What effect does language acquisition have on human cognition? Natural language evolved primarily for communication, but it is not only a conduit for information: it also shapes the ways in which we think about the culture that it enables us to acquire. We can receive information from a language only if we discretize that information in the same way that the language does, and this means that each language shapes the ways in which we interpret and respond to its content. Conversely, it does not enable us to interpret information that is represented in a different system. This chapter explores how, in facilitating the transmission of the local culture, local languages restrict their users to the informational content of that culture, as well as to a particular way of thinking about it. It also asks what happens when local language users come into contact with speakers of a different language, and it finds that there may be an impact on both the speakers and the languages involved. In these ways, we can begin to see the emergence of novel languages and different cultural frameworks, which prepared the way for the artefactual languages that were to follow.

Language and Cognition: Emotions

We have seen how, under primarily communicative pressure, natural language has evolved to be innately learnable by human children, who in turn have brains adapted to its innate acquisition.