This is a strange book - wonderfully thought provoking, but frustrating at times.

The Language Puzzle is exhaustively pedantic in many places…. most of the book covers:

- detailed (unnecessarily so in many cases) explanations of the anatomical development/evolution of speech and hearing mechanisms and cognition/brain development in different animals, and specifically in primates and in humans;

- the long (and contested) story of hominid, hominim, and human evolution, incorporating the most up-to-date evidence from paleo-archaeology and paleo-genetics: everything you could possibly want to know (and a lot more) about early human fossil remains and about stone tool-making and the decorative use of ochre, shells and feathers;

- the use and control of fire by animals and humans, and some wild ideas about the significance of fireside story telling in the development of human culture;

- and a crash course on linguistics, especially mechanisms for language learning/aqusition, how languages are structured and how languages change over time, and how language influences perception and thought.

After the overwhelming accumulation of details for these individual puzzle pieces, Mithen assembles them quickly in a recklessly speculative conclusion of how human language - and cognition and culture - developed over the past 6 million years. I was dazzled but not convinced.

There is a lot to chew on here:

- how human language is different from - and developed from - animal communications (“language”)

- iconic (sound symbolic) words are the first types of words that babies learn (and that humans probably used)

- synesthesia (cross-modal perception neural leakage) may be important in early language learning in children and in the early development of human language

- the “poverty of stimulus” in language learning/uptake in infants (and simulations), which Chomsky used as the rationale for the necessity of innate Universal Grammar wired into human brains, is actually a forcing factor for the development of language itself - learning bottleneck conditions shape languages so that they are generalisable, compositional, stable (i.e., syntax emerges through cultural transmission, not biology)... languages that cannot be learned/derived from limited inputs cannot survive

- humans (all animals?) have a perceptual bias towards objects (complete objects - e.g., dog, not its ears or nose or tail) and basic categories of objects (dog, not animal - superordinate, not terrier - subordinate)

- tool making can be used as a proxy for language development over time - more advanced language capabilities are needed for making (and improving) complex tools (requiring multi-step instructions) and/or special-purpose tools (requiring a name to act as a cognitive anchor - you can’t make a screwdriver without a word/concept for screwdriver)

- there are important differences between symbols (culturally learned and agreed to), signs (icons), and indexes (traces pointing back to something in the physical world)

- metaphors are important (even necessary) for abstract thinking, in making discoveries - connecting reasoning from the concrete physical environment to frame abstractions, and make cognitive breakthroughs… when metaphors become commonplace and stale (dead), we need to replace them with new metaphors to spark thinking

Vous avez donné votre avis sur cette évaluation.

Vous avez donné votre avis sur cette évaluation.