Speech, vocal production learning, and the comparative method

摘要

The faith that "comparative analysis of the behaviour of modern primates, in conjunction with an accurate phylogenetic tree of relatedness, has the power to chart the early history of human cognitive evolution" (Byrne 2000 p. 543) runs afoul of the fact that no other primate besides humans is capable of vocal production learning. This basic enabling adaptation for articulate speech bears crucially on the reconstruction of language origins.