Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 363, Issue 1509, Pages 3591-3603Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0145
Keywords
language; communication; language faculty; cultural evolution; biological evolution
Categories
Funding
- British Academy
- NWO
- Economic and Social Research Council [RES-451-25-4099-A, RES-451-25-4099] Funding Source: researchfish
- ESRC [RES-451-25-4099, RES-451-25-4099-A] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Human language is unique among the communication systems of the natural world: it is socially learned and, as a consequence of its recursively compositional structure, offers open-ended communicative potential. The structure of this communication system can be explained as a consequence of the evolution of the human biological capacity for language or the cultural evolution of language itself. We argue, supported by a formal model, that an explanatory account that involves some role for cultural evolution has profound implications for our understanding of the biological evolution of the language faculty: under a number of reasonable scenarios, cultural evolution can shield the language faculty from selection, such that strongly constraining language-specific learning biases are unlikely to evolve. We therefore argue that language is best seen as a consequence of cultural evolution in populations with a weak and/or domain-general language faculty.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available