Abstract
Comparative studies with macaques and chimpanzees indicate how the left-sided fronto-temporal language circuits might have evolved in modern humans. In particular, tractographic findings show a gradual adaptation to spoken language processing. In light of these findings, the role of mirror neurons is discussed. In turn, the vocalization abilities, particularly in songbirds, let us conclude that despite common features the ability to compute simple recursive hierarchical structures in a symbolic fashion seems to be unique to modern humans. When the transition to crossmodal neural projection occurred, is difficult to determine, but the increase of cranial capacity in Homo erectus indicate that this species is a good candidate for proto-language. We further illustrate how different cultural stages may reflect the development of cognition and of a more sophisticated language system in the human lineage.
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Notes
- 1.
Paul P. Broca (1824–1880), a French surgeon and anthropologist, presented in 1861 at the Society of Anthropology of Paris the patient “Leborgne,” who was only able to produce the automatism “tan.” The autopsy revealed a lesion in the third convolution of the left frontal lobe. According to today’s diagnostic methods, he would have been classified as a global aphasic patient. Often, this discovery is considered as the birth of cognitive neuropsychology, although similar observations were made generations earlier by the French neurologist Marc Dax (1836).
- 2.
In 1909, Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918), a neurologist from Germany, divided the cortex into 52 distinct cortical regions by considering cytoarchitectonic features.
- 3.
Carl Wernicke (1848–1905), a German physician resided in Breslau (Wrocław), discovered an aphasic syndrome caused by lesions in the superior temporal lobe with parietal portions. He predicted a third aphasic syndrome based on his and of Paul Broca’s discovery: conduction aphasia (original term: “Leitungsaphasie”). Moreover, Lichtheim (1884) developed the so-called Wernicke–Lichtheim diagram to predict four more aphasic syndromes.
- 4.
Fibers consist of axon bundles that originate from neurons in the (sub)cortical gray matter. Three types of fibers are defined: (1) commissural fibers, which connect the hemispheres; (2) projection fibers, which either connect the cortex to the internal capsule, basal ganglia, brainstem, and spinal cord (corticofugal fibers) or connect the thalamus to the cortex (corticopedal fibers); and (iii) association fibers, which connect adjacent and nonadjacent cortical regions within the same hemisphere and are referred to as short and long association fibers, respectively.
- 5.
A phoneme is the smallest discrete segmental speech sound (or group of sounds) to form meaningful contrasts between utterances. They can carry stress and tones and can be further decomposed into single phonemic features.
- 6.
Prosimians are primates including lemurs, lorises, bushbabies, and tarsiers and in particular native to Madagascar. Simians are monkeys, apes and humans.
- 7.
K. Brodmann (1909) divides the neurons of the cerebral cortex into six main layers, from the pia (mater) to the white matter.
- 8.
The most popular neuroimaging technique among cognitive neuroscientists is MRI. The invention of MRI did not arrive in one step and was the results of a series of accomplishments in physics. A description of the methods and mechanisms behind MRI goes beyond the scope of the present chapter and the reader will be referred to adequate tutorials (e.g., Pooley, 2005). But let us briefly summarize some important facts about these important but still developing noninvasive neuroimaging techniques. The most common kind of MRI is known as blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) imaging and credited to Ogawa et al. (1990). Neurons receive energy in form of oxygen by means of hemoglobin in capillary red blood cells. An increase of neuronal activity results in an increased demand for oxygen, which in turn generates an increase in blood flow. Hemoglobin is unaffected by the magnetic field (diamagnetic) when oxygenated but strongly affected (paramagnetic) when deoxygenated. The magnetic field is generated by an MRI scanner, which houses a strong electromagnet. For research purposes, the strength of the magnetic field is typically 3 T (1 T = 10,000 G) and is 50,000 times greater than the Earth’s field. It is predicted that the spatial resolution at the cell level requires high-field magnets (far > 10 T; Wada et al., 2010). This difference in magnetic properties causes small differences in the MR signal of blood depending on the degree of oxygenation. The level of neural activity varies with the level of blood oxygenation. This hemodynamic response (HDR) is not linear. The onset of the stimulus-induced HDR is usually delayed by ca. 2 s because of the time it takes that the blood travels from arteries to capillaries and draining veins. There is typically a short period of decrease in blood oxygenation immediately after neural activity increases. Then, the blood flow increases not only to meet the oxygen demand, but to overcompensate the increased demand. The blood flow peaks at around 6–12 s, before returning to baseline. In contrast to a relatively good spatial resolution of < 1 mm, the temporal resolution has its limits.
- 9.
Amniotes are animals that are adapted to survive in a terrestrial environment. They develop a layered environment, in which their offspring can grow regardless of whether they give birth or lay eggs. Amniotes evolved during the Carboniferous period ca. 320 mya from amphibian reptiliomorphs and include today all reptiles, birds, and mammals.
- 10.
It needs to be considered that a restricted phrase structure grammar can be approximated by a more elaborated finite-state grammar (e.g., memorized list of exemplars). Thus, it is important to use appropriate control trials such as the distinction between ungrammatical and grammatical strings).
- 11.
Although the distinction between a natural and a trained setting is important, overall it may be less significant for understanding the plasticity of an animal’s cognitive capacity. Most human cognitive skills require training to be recognized as such. One might assume that even in animals cognitive capacities may change or increase as result of continuous training across many generations.
- 12.
EQ is a measure of relative brain size. It reflects the ratio between actual brain mass and predicted brain mass of an organism of a given body size.
- 13.
The term “Oldowan” (pebble tools) refers to Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where the first stone tools were found.
- 14.
The term “Acheulean” refers to a region in Amiens, northern France, where hand-axes were found in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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Hillert, D. (2014). The Rise of Cognition. In: The Nature of Language. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0609-3_4
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