Why Only Us Language and Evolution

语言与进化。 Robert C. Berwick  Noam Chomsky 的新著。

 We are born crying, but those cries herald the first stirrings of language. German babies’ cries mirror the melody of German speech; French babies mirror French speech—apparently acquired  in utero  (Mampe et al. 2009). Within the first year or so after birth, infants master the sound system of their language; then, after another few years have passed, they are engaging their caretakers in conversation. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—the “faculty of language”—has long raised important biological questions, including the following: What is the nature of language? How does it function? How has it evolved?