Human communication : origins, mechanisms and functions / Edited by Maria D. Sera, Melissa Koenig.

Papers from the 40th Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, held at the University of Minnesota, October 19-20, 2017; sponsored by the Institute of Child Development, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Sera was born in Havana, Cuba and emigrated to the U.S. at the age of seven where she initially lived with her grandparents in Washington Heights, New York. After her family was re-united in the U.S. they settled in southern Indiana. She earned her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa before being hired by the University of Minnesota in 1989, where she bacme a Full Professor since 2003. She has over 40 publications on the development of language and its role in cognition. She approaches developmental questions from dynamic systems and neural network persepctives. Her work has included monolingual and bilingual speakers of English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Hungarian and American Sign Language, and is among the first to show that language differences can reflect differences in categorization across speakers of different languages. She currently lives with her husband in Minneapolis.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii

Part I: Phylogenetic Origins 1

1. A Very Long Look Back at Language Development: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Human Language 3
Catherine Hobaiter, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

2. Building a Communication System in Infancy 31
Athena Vouloumanos and Amy Yamashiro, New York University, New York

3. Connecting Language Acquisition and Language Evolution: Clues from the Emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language* 57
Ann Senghas, Barnard College, New York

Part II: Ontogenetic Origins and Mechanisms 87

4. The Role of Prenatal Experience and Basic Auditory Mechanisms in the Development of Language 89
Maria Clemencia Ortiz Barajas and Judit Gervain, Université Paris Descartes, Paris

5. Infant Speech Perception: Integration of Multimodal Data Leads to a New Hypothesis – Sensorimotor Mechanisms Underlie Learning 113
Patricia K. Kuhl, University of Washington

Part III: Functions 159

6. Does Vocabulary Help Structure the Mind? 161
Gary Lupyan and Martin Zettersten, University of Wisconsin-Madison

7. Numerical Symbols as Explanations of Human Perceptual Experience 201
David Barner, University of California, San Diego

Author Index 243

Subject Index 253

"This volume contains a collection of contributions from leading scholars who study language and communication from comparative, developmental, and biological perspectives. The goals of the volume are four-fold. They are to (1) sketch the parallels and differences between animal communication systems and human language, (2) advance our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in human language development; (3) clarify infants' understanding of the social or communicative functions that language serves; and (4) better understand how language supports and advances aspects of development beyond language itself. We organized the volume into two parts. Part I focuses on Origins and Part II focuses on Functions. Part I, on Phylogenetic Origins, explores the development of human language and communication from both phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives. The first three chapters focus on phylogenetic issues. The first chapter by Catherine Hobaiter (A very long look back at language development: exploring the evolutionary origins of human language) describes the communication "tool kit" that humans share with modern apes, and analyzes the shared modes of communication and the nature of the information conveyed. The second chapter by Athena Vouloumanos and Amy Yamashiro (Building a communication system in infancy) discusses how the preference of young animals to listen to the speech of other members of their own species develops, and how they use this information to recognize when information with a communicative function is being transmitted. The third chapter by Ann Senghas (Connecting language acquisition and language evolution: Clues from the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language) offers evidence suggesting that the evolution of complex human syntax from a simple communication system can evolve over just a few generations of language users, if the users are children. Taken together, these chapters offer a fascinating picture of how human language might have evolved"-- Provided by publisher.

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