LAUSR

Half a century ago, Eric Lenneberg (1967) wrote “The Biological Foundations of Language” and Noam Chomsky (1968) “Language and Mind”. Both pioneered from different perspectives research on the neurobiological and cognitive underpinning of the human language system. In turn, many different research programs emerged to examine how structures can be mapped onto computations andhow theycorrespond to properties of the humanbrain and vice versa. Specific questions about “language evolution”, that is about howthebiological capacity for language emergedor evolved, havebeenmainly left out until Paul Bloom and Steven Pinker (1989) took up this issues in the late 80s by publishing their seminal work on “Natural Language and Natural Selection”. In the last ten years, research on the biology and evolution of language resurfaced as a mainstream research agenda in many disciplines and reflects a truly multidisciplinary endeavor, including in cognitive science and linguistics. In this vein, here a collection of rather diverse but distinguished contributions are presented by experts fromdifferent disciplines to further the discussion aboutwhat human language is and how its biological foundations might have emerged or evolved in our species. Many aspects are controversially discussed andmust remainwithout doubt to bemysterious. Newdata produced faster than ever close often those differences but raise at the same time new challenging questions. Since Charles Darwin (1871) published in “The Descent of Man” his view on language as one of the most important distinction between “man and the lower animals” by emphasizing at the same time the similarity between animal and human communication, some questions are fundamental and current as before. These questions include the biological capacity of language, whether this capacity is specific to language or comprises other cognitive domains such as music or mathematics, how is language related to the theory of mind, mentalizing or intentionality, did other species in the human lineage used “language”, did the biological capacity of language and/or cognition gradually evolve, which brain structures or circuits sustain language andwhat is the relationship of phenotypic plasticity such as preference for (certain) language structures and successful biological adaptation (if such a relationship exists). Various studies demonstrate that language is not an isolated and encapsulated module, which operates completely independent of other cognitive domains (e.g., Fadiga, Craighero, & D'Ausilio, 2009; Hillert, 2014). Syntactic principles of language seemed to be shared with other human-specific cognitive domains to various degrees: rhythmic synchronization in music (e.g., Patel & Daniele, 2003); hierarchical structures in music (e.g., Koelsch, Rohrmeier, Torrecuso, & Jentschke, 2013), vision (e.g., Gershman, Tenenbaum, & J€ akel, 2016), action perception (e.g., Wakita, 2014), binary structures in arithmetic (e.g., Bender& Beller, 2013) or vision (e.g., Jackendoff, 2007). In considering that each human-specific domain operates on different kinds of discrete elements, it remains to be seen whether domain-specific syntactic structures in modern humans underlie the same principles at a universal internal level, which can be ultimately mapped onto the genetic make-up of modern humans.Marc Hauser & Jeffrey Watumull introduce in the present volume such a common computational system, which they call “Universal Generative Faculty”. It is not language per se, which divides man and lower animals e to use Darwin's words, but modern human's general cognition, which interfaces with various domains. Thus, it is assumed that there is no biological capacity for language but a human-specific biological capacity for cognition. This approach is compatible not only with the uniqueness of language in modern humans but also with some basic cognitive properties modern humans and non-human species have in common. On this account, the interface conditions play a particular role. Modern humans combine and draw analogies across different domains, while non-humans are often restricted to a single domain expressed by a single sensory modality. Similarly, and purely speculative, pre-modern humans might have been more restricted in their ability to conceptualize across different domains, which would have also restricted their ability to acquire and use a modern language. A different but related idea is that higher-order intentionality played a crucial role in the evolution of language (e.g., Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007; Dunbar, 1998). Nathan Oesch & Robin Dunbar (2003) emphasize the hypothesis that natural selection might have favored higher-order intentionality. This implies recursive thinking to represent another's mental state within the mental structure of one's own mental state. This recursive or embedded thinking would be the “cognitive scaffolding upon which language and recursive syntax could later be bootstrapped.” We know that language can be separately