Locke & Bogin/Language and life history: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, ================================================================== *** IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Locke-06252… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. NOTE: Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ** Please respond to this Call no later than October 18, 2005 ** ================================================================== CALL FOR COMMENTATORS ================================================================== Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article "Language and life history: A new perspective on the development and evolution of human language" by John L. Locke and Barry Bogin This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Please DO NOT prepare a commentary unless you eventually receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION *** ======================================================================= TITLE: Language and life history: A new perspective on the development and evolution of human language AUTHORS: John L. Locke and Barry Bogin ABSTRACT: It has long been claimed that Homo sapiens is the only species that has symbolic language, but only recently recognized that humans also have an unusual pattern of growth and development. Social mammals have two stages of pre-adult development: infancy and juvenility. Humans have two additional prolonged and pronounced life history stages: childhood---an interval of four years extending between infancy and the juvenile period that follows---and adolescence---a stage of about eight years that stretches from juvenility to adulthood. We begin by reviewing the primary biological and linguistic changes occurring in each of the four preadult ontogenetic stages in life history. Then we attempt to trace the evolution of childhood and juvenility in our hominid ancestors. We propose that several different forms of selection applied in infancy and childhood; and that in adolescence, elaborated vocal behaviors played a role in courtship and intrasexual competition, enhancing fitness and ultimately integrating performative and pragmatic skills with linguistic knowledge in a broad faculty of language. A theoretical consequence of our proposal is that fossil evidence of the uniquely human stages may be used, with other findings, to date the emergence of language. If important aspects of language cannot appear until sexual maturity, as we propose, then a second consequence is that the development of language requires the whole of modern human ontogeny. Our life history model thus offers new ways of investigating, and thinking about, the evolution, development, and ultimately the nature of human language. KEYWORDS: adolescence, childhood, development, evolution, infancy, juvenility, language, life history, modularity, speech FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Locke-06252004/Referees/ ================================================================== *** IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Locke-06252… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. NOTE: Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ** Please respond to this Call no later than October 18, 2005 ** ================================================================== ================================================================== Barbara Finlay - Editor Paul Bloom - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------