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Comment by pygy_ | Hacker News Reader

> Why, if speech is simply a reaction to statistics we are tracking and behaviours that have been rewarded, would the first utterances have been made?

Why not? Look at it from the bottom up:

Communication is a fundament of life, from intra-cellular to inter-cellular to inter-organism interactions (another fundament is the ability to keep oneself in a low entropy state, at the expense of the rest of the world).

Human speech is an evolution of mammal communication. It grew up in complexity, from grunts and other basic noises, along with our way of living, up to what we have now.

> And how do we make completely novel utterances that attempt to express our otherwise abstract thoughts?

Speech is a big collage. New is either the result of

* a recombination of the sub-parts of past speech

* the definition of a new word in terms of older words, or sometimes arbitrarily (for proper nouns).

Nothing fancy AFAICT.

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There's a big difference between "grunts and basic noises" and language. Or at least, that's my opinion. In this same line, I don't believe dogs/monkeys/birds/bees have language, despite the ability to communicate.

This view is just to simplistic to hold its weight when you really look at the intricacies of language and its evolutionary history which, by the way, I would suggest comes from manual gesture and not grunting.

> There's a big difference between "grunts and basic noises" and language. Or at least, that's my opinion. In this same line, I don't believe dogs/monkeys/birds/bees have language, despite the ability to communicate. This view is just to simplistic to hold its weight when you really look at the intricacies of language and its evolutionary history which, by the way, I would suggest comes from manual gesture and not grunting.

Mu![1]

But you're probably right about gestures.

Wild chimps have a vocabulary of about 66 signs. We can also observe tribes with languages more primitive than ours (no pronouns, for example). But there's a missing link of several millions of years of evolution between both.

What are the (known) intricacies of the evolution of our ability to communicate?

There's no definitive proof for the statistical argument, but a growing amount of (neuro)scientific evidence points to it. What's (are) your alternative hypothese(s)?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21533821

This is where the debates really begin :)

I think that most people who believe in some form of the motor theory of speech perception will also believe that speech evolved from manual gesture.

Others scoff at the motor theory. In fact, I'd say I'm in the minority by bringing it up with any regularity.

If the question, what is "known" about the evolution of our ability to communicate, I wouldn't have much to point you towards. Most is theory based on modern evidence, somewhat like armchair psychology. Other people point to our ability to integrate non-verbal gestures into our comprehension, activation of our motor cortex prior to semantic/phonetic network activation when disambiguating difficult speech sounds, our ability to synthesize visual/auditory sources of information when the visual information relates to speech gestures (mouth/tongue movements), etc.

What's the link between the motor theory of speech perception and your criticism of losvedir's post?

Aren't these issues completely orthogonal?

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