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09:00 - 10:30
Parallel sessions 7
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09:00 - 10:30
Room: HSZ - N3
Chair/s:
Barbara Kaup, David Dignath
This symposium examines the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition. While some cognitive functions appear to depend on language, others seem rather independent of it and many more integrate both aspects. In psychology, however, the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition is rarely made explicitly and there is currently no consensus on how language may shape, enable or constrain thought.

The symposium brings together perspectives from cognitive research, developmental psychology and animal cognition to address three questions:

(1) How are language and thought related?
(2) Which cognitive functions are inherently linguistic, and which are not?
(3) To what extend can language modulate domains traditionally considered non-linguistic?

Part 1 brings together comparative and ontogenetic perspectives, focusing on animal cognition and human development. Lena Veit will speak about vocal communication in birds. Marlen Fröhlich's contribution deals with pragmatic inference abilities in orangutans. Paul Gallenkemper studies expectation formation in conceptual and non-conceptual contexts. Krisztina Orban looks at pointing in human and non-human primates as well as from a development perspective, concluding that pointing is a proto-linguistic behavior bridging the gap between non-linguistic behavior and fully developed language. Claudio Tennie discusses the hypothesis that human culture requires language and language in turn requires know-how copying abilities, that are nearly or completely absent in non-human apes.

Part 2 adopts a cognitive psychology perspective (see detailed description there).
Submission 324
Language Needs Know-How Copying and Human Culture Needs Language
SymposiumTalk-05
Presented by: Claudio Tennie
Claudio Tennie
Tools and Culture among Early Hominins Research Group, University of Tübingen, Germany
Human culture exhibits a ratchet effect: faithful copying of “know-how” lifts each generation beyond individual invention; beyond a biological baseline. I argue, first, that language itself depends on powerful copying of know-how (e.g. how words sound like). Second, once present, language massively scales cultural evolution across technology, science, arts, norms, and institutions. Crucially, culture is not only an outcome of human minds but also a producer of human minds: beyond Vygotskian “cultural intelligence,” we culturally acquire “cultural minds” whose capacities are shaped by and via culturally accumulated know-how. For many complex cultural outcomes X (e.g., modern computers), language is plausibly a necessary enabling condition. By logical necessity, if X requires language, then X requires also the prerequisites of language. As one such core prerequisite is the ability to copy know-how, such outcomes X require such copying, too. The archaeological record is consistent with a late (multi-factorial) evolution of this kind of copying (within the last 1 million years). Supporting this view, non-human apes show no robust evidence of copying know-how beyond baseline reach, aligning with their limited cumulative culture, their limited cultural intelligence and their limited cultural minds.