The evolution of language / W. Tecumseh Fitch.
Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, expos...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press,
2010.
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Table of Contents:
- The lay of the land. Language from a biological perspective ; Evolution : consensus and controversy ; Language ; Animal cognition and communication
- Meet the ancestors. Meet the ancestors ; The LCA : our last common ancestor with chimpanzees ; Hominid paleontology and archaeology
- The evolution of speech. The evolution of the human vocal tract ; The evolution of vocal control : the neural basis for spoken language ; Models of the evolution of speech and phonology
- Evaluating phylogenetic models of language evolution. Historical overview : Western theories of language origin before Darwin ; Lexical protolanguage ; Signs before speech : gestural protolanguage theories ; Musical protolanguage ; Conclusions and prospects.