New Perspectives on the Origins of Language

1. Preface; 2. Introduction; 3. Part 1. General perspectives and issues on language origins; 4. Historical, Darwinian, and current perspectives on the origin(s) of language (by Cohen, Henri); 5. The origin of language as seen by eighteenth-century philosophy (by Auroux, Sylvian); 6. Cognitive and social aspects of language origins (by Barnard, Alan); 7. Part 2. At the roots of language; 8. Reconstructed fossil vocal tracts and the production of speech: Phylogenetic and ontogenetic considerations (by Boe, Jean-Louis); 9. Paleoanthropology and language (by Tattersall, Ian); 10. Material culture and language (by Dubreuil, Benoit); 11. Gestural theory of the origins of language (by Corballis, Michael C.); 12. Part 3. Communication and language origins; 13. Primate communication (by Zuberbuhler, Klaus); 14. FoxP2 and vocalization (by White, Stephanie); 15. Brain lateralization and the emergence of language (by Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie); 16. Sensorimotor constraints and the organization of sound patterns (by Menard, Lucie); 17. Symbol grounding and the origin of language: From show to tell (by Masse, Alexandre Blondin); 18. Part 4. Linguistic views on language origins; 19. Sound patterns and conceptual content of the first words (by MacNeilage, Peter F.); 20. Brave new words (by Bancel, Pierre J.); 21. On the origin of Grammar (by Heine, Bernd); 22. Arbitrary signs and the emergence of language (by Bouchard, Denis); 23. On the relevance of pidgins and creoles in the debate on the origins of language (by Lefebvre, Claire); 24. Part 5. Computational modeling of language origins; 25. Modeling cultural evolution: Language acquisition as multiple-cue integration (by Christiansen, Morten H.); 26. How language emerges in situated embodied interactions (by Steels, Luc); 27. Emergence of communication and language in evolving robots (by Nolfi, Stefano); 28. Evolving a bridge from praxis to language (by Arbib, Michael A.); 29. Index