In this course, we will look at the human language from the perspective of evolution: How did human language emerge in evolution? To get at this issue, we will look at a number of issues having to do with human language, the development of the brain, and a variety of proposals about language in evolution, including the Integration Hypothesis that the instructor recently proposed with colleagues.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this course you should be able to:
describe and explain the issues pertaining to language and evolution
describe some of the brain regions that support language
describe some major proposals for how language emerged in evolution
describe the systems that underlie birdsong and primate communication
describe and explain the basic components of a sentence
explain how the integration hypothesis incorporates what we know about other systems that underlie communication
