A Joint Prosodic Origin of Language and Music

Abstract

Vocal theories of the origin of language rarely make a case for the precursor functions that underlay the evolution of speech. The vocal expression of emotion is unquestionably the best candidate for such a precursor, although most evolutionary models of both language and speech ignore emotion and prosody altogether. I present here a model for a joint prosodic precursor of language and music in which ritualized group-level vocalizations served as the ancestral state. This precursor combined not only affective and intonational aspects of prosody, but also holistic and combinatorial mechanisms of phrase generation. From this common stage, there was a bifurcation to form language and music as separate, though homologous, specializations. This separation of language and music was accompanied by their (re)unification in songs with words.

Emotion Communication Through Voice Modulation: Insights on Biological and Evolutionary Underpinnings of Language

“…This research shows that the vocal expression of emotional states deeply impacts language processing, involving the most ancient brain circuitries (Dalgleish, 2004;Kotz & Paulmann, 2011). In sum, cross-disciplinary studies on the role of emotional prosody in language contribute to a relatively consistent picture: the ability for emotional communication through prosodic modulation of the voice is evolutionary older than the ability to process lexical information (Brown, 2017;Filippi, 2016;Fitch, 2010;Mithen, 2005). Furthermore, findings from studies on the role of prosodic modulation of the voice in language acquisition are consistent with the hypothesis that it may have facilitated the emergence of the ability for language.…”

Temporal modulation in speech, music, and animal vocal communication: evidence of conserved function

“…By comparing different domains of acoustic communication within humans and across species, research on temporal patterning has the potential to inform our understanding of the selective pressures that shaped a critical aspect of language, that is, the identification of unit boundaries in speech. For instance, much research attempting to identify the origins of language has suggested that social effects, such as group bonding from making music together, favored the emergence of language . However, there is little empirical evidence on the role of social factors as a shared evolutionary link between language and music processing, thus it may be too early to speculate.…”

“…For instance, much research attempting to identify the origins of language has suggested that social effects, such as group bonding from making music together, favored the emergence of language. 10,[177][178][179][180] However, there is little empirical evidence 181 on the role of social factors as a shared evolutionary link between language and music processing, thus it may be too early to speculate. The ability to identify units in a continuous acoustic stream opens the door to the use of those units in compositional and combinatorial structures or pragmatic skills essential to linguistic communication.…”

A Musical Approach to Speech Melody

“…There are many other types of questions about the relationship between speech prosody and music that can be explored using transcription and musical notation. This is important given the strong interest in evolutionary models that relate speech and music (Brown, 2000, 2017; Mithen, 2005; Fitch, 2010), as well as cognitive and neuroscientific models that show the use of overlapping resources for both functions (Juslin and Laukka, 2003; Besson et al, 2007; Patel, 2008; Brandt et al, 2012; Bidelman et al, 2013; Heffner and Slevc, 2015). For example, it would be interesting to apply our analysis method to a tone language and attempt to quantify the production of lexical tones in speech, since lexical tone is thought of as a relative-pitch system comprised of contrastive level tones and/or contour tones.…”