Emergence and development of human language

Abstract

I will introduce the topic of this paper by demarcating the notion of “language”, as a necessary first step in order to know what we mean when dealing with its appearance and development in the human species. In a first approximation, I’ll highlight the fact of being a human capacity with an intermediary function between a physical signal (i.e., sounds) and an intentional state of the individual (i.e., meanings). Such an intermediary function and its associated features (arbitrariness, symbolism, compositionality, productivity, systematicity) require a multidisciplinary treatment with different levels of explanation (linguistic, psychological, neurobiological) that give rise to corresponding models of that human language capacity. I’ll then review those models and make them converge into the appropriate frame of reference –characteristic of the cognitive science– for dealing with the main topic of this paper. It will be pursued along two sections, one devoted to the acquisition of language by the individual and its development from an ontogenetic perspective; and the other just devoted to language appearance in the evolutionary history of the species and, hence, to its phylogenetic development. I’ll conclude by underlining the natural (innate for its most part) and specialized character of the human faculty of language, together with its specificity as a unique property of the human species, which points to its relatively sudden appearance and to the possibility of facing a genuine example of evolutionary discontinuity.