The Social Origins of Language (Duke Institute for Brain Sciences Series)

Petkov and Benjamin Wilson, and Peter Godfrey-Smith, each of whom draw on their respective expertise in linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Arnold, Christopher I. In other words, social communication is the biological foundation upon which evolution built more complex language.Seyfarth and Cheney’s argument serves as a jumping-off point for responses by John McWhorter, Ljiljana Progovac, Jennifer E. Michael Platt provides an introduction, Seyfarth and Cheney a concluding essay. They argue that key elements of human language emerged from the need to decipher and encode complex social interactions. How human language evolved from the need for social communicationThe origins of human language remain hotly debated. The Social Origins of Language provides a novel perspective on this question and charts a new path toward its resolution.In the lead essay, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney draw on their decades-long pioneering research on monkeys and baboons in the wild to show how primates use vocalizations to modulate social dynamics. Despite growing appreciation of cognitive and neural continuity betwe

Platt is the James S. . Michael L. Robert M. They are the coauthors of How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species and Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Seyfarth is professor of psychology and Dorothy L. Riepe University Professor of neuroscience, psychology, and marketing at the

From the Back Cover"Focused around a central essay by Seyfarth and Cheney, with five commentary essays by experts from relevant fields, this book is original in its specific linking of key generative features of language with the brain mechanisms and social functions of nonhuman primate communication. It will be read widely within primatology and language evolution circles."--Thom Scott-Phillips, author of Speaking Our Minds"There is no doubt in my mind that this book will attract attention and will be widely referred to."--Cedric Boeckx, Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies