Autors:
Sergio Balari & Guillermo LorenzoTítol:
Evo-Devo of language and cognition. In L. Nuño de la Rosa & Gerd B. Müller, eds. Evolutionary Developmental Biology. A Reference Guide.Editorial: Springer
ISBN13: 978-3-319-33038-9
Més informació
Historically, the task of disentangling the evolutionary origins of language has been obscured by a number of difficulties that may be diagnosed as the problem of ontology (what the evolved phenotype is), the problem of computation (what kinds of cognitive processes subserve linguistic activity), the problem of representation (what is the nature of the objects of computation), the problem of homology/novelty (how language relates with animal cognition at large), and the problem of selection (how language has been fixed as a species-typical trait). While assuming that facets of these problems remain as recalcitrant as ever, this chapter explains how the adoption of the developmental perspective offers the promise of gaining a degree of explanatory accuracy hitherto unknown in this field of specialization.
