstrates that they have the capacity to:
My younger brother used to ask questions all the time about how certain words were invented. “Who came up with the word sky? Why did they call it that?” were some of many questions I was asked when we were growing up. I always had to tell him that I had no idea or that it just happened. What Jonathan was questioning is a concept that linguists and anthropologists are still trying to answer today. The evolution of language is an incredibly difficult process to determine. Robbins Burling has written an entire book about, The Talking Ape, and still cannot definitively prove that the theories he presents are the exact way that language developed. However, Burling points out a plethora of evidence that points in such a direction. One piece of
This article explores Neanderthal cognition through speech. The author gives definition about what language is and how is it formed in the first half of the article. Then Johansson discusses Neanderthal speech ability. He concluded that Neanderthal did have the ability to voluntarily speak, but he could not definitively conclude on how much and whether or not they actually spoke a language or just made grammatical sounds. His conclusion is based on archaeological evidence such as one Neanderthal hyoid bone being and genetic evidence that is like to the capability of producing speech.
As one grows older, we start forming, or try to form, these sounds and gestures into words. Human communication can be verbal, using words or non-verbal, such as cries, sighs, laughter, and gestures. During the evolution of vocal learners, once the striatum got connected to other regions necessary for vocal learning to occur, FOXP2 mutated in humans to become human specific and this might have affected neural transmission (Scharff & Petri, 2011. Pg. 2134). “FOXP2 is among the genes likely to have undergone positive selection in human evolution, based on the ratio of non-synonymous to synonymous nucleotide changes in genes for which sequence information was available for humans, chimpanzees, and other species” (Preuss, 2012. Pg. 10712). “FOXP2 transcription factor and the regulatory molecular network that it interacts with may be part of a molecular toolkit that is essential for sensory-guided motor learning in cortico-striatal and cortico-cerebral circuits in humans, mice and songbirds and maybe even invertebrates” (Scharff & Petri, 2011. Pg. 2125). The protein has been studied with the vocals of songbirds, mice, and language between chimpanzees to further understand the function of FOXP2 in humans. This gene undergoes an alternative from of maturation in all species examined to date, and because of this, it gives rise to different protein isoforms which seem to play different
Although my previous two papers concerned the interplay between neurobiology and genetics, I have not quite worked the issue out to my satisfaction nor to the depth which I think the topic warrants. Therefore, I will again tackle this complex set of biological questions pertaining to the ways in which our genes shape our brains. My first paper dealt with the nature-nurture debate and its relation to the brain-behavior problem raised in class. Then, in the second paper, I moved on to a narrower issue in neurogenetics; I wrote about Fragile X Syndrome and the ways in which a specific genetic mutation can drastically change behavioral output. I would now like to enlarge the scope of this outlook on genes and the brain to encompass the topic of the evolution of the human brain. Throughout the semester, as we covered sensory input and motor output, a single neuron and complex motor symphonies, car sickness and dreaming, I have left class wondering: how are these behaviors, from the micro-actions of a neuron to the macro-actions of a human being, adaptive? How did large brains and extensive nervous systems come to be selected for? And why have humans, alone, acquired them? Some aspects of these questions seem to reside in the realm of the paleontologists, others, in the realm of the neurogeneticists. They do, however, seem to me to be central to neurobiology. For it is drilled into us that form connotes function, and, perhaps, if we come to understand how and why the human nervous system was formed, we will have a richer understanding of how and why it functions as it does.
The purpose of this paper to examine the evolution of the human brain that distinguishes them from other species based on the traits that humans possess: such as language, emotional complexity and consciousness. The significance of traits are due to adaptations in humans to promote the survival of our ancestors. Professor Hamilton (2012) discusses that the evolution of the human brain starts with the idea of the Triune brain, proposed by MacLean, whereby the human brain is made up of three parts: Reptilian, Paleo-mammalian, and Neo-mammalian. Animals with the neo-mammalian brain have a more complex brain compared to the other parts, since this is where the neocortex evolved. Humans essentially have this higher brain function which is responsible for our ability to think, make decisions, promote agency, and the ability to relate with each other. This concept fits into the evolutionary process since it shows how the complex the brain has become through evolutionary processes. In essence, as humans, we “have a rich, evidence-based understanding of our behavior that can lead us to plan to be ‘better’ or ‘more successful’ people” according to Professor Hamilton (2012). Thus, shows how evolution plays a significance in understanding human behavior and comparing humans with other species.
There are three main theories of child language acquisition; Cognitive Theory, Imitation and Positive Reinforcement, and Innateness of Certain Linguistic Features (Linguistics 201). All three theories offer a substantial amount of proof and experiments, but none of them have been proven entirely correct. The search for how children acquire their native language in such a short period of time has been studied for many centuries. In a changing world, it is difficult to pinpoint any definite specifics of language because of the diversity and modification throughout thousands of millions of years.
... (p. 116). In her article, “Babies Prove Sound Learners,” Sohn (2008), states, “Such studies show that, up to about 6 months of age, babies can recognize all the sounds that make up all the languages in the world” (para.24). B.K. Skinner suggest that the materialization of language is the result of imitation and reinforcement. According to Craig and Dunn (2010), “Language development is linked to cognitive development that, in turn, depends on the development of the brain, on physical and perceptual abilities, and on experiences. Biological and social factors also jointly influence the early development of emotion and personality” (p. 117). In her article, A natural history of early language experience. Hart (2000), states, “Talking is important for children, because complexity of what children say influences the complexity of other people’s response” (para. 1).
In this part, the writer will point out the importance of the biological and neural foundation of language learning by discussing the following :First, the brain anatomy. Second, l...
Language acquisition is perhaps one of the most debated issues of human development. Various theories and approaches have emerged over the years to study and analyse this developmental process. One factor contributing to the differing theories is the debate between nature v’s nurture. A question commonly asked is: Do humans a...