Front. Psychol. Frontiers in Psychology Front. Psychol. 1664-1078 Frontiers Media S.A. 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1233239 Psychology Editorial Editorial: Challenges in language evolution research Mineiro Ana 1 2 * 1Faculty of Health Sciences and Nursing, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal 2Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Health (CIIS), Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal

Edited and reviewed by: Xiaolin Zhou, Peking University, China

 *Correspondence: Ana Mineiro amineiro@ics.lisboa.ucp.pt 27 09 2023 2023 14 1233239 01 06 2023 04 09 2023 Copyright © 2023 Mineiro. 2023 Mineiro

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 Editorial on the Research Topic Challenges in language evolution research human tongue language evolution teaching pantomime section-at-acceptance Psychology of Language

The scope of the Research Topic was to bring together the contributions of researchers from different backgrounds in the field of language origins.

The evolution of human language has been discussed for centuries from different perspectives. Proposals that the semiotic system of gesture played a pivotal role in the evolution of language have been, and continue to be, influential (Zlatev, 2008; Zywiczyński et al., 2018; Zlatev et al., 2020). This statement, however, illustrates not so much a specific theory but an axis of debate in language origins, along which “gesture-first” proposals (Corballis, 2003, 2009; Arbib, 2012; Mineiro et al., 2017, 2021) traditionally compete with “speech-first” approaches (Bickerton, 1990).

One perspective within our Research Topic of articles is the crucial role of the emergence of the human-specific tongue. Ekström and Edlund, in their article entitled Evolution of the human tongue and emergence of speech biomechanics, provide a view into the cruciality of the emergence of the human-specific tongue to the evolution of human articulate speech. They state that the tongue properties and morphology were a turning point in the evolution of human articulate speech. It provided the possibility of mapping articulatory targets via the exaptation of manual-gestural mapping capacities evident in extant great apes.

Another view, by Ferretti in an article within this Research Topic entitled, On the Influence of Thought on Language: A Naturalistic Framework for the Pantomimic Origins of Human Communication, emphasizes pantomime as an ideal expressive means for bootstrapping the evolutionary foundations of language origins. Pantomime can be angled as a privileged lens for investigating language origin and evolution, partly due to its motivated iconic character of pantomime while compared with the arbitrary and abstract features of language and partly due to the way it obliges rethinking the relationship between thought and language.

Another research vision is rooted in the evolution of teaching as one of the main factors that lead to increasingly complex communicative systems in the hominin species. Gärdenfors, in a paper entitled Teaching as an evolutionary precursor to language defends that earlier analyses of the evolution of teaching demonstrate that pantomime seems to be the earliest evolutionary unique human capacity and that could also be explained via the evolution of a theory of mind.

A totally different perspective given teaching comes with Alhadi Ali Ahmed et al. in their article entitled An in-depth analysis of the representation of speech acts and language functions in Libyan public high school English Textbooks stating that pragmatic potential competence is the turning point to use speech acts and language functions.

The selection of papers within this Research Topic provides a picture of some of the current challenges in language evolutionary research.

Author contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

 Funding

This work was partly financially supported by National Funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the UIDB/04279/2020 project. We are thankful to the NCU- Center for Language Evolution Studies and to the Catholic University of Portugal (Lisbon).

 Conflict of interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

 Publisher's note

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