Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages

By Morten H. Christiansen, N. Chater. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2015

320 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The target article by Christiansen & Chater (C&C) offers an integrated framework for the study of language acquisition and, possibly, a novel role for internal speech in language acquisition. However, the “Now-or-Never bottleneck” raises a paradox for language evolution. It seems to imply that language complexity has been either reduced over time or has remained the same. How, then, could languages as complex as ours have evolved in prelinguistic ancestors? Linguistic Platonism could offer a solution to this paradox.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3da801659a9002a680193110aba84fc749a6c233