A sequence bottleneck for animal intelligence and language?

We discuss recent findings suggesting that non-human animals lack memory for stimulus sequences, and therefore do not represent the order of stimuli faithfully. These observations have far-reaching consequences for animal cognition, neuroscience, and studies of the evolution of language and culture. This is because, if non-human animals do not remember or process information about order faithfully, then it is unlikely that non-human animals perform mental simulations, construct mental world models, have episodic memory, or transmit culture faithfully.

Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.

Human language is unique in its compositional, open-ended, and sequential form, and its evolution is often solely explained by advantages of communication. However, it has proven challenging to identify an evolutionary trajectory from a world without language to a world with language, especially while at the same time explaining why such an advantageous phenomenon has not evolved in other animals. Decoding sequential information is necessary for language, making domain-general sequence representation a tentative basic requirement for the evolution of language and other uniquely human phenomena.

A model of contact-induced language change: Testing the role of second language speakers in the evolution of Mozambican Portuguese.

Language change is accelerated by language contact, especially by contact that occurs when a group of speakers shifts from one language to another. This has commonly been explained by linguistic innovation occurring during second language acquisition. This hypothesis is based on historical reconstructions of instances of contact and has not been formally tested on empirical data.