Publications

Publication details [#54545]

Schwartz, Jean-Luc, Christian Abry, Anne Vilain and Jacques Vauclair, eds. 2011. Primate Communication and Human Language. Vocalisation, gestures, imitation and deixis in humans and non-humans. (Advances in Interaction Studies 1). John Benjamins. vi+239 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English

Annotation

After a long period where it has been conceived as iconoclastic and almost forbidden, the question of language origins is now at the centre of a rich debate, confronting acute proposals and original theories. Most importantly, the debate is nourished by a large set of experimental data from disciplines surrounding language. The editors of the present book have gathered researchers from various fields, with the common objective of taking as seriously as possible the search for continuities from non-human primate vocal and gestural communication systems to human speech and language, in a multidisciplinary perspective combining ethology, neuroscience, developmental psychology and linguistics, as well as computer science and robotics. New data and theoretical elaborations on the emergence of referential communication and language are debated here.