title: Pro and con: Internal speech and the evolution of complex language.
abstract: The target article by Christiansen & Chater (C&C) offers an integrated framework for the study of language acquisition and, possibly, a novel role for internal speech in language acquisition. However, the "Now-or-Never bottleneck" raises a paradox for language evolution. It seems to imply that language complexity has been either reduced over time or has remained the same. How, then, could languages as complex as ours have evolved in prelinguistic ancestors? Linguistic Platonism could offer a solution to this paradox.
authors: Department of Philosophy,Dalhousie University,Halifax,NS B3H 4R2,Canada.christinabehme@gmail.com.
authors: Christina
authors: C
authors: Behme
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D013060:Speech