Origins of Human Language - Birds, Monkeys, and Humans

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