Elizabeth Bates and the Search for the Roots of Human Language

specialists in linguistics maintain that although grammars differ from one another, their basic forms – which Noam Chomsky calls their deep structures – are universal (i.e. at the deepest neuropsychic level, there exists a universal [or ‘archetypal’] grammar on which all individual grammars are based); an entirely new discipline, sociobiology, has

lors, penser était une exaptation – un mécanisme qui a originellement évolué pour une fonction donnée, puis qui a ouvert la voie à l’évolution d’une fonction très différente (dans ce cas, le langage).

La quatrième hypothèse – diamétralement opposée à celle de Gould – a été proposée par le linguiste distingué de l’université de Harvard, Steven Pinker, qui affirme que le langage était un instinct ancré dans la nature humaine, à l’instar de la toux, l’éternuement

Just as everything about our minds is caused by our brains, everything about our brains is ultimately caused by our evolutionary history. That means, though, that evolution can select learning strategies and cultural abilities just as it selects reflexes and instincts. For human beings, nurture is our nature. The capacity for culture is part of our

Through language one human can invoke memories and create new juxtapositions of mental objects in another human. Language is pure analogy, and through it we can cause other humans to experience and learn about things they may never actually see.

A false idea that has dominated the study of language acquisition is that meaning is derived from a process of association,