Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk
Abstract: Language emerged around the time when humans began making diverse stone tools; it served as the backbone of cultural evolution, which propelled our species to the unique status of "masters of the planet". Extensive typological studies of the world's diverse languages provided background for Lenneberg's 1967 comprehensive synthesis of the knowledge available at his time on the biological foundations of language. This classic was revisited recently from a multidisciplinary perspective, anthologized in Gong et al (2018). I will discuss the advances made in our understanding of the nature of language and human communication over the past half-century, especially in cognitive neuroscience, including in the areas of language acquisition and cognitive decline.