Definition
Ta-ta theory states that humans made the first words by tongue movements that mimicked the movement of the hands, face, or other parts of the body and translated them into audio.
Introduction
According to Richard Paget, the ta-ta hypothesis supported that speech and the development of sound were produced to endorse the hand and body movements of the individual. So as to better demonstrate the meaning behind the gestures, these sounds developed different words or combinations of sounds unavoidably leading to speech patterns (Paget 1930). For instance, when a person would say ta-ta, he was basically saying goodbye with his tongue. At some point, this theory was even supported by Charles Darwin (Mandavilli 2016). In the literature, there are several theories such as the oral gesture theory and the chew-chew theorythat support the idea that the origin of language begun from early human gestures made from...
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References
Mandavilli, S. R. (2016). On the origin and spread of languages: Propositioning twenty-first century axioms on the evolution and spread of languages with concomitant view on language dynamics. ELK Asia Pacific Journal of Social Science, 3(1). Retrieved from https://www.elkjournals.com/MasterAdmin/UploadFolder/Sujay%20On%20the%20origin%20of%20spoken%20language%20final%20final%20final/Sujay%20On%20the%20origin%20of%20spoken%20language%20final%20final%20final.pdf
Meir, I., Sandler, W., Padden, C., & Aronoff, M. (2010). Chapter 18: Emerging sign languages. In Oxford handbook of deaf studies, language, and education (Vol. 2). Oxford: New York. Retrieved from http://sandlersignlab.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/pdf/EMERGING_SIGN_LANGUAGES.pdf
Paget, R. (1930). Human speech: Some observations, experiments, and conclusions as to the nature, origin, purpose and possible improvement of human speech. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Themistocleous, D., Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous, X. (2018). Ta-ta. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1121-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1121-1
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