Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought

Evelina Fedorenko (), Steven T. Piantadosi and Edward A. F. Gibson
Additional contact information
Evelina Fedorenko: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Steven T. Piantadosi: Berkeley
Edward A. F. Gibson: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature, 2024, vol. 630, issue 8017, 575-586

Abstract: Abstract Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:630:y:2024:i:8017:d:10.1038_s41586-024-07522-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07522-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().