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The evolutionary origins of syntax : event cognition in nonhuman primates

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Date
24/06/2022
Author
Wilson, Vanessa A D
Zuberbühler, Klaus
Bickel, Balthasar
Keywords
Animals
Biological Evolution
Cognition
Hominidae
Humans
Language
Primates
BF Psychology
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Abstract
Languages tend to encode events from the perspective of agents, placing them first and in simpler forms than patients. This agent bias is mirrored by cognition: Agents are more quickly recognized than patients and generally attract more attention. This leads to the hypothesis that key aspects of language structure are fundamentally rooted in a cognition that decomposes events into agents, actions, and patients, privileging agents. Although this type of event representation is almost certainly universal across languages, it remains unclear whether the underlying cognition is uniquely human or more widespread in animals. Here, we review a range of evidence from primates and other animals, which suggests that agent-based event decomposition is phylogenetically older than humans. We propose a research program to test this hypothesis in great apes and human infants, with the goal to resolve one of the major questions in the evolution of language, the origins of syntax.
Citation
Wilson , V A D , Zuberbühler , K & Bickel , B 2022 , ' The evolutionary origins of syntax : event cognition in nonhuman primates ' , Science Advances , vol. 8 , no. 25 , eabn8464 . https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abn8464
Publication
Science Advances
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abn8464
ISSN
2375-2548
Type
Journal item
Rights
Copyright © 2022 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: This research received funding from a Swiss National Science Foundation Project grant 310030_185324 (K.Z.) and the NCCR Evolving Language, Swiss National Science Foundation Agreement #51NF40_180888 (B.B. and K.Z.).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/25636

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