2019.09.18 Prof. Sir Colin Blakemore

Yeung Kin Man Chair Professor of Neuroscience

City University of Hong Kong

Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience

University of Oxford

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Seeing, drumming, dancing, drawing and writing: Clues to the evolution of language

How language evolved remains a crucial issue for understanding human cognition. I shall examine the still-dominant view that human beings have an innate (genetically specified) mental faculty for language. The functional specializations that are necessary for spoken and gestural communication are extensive and complex – in the larynx, the tongue, the hands, the ears. The capacity to plan and coordinate fine movements of the hands, limbs, larynx and tongue, and to use them for communication and cooperation, have a long evolutionary history. What is harder to understand is how these peripheral specializations became co-ordinated, and especially how brain architectures representing syntax and meaning could also have evolved. I shall draw evidence from three areas: 1) the social function of communication; 2) the relationship between vision and language; and 3) the lessons about the role of plasticity in the acquisition of language from recent research on reading and writing.