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The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their own children.
Humans can use language to talk about language. Also a very defining feature of human language, reflexiveness is a trait not shared by animal communication. With reflexiveness, humans can describe what language is, talk about the structure of language, and discuss the idea of language with others using language.
It was suggested that human language predates the out-of-Africa migrations of 50,000 to 70,000 years ago and that language might have been the essential cultural and cognitive innovation that facilitated human colonization of the globe. [11] In Perreault and Mathew (2012), [12] an estimate of the time of the first emergence of human language ...
Little is known about the timing of language's emergence in the human species. Unlike writing, speech leaves no material trace, making it archaeologically invisible. Lacking direct linguistic evidence, specialists in human origins have resorted to the study of anatomical features and genes arguably associated with speech production.
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language.In other words, it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language, to understand it, and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Unlike humans, however, Nim was unable to make use of significant grammar or context. Other attempts to teach great apes language have met with varying degrees of success, and whether the communication the apes achieve can be equated to human language is controversial. [24] [25] [26]