PSY274H5 Lecture Notes - British Sign Language, French Sign Language, Spoken Language
Document Summary
Linguistic communication: vocal-auditory channel, manual-visual channel (communicating using hands) Many evolutionary theorists argue that it is the manual visual channel that should be dominant. Academy francaise" prohibited any discussion of this stupid because it was so unscientific and speculative. A wolf howling etc was the origin of language. People said humans were imitating the sounds of the environment. We see so many cases in the animal kingdom where animals communicated through a visual manner. Imagine gestural behavior was the origin of language. The relative arrangement of the vocal cords, the windpipe and the food pipe in humans create a potential for choking. In non-human primates, the vocal apparatus is arranged in such a way that they can"t choke. The deer has a vocal apparatus similar to humans. Even if humans had the capacity to use this modality, by the time they"re adults, they"d be used to using the auditory modality.
