SINGLE WORDS, MULTIPLE WORDS, AND THE FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE

Wilkins & Wakefield assign importance to motor systems but skip from anatomy to cognitive structure with little attention to behavior. Organisms, no matter how sophisticated, that do not behave in accord with what they know will fall by the evolutionary wayside. Facts about behavior can supplement the authors' theory, whose hierarchical structures can accommodate an evolutionary scenario in which a million years or more of functionally varied utterances mainly limited to single words is followed by an explosion of linguistic diversity with the development in the last 50,000 years or so of syntactically organized multiple-word utterances.