Review of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences 2010: The Origins of Language

During the last two weeks of June, the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) organized the Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences 2010 (UQÀM 2010, 21–30 June 2010). This year’s topic was “the hardest problem in science” (Christiansen & Kirby 2003a) — the origins of language. Language origin refers to the phylogenetic process whereby Homo sapiens made the transition from a pre-linguistic communication system to a communication system with languages of the sort we use today (Wang 1978, Gong 2009). Questions concerning when, where, and how human language (henceforth, simply ‘language’) originated and evolved belong to the realm of evolutionary linguistics (Ke & Holland 2006, Hauser et al. 2007). This field has now become resurgent as a scientific and collaborative beacon for research (Oudeyer 2006), as shown by many anthologies and reviews; see, among others, Harnad et al. (1976), Wang (1991), Hurford et al. (1998), Briscoe (2002), Wray (2002b), Christiansen & Kirby (2003a, 2003b), Cangelosi et al. (2006), Smith et al. (2008), Bickerton & Szathmáry (2009), Larson et al. (2009), and Smith et al. (2010)