Byrne Richard W, Cochet Hélène
School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland.
Cognition, Communication & Development Laboratory, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Feb;24(1):68-71. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1071-0.
Comparative analysis of the gestural communication of our nearest animal relatives, the great apes, implies that humans should have the biological potential to produce and understand 60-70 gestures, by virtue of shared common descent. These gestures are used intentionally in apes to convey separate requests, rather than as referential items in syntactically structured signals. At present, no such legacy of shared gesture has been described in humans. We suggest that the fate of "ape gestures" in modern human communication is relevant to the debate regarding the evolution of language through a possible intermediate stage of gestural protolanguage.
对与我们亲缘关系最近的动物近亲——大猩猩的手势交流进行比较分析表明，由于拥有共同的祖先，人类应具备产生和理解60至70种手势的生物学潜力。在大猩猩中，这些手势是被有意用来传达不同请求的，而非作为句法结构信号中的指代性元素。目前，在人类中尚未发现这种共享手势的遗留现象。我们认为，在现代人类交流中，“大猩猩手势”的命运与关于语言是否通过手势原语言这一可能的中间阶段进化的争论相关。
