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How the Brain Got Language – Towards a New Road Map
Benjamins Current Topics
issn 1874-0081
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Volume 112
How the Brain Got Language – Towards a New Road Map
Edited by Michael A. Arbib
These materials were previously published in Interaction Studies 19:1/2 (2018).
How the Brain Got Language –
Towards a New Road Map
Edited by
Michael A. Arbib
University of California at San Diego, La Jolla
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/bct.112
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2020023476 (print) / 2020023477 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 0762 3 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6067 3 (e-book)
© 2020 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Introduction
Introducing the Volume: “How the brain got language:
Towards a new road map” 1
Michael A. Arbib
An Old Road Map to Draw Upon
Computational challenges of evolving the language-ready brain:
1. From manual action to protosign 7
Michael A. Arbib
Computational challenges of evolving the language-ready brain:
2. Building towards neurolinguistics 22
Michael A. Arbib
Starting from the Macaque
Reflections on the differential organization of mirror neuron systems for
hand and mouth and their role in the evolution of communication in
primates 38
Gino Coudé and Pier Francesco Ferrari
Plasticity, innateness, and the path to language in the primate brain:
Comparing macaque, chimpanzee and human circuitry for visuomotor
integration 54
Erin Hecht
Voice, gesture and working memory in the emergence of speech 70
Francisco Aboitiz
Bringing in Emotion
Relating the evolution of Music-Readiness and Language-Readiness
within the context of comparative neuroprimatology 86
Uwe Seifert
vi How the Brain Got Language: Towards a New Road Map
Why do we want to talk? Evolution of neural substrates of emotion and
social cognition 102
Katerina Semendeferi
Mind the gap – moving beyond the dichotomy between intentional
gestures and emotional facial and vocal signals of nonhuman primates 121
Katja Liebal and Linda Oña
Turn-taking and Prosociality
From sharing food to sharing information: Cooperative breeding and
language evolution 136
Judith Burkart, Eloisa Guerreiro Martins, Fabia Miss and
Yvonne Zürcher
Social manipulation, turn-taking and cooperation in apes: Implications
for the evolution of language-based interaction in humans 151
Federico Rossano
Language origins: Fitness consequences, platform of trust, cooperation,
and turn-taking 167
Sławomir Wacewicz and Przemysław Żywiczyński
Imitation, Pantomime and Development
The evolutionary roots of human imitation, action understanding and
symbols 183
Masako Myowa-Yamakoshi
Pantomime and imitation in great apes: Implications for reconstructing
the evolution of language 200
Anne E. Russon
From action to spoken and signed language through gesture: Some basic
developmental issues for a discussion on the evolution of the human
language-ready brain 216
Virginia Volterra, Olga Capirci, Pasquale Rinaldi and Laura Sparaci
Praxis, symbol and language: Developmental, ecological and linguistic
issues 239
Chris Sinha
Table of contents vii
Action, Tool Making and Language
Archaeology and the evolutionary neuroscience of language: The
technological pedagogy hypothesis 256
Dietrich Stout
Tracing the evolutionary trajectory of verbal working memory with
neuro-archaeology 272
Shelby S. Putt and Sobanawartiny Wijeakumar
From actions to events: Communicating through language and gesture 289
James Pustejovsky
Meaning and Grammar Emerging
From evolutionarily conserved frontal regions for sequence processing to
human innovations for syntax 318
Benjamin Wilson and Christopher I. Petkov
The evolution of enhanced conceptual complexity and of Broca’s area:
Language preadaptations 336
P. Thomas Schoenemann
Mental travels and the cognitive basis of language 352
Michael C. Corballis
The Road Map
The comparative neuroprimatology 2018 (CNP-2018) road map for
research on How the Brain Got Language 370
Michael A. Arbib, Francisco Aboitiz, Judith M. Burkart,
Michael Corballis, Gino Coudé, Erin Hecht, Katja Liebal,
Masako Myowa-Yamakoshi, James Pustejovsky, Shelby Putt,
Federico Rossano, Anne E. Russon, P. Thomas Schoenemann,
Uwe Seifert, Katerina Semendeferi, Chris Sinha, Dietrich Stout,
Virginia Volterra, Sławomir Wacewicz and Benjamin Wilson
Index 389
Introduction
Introducing the Volume
“How the brain got language:
Towards a new road map”
Michael A. Arbib
This volume is based on presentations and discussion at a workshop entitled
“How the Brain Got Language: Towards a New Road Map.” Unifying themes
include the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in
monkeys, apes and humans, and an EvoDevoSocio framework for approach-
ing biological and cultural evolution within a shared perspective. The final
article of the volume builds on the previous papers to present “The Comparative
Neuroprimatology 2018 (CNP-2018) Road Map for Research on How the
Brain Got Language.”
Comparative Neuroprimatology and the EvoDevoSocio Perspective
The Workshop “How the Brain Got Language: Towards a New Road Map” was
held in La Jolla, California, on August 29–31, 2017 (Michael A. Arbib, Organizer).
Drafts of 21 papers were prepared prior to the Workshop which itself was orga-
nized to combine short presentations of key ideas in the papers with lengthy dis-
cussions integrating across multiple themes. The versions of those papers pub-
lished here reflect feedback from the Workshop and subsequent external reviews.
Each starts with an introduction that makes clear the aspects of language (or pre-
cursors thereof) whose evolution will be the target of the article, and outlines the
methods to be used. The final section is titled “Toward a New Road Map” and
presents “via points” (some more speculative than others) for the new map, along
with prescriptions for future research to address them. These set the stage for “The
Comparative Neuroprimatology 2018 (CNP-2018) Road Map for Research on
How the Brain Got Language” that is published as the final article in the volume.
There are many approaches to the study of language evolution, but the
Workshop title makes explicit the concern with the brain mechanisms that support
language. Moreover, we adopted the framework of “comparative neuroprimatol-
ogy” – assessing relevant data and theories concerning the brains, behaviors and
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.112.01arb
© 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company
