Ruth S. Contreras E.

Why did language evolve among humans? To facilitate thinking? Or to facilitate communication? This new perspective article just published in @Nature suggests that language evolved as a tool for communication. The main evidence against the language-for-thought hypothesis comes from patients with brain damage and disorders. There are people with major linguistic impairments but virtually intact cognitive abilities. Additional evidence comes from fMRI studies suggesting that the language network is virtually disjoint from networks involved in thinking. The main evidence supporting the language-for-communication hypothesis comes from research highlighting that the structure of language seems to be optimized for ease of production, learning, and robustness to noise. For example, the tendency to minimise dependency length, the preference for certain word orders (e.g., subject-object-verb and subject-verb-object), and the presence of ambiguity, seem to be useful for decreasing the cognitive cost of communicating. Full paper: nature.com/articles/s41586-0…