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Article In: Evolutionary Linguistic Theory: Online-First Articles

An attentional-bias account of language emergence

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Abstract
Why do humans alone develop language? I argue that evolution selected a binding bias, not specialized syntactic machinery: a hyperprior treating addressed, multi-timescale communicative events (infant-directed speech, with eye contact and rhythmic prosody) as reliable evidence. Under active inference, the same precision profile biases both perceptual uptake and vocal convergence; no separate imitation system is required. Human echolocation illustrates the logic: trained blind individuals navigate by self-generated clicks, a complex skill from generic neural systems; complexity doesn’t entail selection. The account explains language’s universality and the combinatorial limits of other vocal learners. Three falsifiable tests: a neonatal preference study, a computational replay varying the gain profile, and a newborn functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) assay. Selection targeted what we notice, not what we compute.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Echolocation: Spandrels, adaptations, and evolutionary insight
    • 2.1Key evolutionary terms
    • 2.2Echolocation across species
    • 2.3Human echolocation as a spandrel
    • 2.4Implications for language-emergence arguments
    • 2.5Addressing the universality asymmetry
    • 2.6Anatomical considerations
  • 3.The attention-bias hypothesis
    • 3.1Attention as biological gain control
      • Hypothesized sequence
    • 3.2Distinguishing the attention-bias hypothesis
    • 3.3Evidence for innate attentional biases
    • 3.4Attention versus processing accounts
    • 3.5Comparative implications: Other vocal learners
    • 3.6Causal model
    • 3.7Scope of the mechanism: Segmentation, structure, and what is presupposed
  • 4.Testing the attention-bias hypothesis
    • 4.1Birth-onset cross-species preference test
    • 4.2Computational replay with and without the gain profile
    • 4.3Neonatal neural precision-weighting
    • 4.4Toy stress test of a single-threshold transitional-probability segmenter
  • 5.Implications for language emergence
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Author note
  • Notes
  • References
References (136)
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