Biological Origin of Linguistic structure – BOL

The structural complexity of language is greater than anything found in other species and nevertheless mastered early in life. At two years of age, human infants start producing two-word utterances, a developmental process that ends with the capacity to produce and decode complex sentences such as “Neither did my children enjoyed the cookies that I baked nor were they impressed”. While such a grammatical capacity is specific to humans, it is less clear which components of this system are unique to humans, and which are unique to language. The goal of the present project is to provide a detailed picture of the key similarities and differences between human adults, human infants and non-human primates on their perception of world events and their computational capacities, two components that govern respectively the type of linguistic elements found in language and the operations that can be applied on them. The concrete behavioural results generated will contribute to understanding the abstract cognitive foundations of linguistic ability from an evolutionary and developmental perspective, bringing deep theoretical implications about the elementary pieces that constitute the prime system we consider exclusive to humans.