AJP - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, Vol 246, Issue 6 912-R914, Copyright © 1984 by American Physiological Society
Functional precursors to language and its lateralization
P. F. MacNeilage, M. G. Studdert-Kennedy and B. Lindblom
An adequate account of language evolution must reconcile the propositions
that language is unique but has precursors. The paper of Bellman and
Goldberg and that of Tzeng and Wang each neglects one of these
propositions. We suggest that the uniqueness of language lies primarily in
its dualistic structure which has a frame-content mode of organization: at
the phonological level, consonant and vowel elements are inserted into
syllabic frames; and at the morphological level, stem forms of content
words are inserted into syntactic frames. We suggest that the morphological
level evolved from the phonological level and that the frame-content mode
of organization in phonology had a precursor in the form of bimanual
coordination in which the nonpreferred (frame) hand holds an object
operated on by the preferred hand (content). It is argued that
lateralization of cortical function evolved first for bimanual
coordination, then for language. Old World monkey hand preferences may be
consistent with both the putative left-hemisphere specialization for
bimanual coordination and the human right-hemisphere specialization for
spatial functions.
