Structuring unleashed expression: Developmental foundations of human communication

Human ostensive communication is believed to be a distinctive cognitive and behavioral trait. This thesis investigates the origin of this communicative system from an evolutionary and developmental perspective. Since addressing this question requires a specified explanandum, chapter 2 explores various accounts of ostension. I suggest that the difficulty of characterizing ostension may originate in evoking mostly mechanistic notions. For instance, higher-order intentionality focuses on the internal processes underlying communication and obscures their function. Likewise, attention manipulation draws on attentional mechanisms and fails to account for cases that go beyond highlighting perceptual phenomena. I propose, instead, to define ostension as involving nonnatural marking, i.e., the act of marking actions as communicative. This function can be implemented in various mechanisms and enables generating communicative means open-endedly. Chapter 3 discusses the diverse selective scenarios proposed for the evolution of human communication. These scenarios are assessed against five criteria suggested by scholars for sound evolutionary accounts: uniqueness, immediate utility, generality, honesty, and cooperativeness. I show that scenarios stressing non-verbal modalities and the transfer of semantic contents are more successful in satisfying immediate utility and generality. Overall, most theories do not offer convincing explanations for the uniqueness of ostensive communication. In chapter 4, I present my proposal for the origin of ostensive communication: it evolved to enable teaching technological knowledge. Hominin technology involved opaque skills that demanded demonstration and ostensive marking. Unlike other scenarios, demonstrating technological knowledge uniquely requires open-ended communication. Demonstrations are of immediate utility due to using objects and actions, rather than conventions. Demonstrations also satisfy the generality criterion, because they flexibly exploit stimuli to represent displaced generic contents. Finally, inclusive fitness explains why honest, cooperative communication was possible in early interactions. If ostensive communication evolved in demonstrations, these may already contain some of the properties of language. In chapter 5, I argue that demonstrations possess a predicate-argument structure. Previous work has suggested that objects in CEU eTD Collection II demonstrations may act as exemplars symbolizing their kind. I propose that actions on these object-symbols work like predicates in revealing hidden properties. The effect of actions on objects and their relations can be interpreted by infants as predicates ascribable to the kinds. Chapter 6 investigates what a concept of communication involves. The standard answer is that communication requires complex metarepresentations of mental states. This complexity is at odds with the limited abilities of infants. But mentalistic metarepresentations are neither necessary nor sufficient in explaining communication. Ostensive signals rest on decoding rather than metarepresentational inferencesthus, some metarepresentations may be unnecessary. However, mentalizing is also insufficient for explaining communication: the logic of instrumental actions permits interpreting their effect as following from intentions. However, communicative effects are often unavailable for inferring meaning. My proposal is that the primitive concept of communication targets, instead, representational action. When we communicate, we typically convey a content that is detached from our acts. This representational property is absent in ordinary goal-directed actions. This account additionally raises the possibility that metarepresentation emerged for representing external, communicative representations and was later exapted for other purposes. CEU eTD Collection III Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at Central European University or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference.

Organon F, 2021

In this paper, I examine two non-Gricean approaches to the evolution of human communicative abilities: Mitchell S. Green’s ac-count of organic meaning and Dorit Bar-On’s account of expressive communication. I argue that the non-Gricean approaches in question face certain problems: i) they focus on the adaptive function of com-municative behaviours and ignore questions about their mechanisms, ontogeny and phylogeny; ii) the notion of organic meaning does not constitute an intermediate form between natural and non-natural meaning but should rather be understood as a special case of natural meaning; iii) the non-Gricean approaches under scrutiny cannot ex-plain the transition from dyadic to triadic communication. I also out-line the differences between Gricean and non-Gricean approaches and argue against the usefulness of the non-Gricean approaches discussed in this paper in explaining the evolution of human communicative abilities.

2000

for their most useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Developmental Psychology, 1987

A systems approach is introduced and applied to the development of expressive and communicative action of infants in the first year of life. In this approach, expressive and communicative actions are organized, as part of cooperative systems with other elements of the infants' physiology, cognition, behavior, and social environment. A systems approach presumes that order arises dynamically as a result of the interaction between the cooperating elements that are changing asynchronously, rather than as the result of centrally coordinated developmental change that is synchronous across domains. The systems approach further assumes that the control parameter responsible for eliciting developmental change may be different depending on age, context, and task. It offers a means to understand previously unexplained developmental phenomena: the appearance of mature forms of expression before mature function has been achieved, the asynchronous rates of development of communicative-action components, discontinuous developmental shifts arising from continuous processes, and the process by which adults influence communicative development.

We report on the emergence of functional flexibility in vocalizations of human infants. This vastly underappreciated capability becomes apparent when prelinguistic vocalizations express a full range of emotional content-positive, neutral, and negative. The data show that at least three types of infant vocalizations (squeals, vowel-like sounds, and growls) occur with this full range of expression by 3-4 mo of age. In contrast, infant cry and laughter, which are speciesspecific signals apparently homologous to vocal calls in other primates, show functional stability, with cry overwhelmingly expressing negative and laughter positive emotional states. Functional flexibility is a sine qua non in spoken language, because all words or sentences can be produced as expressions of varying emotional states and because learning conventional "meanings" requires the ability to produce sounds that are free of any predetermined function. Functional flexibility is a defining characteristic of language, and empirically it appears before syntax, word learning, and even earlier-developing features presumed to be critical to language (e.g., joint attention, syllable imitation, and canonical babbling). The appearance of functional flexibility early in the first year of human life is a critical step in the development of vocal language and may have been a critical step in the evolution of human language, preceding protosyntax and even primitive single words. Such flexible affect expression of vocalizations has not yet been reported for any nonhuman primate but if found to occur would suggest deep roots for functional flexibility of vocalization in our primate heritage. evolution of language | infant communication | flexibility in communication | language development | primate communication R esearch on evolution and development of language has been devoted primarily to syntax, the uniquely human capacity to produce well-formed complex sentences (1-4). Additional work has targeted the emergence of simpler communicative structures and thus has shifted attention back in evolutionary time to an earlier possible split of hominins from the primate background. For example, research has considered the presumably earlier evolution of simple sentences or "protosyntax" (5). Other work influenced by recent trends in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) (6, 7) has focused on infrastructure for language, invoking capabilities logically more foundational even than protosyntax and presumably moving the communicative differentiation of hominins from other primates much farther back. For example, symbolic expression in single words beginning in modern human development at about 12 mo is a precursor to even the simplest syntax (8). Moving the evolutionary focus even farther back in time, joint attention-infant pointing with gaze alternation between an object and an adult interactor, occurring before the end of the first year-is deemed a critical precursor to words (9). Similarly, canonical babbling (onset at about 7 mo) is a crucial step toward verbal vocabulary because development and imitation of canonical syllables (e.g., "baba") is required for extensive word learning (10, 11). Recent reasoning influenced by evo-devo converges on the contention that the evolution of language in hominins and the development of language in modern infants are guided by a common set of infrastructural principles, with similar foundational steps (such as canonical babbling, joint attention, and so on) being required in both cases for subsequent languagerelated advancement .

Jornal da Sociedade Brasileira de Fonoaudiologia, 2011

The aim of this multiple case-study is to present issues to the analysis and discussion of communicative development since the pre-verbal period. The case presentation starts with the description of the analyzed sample followed by the synthesis of data regarding the pragmatic aspects of six subjects, from the 1st to the 36th month of life. Data regarding the number of communicative acts expressed per minute, occupation of the communicative space, proportion of use of the communicative means and the communication's interaction proportion are included. The individualized analysis of the number of communicative acts produced per minute in each sample shows an increasing tendency that is almost constant, but also frequent individual variations. The occupation of the communicative space has shown larger and more constant variations that, nevertheless, continue to evidence evolution. The longitudinal follow-up allowed the observation of the proportion of the use of the verbal communic...

… of the Twentieth Annual Conference of …, 1998

From a cognitive perspective, intentional communication may be viewed as an agent's activity overtly aimed at modifying a partner's mental states. According to standard Gricean definitions, this requires each party to be able to ascribe mental states to the other, i.e., to entertain a so-called theory of mind. According to the relevant experimental literature, however, such capability does not appear before the third or fourth birthday; it would follow that children under that age should not be viewed as communicating agents. In order to solve the resulting dilemma, we propose that certain specific components of an agent's cognitive architecture (namely, a peculiar version of sharedness and communicative intention), are necessary and sufficient to explain infant communication in a mentalist framework. We also argue that these components are innate in the human species.

semi, 1997

The idea that human linguistic ability has evolved from other, 'lesser' abilities is a notion which we accept almost intuitively today. Yet the intuition resists theoretical explication in several ways. The central problem is our lack of understanding of how the scale of such abilities-a scale which encompasses both human and non-human abilities-might best be formulated. We lack an adequate comparative framework in which questions of language evolution can be posed. Several additional difficulties attend this central problem. From the outset, for example, language calls attention to non-language. It is difficult even to raise the question of the evolution of language without raising questions about the development of other semiotic abilities-such as conceptual and communicative abilities-across the phylogenetic spectrum. Yet terms such as 'concept' and 'communication' are not particularly well suited to reasoning about evolutionary processes. Even where these terms have precise, theory-shaped definitions, such definitions are designed, in a sense, to characterize distinctively human abilities. If we enquire after an evolutionary process by relying on terms which are definitionally biased towards its end, such an enquiry remains in the grip of a false teleology; what is worse, the very terms of the enquiry heighten the appearance of discontinuity between the evolutionary telos in question, and all stages prior to it. Similar definitional impediments apply to the term 'language'. Ever since Saussure, 'linguistic' theory (in several incarnations and traditions) has maintained a restrictive focus on those aspects of human semiotic ability which distinguish us from all other animals. Ironically, Saussure himself imagined the 'linguistic' study of human 'language' to be part of a larger field of study which he called 'semiology'; but about semiology itself he had little to say. Since even distinctively human semiotic abilities are highly complex in nature, disciplinary 'linguistics' has had much to

Frontiers in Psychology, Cognitive Science, 2023

Human language sentences are standardly understood as exhibiting considerable hierarchical structure: they can and typically do contain parts that in turn contain parts, etc. In other words, sentences are thought to generally exhibit significant nested part-whole structure. As far as we can tell, this is not a feature of the gestural or vocal communication systems of our great ape relatives. So, one of the many challenges we face in providing a theory of human language evolution is to explain the evolution of hierarchically structured communication in our line. This article takes up that challenge. More specifically, I first present and motivate an account of hierarchical structure in language that departs significantly from the orthodox conception of such structure in linguistics and evolutionary discussions that draw on linguistic theory. On the account I propose, linguistic structure, including hierarchical structure, is treated as a special case of structured action. This account is rooted in the cognitive neuroscience of action, as opposed to (formal) linguistic theory. Among other things, such an account enables us to see how selection for enhanced capacities of act organization and act control in actors, and for act interpretation in observers, might have constructed the brain machinery necessary for the elaborate forms of hierarchically structured communication that we humans engage in. I flesh out this line of thought, emphasizing in particular the role of hominin technique and technology, and the social learning thereof, as evolutionary drivers of this brain machinery.