80700
Seminar in Speech and Language: The Evolution and Development of Language - 3 Credits

COURSE OFFERING
Spring 2008
Ph.D. Program in Speech and Hearing Sciences
Graduate Center  of The City University of New York

80700 Seminar in Speech and Language: The Evolution and Development of Language
Tue 6:30-8:30

Instructor: John Locke
 

This seminar offers an introduction to evolutionary developmental linguistics, a new endeavor that is concerned with interactions between evolutionary and developmental processes in the emergence of language in the human infant.  These interactions are bidirectional: in the infant, language involves the maturation of evolved mechanisms that are heavily designed by genes; in the species, language was facilitated by the evolution and remodeling of developmental stages.  By viewing language within this framework, we see that each stage of human life history, from infancy and childhood through juvenility and adolescence, contributed to linguistic capacity, and that each of these stages now makes a unique contribution to the development of language in pre-adult humans.  In primate, anthropological, and psychological literatures, we also encounter some interesting differences between males and females that thread their way through evolution, development, and the communicative practices of modern adults.  By following an evolutionary-developmental trail, it becomes evident that human language has characteristics---some relating to continuity between such disparate systems as pragmatics and phonology, others relating to distinctions between speech and language---that have yet to be fully explored.

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