The Origins of Language Revisited

Nobuo Masataka has been a Professor at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute since 2003. His doctoral dissertation was a study on vocal communication in New World primates.  Particularly, he specialized in playback experiments, using synthesized sounds in order to investigate vocal perception in monkeys. Thereafter, he extended his research interests to include human infants and arrived at several intriguing findings on preverbal infants’ vocal interactions with their mothers. These findings are summarized in his book Onset of Language, published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. In 2008, he edited The Origins of Language, Unravelling Evolutionary Forces, published by Springer. The present work is essentially the second edition of that book.

Chapter 1. Evidence for the gestural origins of language that is not incompatible with the vocal theory of language origins.- Chapter 2. Primate Voice Physiology: Similarities and Difference between Humans and Non-Human Primates.- Chapter 3. Integrations of multiple abilities underlying the evolution of primate vocalizations.- Chapter 4. Conversational rules among primate species.- Chapter 5. Language evolution from a perspective of Broca’s area.- Chapter 6. Social scaffolding of the development of vocal communication and language during infancy.- Chapter 7. Emergence of the distinction between "verbal" and "musical" skills in early childhood development.- Chapter 8. Yakut tradition of "Talking Jew's Harp" and its relation to vowel harmony as a paradigm of formative influence of music on language.- Chapter 9. Were musicians and artists in the Ice Age caves likely with autism spectrum disorder? - A neurodiversity hypothesis to explain the co-emergence of art and music as a type of prosodic protolanguage.