Desarrollo y complejidad computacional, ¿dos elementos clave para comprender los orígenes del lenguaje?
Resumen
Development and computational complexity: two key items to understand the origins of language?
In this paper an evolutionary scenario for the origins of the narrow faculty of language (as defined by Chomsky and others in their recent work) is presented, although putting special emphasis on a methodological distinction between the emergence of this faculty and the development of complex grammatical systems. Thus, in a first step, I seek the possible precursors of recursion and structural dependency in the cognitive capacities of our ancestors and argue that the narrow faculty could have emerged as a result of an independent evolutionary event connected with changes in the mechanisms that regulate the development of the primate nervous system. As for complex grammars, however, and with the narrow faculty already in place, I propose a gradual coevolutionary process, triggered by the adaptive value of an enhanced communicative capacity and controlled by the interaction of biological and cultural evolution.
Key words: Origins of language, neural development, heterochronies, structural dependency, recursion, social cognition, visual processing, computational complexity, Baldwin Effect, gene/culture coevolution.
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