The Origin Of Speech

Author : Peter F. MacNeilage
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199581580

Get Book

The Origin of Speech by Peter F. MacNeilage Pdf

This book explores the origin and evolution of speech. The human speech system is in a league of its own in the animal kingdom and its possession dwarfs most other evolutionary achievements. During every second of speech we unconsciously use about 225 distinct muscle actions. To investigate the evolutionary origins of this prodigious ability, Peter MacNeilage draws on work in linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior. He puts forward a neo-Darwinian account of speech as a process of descent in which ancestral vocal capabilities became modified in response to natural selection pressures for more efficient communication. His proposals include the crucial observation that present-day infants learning to produce speech reveal constraints that were acting on our ancestors as they invented new words long ago. This important and original investigation integrates the latest research on modern speech capabilities, their acquisition, and their neurobiology, including the issues surrounding the cerebral hemispheric specialization for speech. Written in a clear style with minimal recourse to jargon the book will interest a wide range of readers in cognitive, neuro-, and evolutionary science, as well as all those seeking to understand the nature and evolution of speech and human communication.

Author : Isaac E. Mozeson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2011-02
Category : Human evolution
ISBN : 0979261805

Get Book

The Origin of Speeches by Isaac E. Mozeson Pdf

The Origin of Speeches begins by recapping the history of our views about the source of language. It then debunks the errors that infuse your dictionary, like those about how words in "unrelated" languages could only have identical sound and sense by "coincidence." It does so with both quality and quantity of data. The next chapters give anyone the skills to sleuth out the Edenic origin of any human word. One learns about letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and drop out. We discover how Edenics works much like other natural sciences, such as chemistry and physics. Like-sounding opposite words were certainly programmed, not pragmatically evolved. Our current academics and reference books consider the Tower of Babel account to be a quaint Genesis "myth." True, linguists now think there once WAS a universal human language, but they assume that it evolved chaotically, and that it also de-evolved naturally and chaotically over millennia. Now comes an epical book that documents the language of the earliest modern humans. Let's call them Adam and Eve, and let's call that global Mother Tongue "Edenic." Surely our current 6,000 languages grew from migrations and such, but this book proves that there was a "Big Bang" that diversified that special original, global language.

Author : Daniel L. Everett
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2017-11-07
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780871404770

Get Book

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention by Daniel L. Everett Pdf

How Language Began revolutionizes our understanding of the one tool that has allowed us to become the "lords of the planet." Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” (Tom Wolfe, Harper’s), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist today. Although fossil hunters and linguists have brought us closer to unearthing the true origins of language, Daniel Everett’s discoveries have upended the contemporary linguistic world, reverberating far beyond academic circles. While conducting field research in the Amazonian rainforest, Everett came across an age-old language nestled amongst a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Challenging long-standing principles in the field, Everett now builds on the theory that language was not intrinsic to our species. In order to truly understand its origins, a more interdisciplinary approach is needed—one that accounts as much for our propensity for culture as it does our biological makeup. Language began, Everett theorizes, with Homo Erectus, who catalyzed words through culturally invented symbols. Early humans, as their brains grew larger, incorporated gestures and voice intonations to communicate, all of which built on each other for 60,000 generations. Tracing crucial shifts and developments across the ages, Everett breaks down every component of speech, from harnessing control of more than a hundred respiratory muscles in the larynx and diaphragm, to mastering the use of the tongue. Moving on from biology to execution, Everett explores why elements such as grammar and storytelling are not nearly as critical to language as one might suspect. In the book’s final section, Cultural Evolution of Language, Everett takes the ever-debated “language gap” to task, delving into the chasm that separates “us” from “the animals.” He approaches the subject from various disciplines, including anthropology, neuroscience, and archaeology, to reveal that it was social complexity, as well as cultural, physiological, and neurological superiority, that allowed humans—with our clawless hands, breakable bones, and soft skin—to become the apex predator. How Language Began ultimately explains what we know, what we’d like to know, and what we likely never will know about how humans went from mere communication to language. Based on nearly forty years of fieldwork, Everett debunks long-held theories by some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to Chomsky. The result is an invaluable study of what makes us human.

Author : Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Publisher : Argo Books
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 1981
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0912148136

Get Book

The Origin of Speech by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Pdf

Author : William C. Stokoe
Publisher : Gallaudet University Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 156368103X

Get Book

Language in Hand by William C. Stokoe Pdf

Integrating current findings in linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology, Stokoe fashions a closely reasoned argument that suggests how our human ancestors' powers of observation and natural hand movements could have evolved into signed morphemes.".

Author : Tom Wolfe
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 123 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2016-08-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780316404648

Get Book

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe Pdf

The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech -- not evolution -- is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements. From Alfred Russel Wallace, the Englishman who beat Darwin to the theory of natural selection but later renounced it, and through the controversial work of modern-day anthropologist Daniel Everett, who defies the current wisdom that language is hard-wired in humans, Wolfe examines the solemn, long-faced, laugh-out-loud zig-zags of Darwinism, old and Neo, and finds it irrelevant here in the Kingdom of Speech.

Author : Peter F. MacNeilage
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781461382027

Get Book

The Production of Speech by Peter F. MacNeilage Pdf

This monograph arose from a conference on the Production of Speech held at the University of Texas at Austin on April 28-30, 1981. It was sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Science, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Linguistics and Psychology Departments. The conference was the second in a series of conferences on human experimental psychology: the first, held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Psychology Department, resulted in publication of the monograph Neural Mechanisms in Behavior, D. McFadden (Ed.), Springer-Verlag, 1980. The choice of the particular topic of the second conference was motivated by the belief that the state of knowledge of speech production had recently reached a critical mass, and that a good deal was to be gained from bringing together the foremost researchers in this field. The benefits were the opportunity for the participants to compare notes on their common problems, the publication of a monograph giving a comprehensive state-of-the-art picture of this research area, and the provision of enormous intellectual stimulus for local students of this topic.

Author : Edward Sapir
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2014-03-20
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108063784

Get Book

Language by Edward Sapir Pdf

A seminal 1921 work by the linguist Edward Sapir, outlining his influential ideas and hypotheses on language and its speakers.

Author : Robin Dunbar
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2011-04-07
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780571265183

Get Book

Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language by Robin Dunbar Pdf

Did mankind evolve unusually large brains simply in order to gossip? Primates differ from other animals by the intensity of their social relationships, by the amount of time they spend grooming one another. Not just a matter of hygiene, grooming is all about cementing bonds, making friends and influencing your fellow ape. Early humans, in their characteristic large groups of 150 or so, would have had to spend almost half their time in mutual grooming. Instead, Professor Robin Dunbar argues, they evolved a more efficient mechanism: language. It seems there is nothing idle about idle chatter. Having a good gossip ensures that a dynamic group - of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, workmates - remains cohesive.Men and women 'gossip' equally, but men tend to talk about themselves, while women talk more about other people, working to strengthen the female-female relationships that underpin both human and primate societies. Until now, most anthropologists have assumed that language developed in male-male relationships, during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's intriguing research suggests that, to the contrary, language evolved among women.

Author : Géza Révész
Publisher : Greenwood
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : UOM:39076007039162

Get Book

The Origins and Prehistory of Language by Géza Révész Pdf

Author : Francisco Aboitiz
Publisher : Springer
Page : 505 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2017-07-12
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781137540607

Get Book

A Brain for Speech by Francisco Aboitiz Pdf

This book discusses evolution of the human brain, the origin of speech and language. It covers past and present perspectives on the contentious issue of the acquisition of the language capacity. Divided into two parts, this insightful work covers several characteristics of the human brain including the language-specific network, the size of the human brain, its lateralization of functions and interhemispheric integration, in particular the phonological loop. Aboitiz argues that it is the phonological loop that allowed us to increase our vocal memory capacity and to generate a shared semantic space that gave rise to modern language. The second part examines the neuroanatomy of the monkey brain, vocal learning birds like parrots, emergent evidence of vocal learning capacities in mammals, mirror neurons, and the ecological and social context in which speech evolved in our early ancestors. This book's interdisciplinary topic will appeal to scholars of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, biology and history.

Author : Jean Aitchison
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2000-05-04
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0521785715

Get Book

The Seeds of Speech by Jean Aitchison Pdf

Clear and non-technical overview of the history of language development by popular author. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Author : Steven Pinker
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2010-12-14
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780062032522

Get Book

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker Pdf

"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

Author : Jacob Grimm
Publisher : Brill Archive
Page : 52 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Langage et langues
ISBN : 9004070583

Get Book

On the Origin of Language by Jacob Grimm Pdf

Author : David F. Armstrong,Sherman E. Wilcox
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2007-04-19
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0198036914

Get Book

The Gestural Origin of Language by David F. Armstrong,Sherman E. Wilcox Pdf

In The Gestural Origin of Language, Sherman Wilcox and David Armstrong use evidence from and about sign languages to explore the origins of language as we know it today. According to their model, it is sign, not spoken languages, that is the original mode of human communication. The authors demonstrate that modern language is derived from practical actions and gestures that were increasingly recognized as having the potential to represent, and hence to communicate. In other words, the fundamental ability that allows us to use language is our ability to use pictures or icons, rather than linguistic symbols. Evidence from the human fossil record supports the authors' claim by showing that we were anatomically able to produce gestures and signs before we were able to speak fluently. Although speech evolved later as a secondary linguistic communication device that eventually replaced sign language as the primary mode of communication, speech has never entirely replaced signs and gestures. As the first comprehensive attempt to trace the origin of grammar to gesture, this volume will be an invaluable resource for students and professionals in psychology, linguistics, and philosophy.