The study of language evolution, and human cognitive evolution more generally, has often
been ridiculed as unscientific, but in fact it differs little from many other disciplines that …

Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and
processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research …

Why is language the way it is? How did language come to be this way? And why is our
species alone in having complex language? These are old unsolved questions that have …

Research into the emergence and evolution of human language has received
unprecedented attention during the past 15 years. Efforts to better understand the processes …

What blocks the way to a better understanding of language evolution, it is widely held, is
above all a paucity of factual evidence. Not so, argues Unravelling the Evolution of …

The historical origins of natural language cannot be observed directly. We can, however,
study systems that support language and we can also develop models that explore the …

The post-genomic era is an exciting time for researchers interested in the biology of speech
and language. Substantive advances in molecular methodologies have opened up entire …

It has been suggested that the evolution of language might be “the hardest problem in
science”(Christiansen & Kirby, 2003, p. 1). Part of the difficulty is that language has long …

A tension has long existed between those biologists who emphasize the importance of
adaptation by natural selection and those who highlight the role of phylogenetic and …

The recent blossoming of evolutionary linguistics has resulted in a variety of theories that
attempt to provide a selective scenario for the evolution of early language. However, their …