Spoken or gestural origins?
In this week’s lecture and associated reading we are talking about the evolution of speech, the default (but not the only) modality for language. However, not everyone agrees that language started out in the vocal modality. There’s a prominent position in the literature that protolanguage may have been gestural, rather than vocal – by protolanguage we mean the communication system of ancestral hominids that is intermediary between non-linguistic communication and full-blown language. We’d like you to take one of two sides on this debate and either argue that protolanguage was gestural (Team 2) or vocal (Team 1), before (as usual) collectively agreeing on what the main strengths and weaknesses of the two positions are, what the key evidence is, and what you think the truth is. The debate will probably work best if team 2 go first, put the case for gestural protolanguage, and team 1 respond, but that’s up to your tutor and you!
The readings are below – as usual, these should be freely accessible from these links if you are on the University network. They are short, so read at least one team’s allocation. but ideally both.
Team 1: Perhaps surprisingly, there is no one article that puts the case for a vocal origin for language – you might like to ponder why that might be. So I am going to ask you to read two short articles – one is a recent review of the interesting features of great ape vocal behaviour, which I think is relevant; the other is a direct (very short) rebuttal to a different paper arguing for gestural origins (the original is by Michael Arbib and is far too long to ask you to read – but the response is also relevant to the Corballis article that Team 2 are reading and should give you some ammo). The papers are: Slocombe, K. (2012). Have we underestimated great ape vocal capacities? In K. R. Gibson & M. Tallerman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution (pp. 90-96). Oxford: Oxford University Press. And: Seyfarth, R. M. (2005). Continuities in vocal communication argue against a gestural origin of language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 144-145.
Team 2: Corballis, M. C. (2010). The gestural origins of language. WIREs Cognitive Science, 1, 2-7.
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