The Origin of Speech

The Origin of Speech PDF Author: Peter F. MacNeilage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199581584
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
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.

The Origin of Speech

The Origin of Speech PDF Author: Peter F. MacNeilage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199581584
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Origin of Speech

The Origin of Speech PDF Author: Peter MacNeilage
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019152865X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
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.

The Origin of Speech

The Origin of Speech PDF Author: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Publisher: Argo Books
ISBN: 9780912148137
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description


How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention PDF Author: Daniel L. Everett
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 087140477X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
A Buzzfeed Gift Guide Selection “Few books on the biological and cultural origin of humanity can be ranked as classics. I believe [this] will be one of them.” — Edward O. Wilson At the time of its publication, How Language Began received high acclaim for capturing the fascinating history of mankind’s most incredible creation. Deemed a “bombshell” linguist and “instant folk hero” by Tom Wolfe (Harper’s), Daniel L. Everett posits that the near- 7,000 languages that exist today are not only the product of one million years of evolution but also have allowed us to become Earth’s apex predator. Tracing 60,000 generations, Everett debunks long- held theories across a spectrum of disciplines to affi rm the idea that we are not born with an instinct for language. Woven with anecdotes of his nearly forty years of fi eldwork amongst Amazonian hunter- gatherers, this is a “completely enthralling” (Spectator) exploration of our humanity and a landmark study of what makes us human. “[An] ambitious text. . . . Everett’s amiable tone, and especially his captivating anecdotes . . . , will help the neophyte along.”— New York Times Book Review

The Origins and Prehistory of Language

The Origins and Prehistory of Language PDF Author: Géza Révész
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description


The Gestural Origin of Language

The Gestural Origin of Language PDF Author: David F. Armstrong
Publisher: Perspectives on Deafness
ISBN: 0195163486
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This is a unique view of the origins of language, describing what linguistic science would look like if sign language rather than speech was used as the basis for the study of language systems.

Origins of Human Language

Origins of Human Language PDF Author: Louis-Jean Boë
Publisher: Speech Production and Perception
ISBN: 9783631737262
Category : Animal communication
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book proposes a detailed picture of the continuities and ruptures between communication in primates and language in humans. It explores a diversity of perspectives on the origins of language, including a fine description of vocal communication in animals, mainly in monkeys and apes, but also in birds, the study of vocal tract anatomy and cortical control of the vocal productions in monkeys and apes, the description of combinatory structures and their social and communicative value, and the exploration of the cognitive environment in which language may have emerged from nonhuman primate vocal or gestural communication.

Language in Hand

Language in Hand PDF Author: William C. Stokoe
Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
ISBN: 9781563681035
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
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.".

Language

Language PDF Author: Edward Sapir
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Professor Sapir analyzes, for student and common reader, the elements of language. Among these are the units of language, grammatical concepts and their origins, how languages differ and resemble each other, and the history of the growth of representative languages--Cover.

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language PDF Author: Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674363366
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Here, the author examines gossip as a form of 'verbal grooming', and as a means of strengthening relationships. He challenges the idea that language developed during male activities such as hunting, and that it was actually amongst women that it evolved.