Vocal or gestural origins?
In this week’s lecture we looked at communication in non-human animals, with a focus on vocal communication and the (implicit) assumption that studying vocal communication in other species will give us the best insights into traits which are homologous and analogous to human language. However, not everyone agrees that language started out in the vocal modality, or that vocal communication in other species is particularly relevant to understanding language origins. 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 read a paper from each side of this debate and discuss the main strengths and weaknesses of the two positions are, what the key evidence is, and what you think the truth is.
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 do the reading for at least one side of the debate but ideally both.
Vocal origins paper(s): 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 to cover this. 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 below). 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.
Gestural origins paper: Corballis, M. C. (2010). The gestural origins of language. WIREs Cognitive Science, 1, 2-7.
Thinking about the following questions might help you as you read the papers and discuss with your tutorial group:
For the vocal origins papers:
For the gestural origins paper:
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