1. Action-oriented neurolinguistics and the mirror

system hypothesis 1.1. Evolving the language-ready brain Two definitions: 1. A protolanguage is a system of utterances used by a particular hominid species (possibly including Homo sapi-ens) which we would recognize as a precursor to human lan-guage (if only the data were available!), but which is not it-self a human language in the modern sense.1 2. An infant (of any species) has a language-ready brain if it can acquire a full human language when raised in an en-vironment in which the language is used in interaction with the child. Does the language readiness of human brains require that the richness of syntax and semantics be encoded in the genome, or is language one of those feats – from writing history to building cities to using computers – that played no role in biological evolution but rested on historical de-velopments that created societies that could develop and transmit these skills? My hypothesis is that: Language readiness evolved as a multimodal manual/facial/vo-cal system with protosign (manual-based protolanguage) pro-viding the scaffolding for protospeech (vocal-based protolan-guage) to provide “neural critical mass ” to allow language to emerge from protolanguage as a result of cultural innovations within the history of Homo sapiens.2 The theory summarized here makes it understandable why it is as easy for a deaf child to learn a signed language as it is for a hearing child to learn a spoken language