Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Speech and Hearing in Bioscience and Technology Program at Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA.
Nature. 2024 Jun;630(8017):575-586. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07522-w. Epub 2024 Jun 19.
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.
语言是人类的一个重要特征，但语言的功能（或多种功能）已经争论了几个世纪。在这里，我们从神经科学和相关学科引入了最新的证据，证明在现代人类中，语言是一种交流工具，与一种认为我们使用语言进行思考的观点相反。我们首先介绍支持人类语言能力的大脑网络。然后，我们回顾了语言和思维之间的双重分离的证据，并讨论了语言的几个特性，这些特性表明语言是为了交流而优化的。我们的结论是，尽管语言的出现无疑改变了人类文化，但语言似乎不是复杂思维（包括象征性思维）的先决条件。相反，语言是传播文化知识的有力工具；它很可能与我们的思维和推理能力共同进化，只是反映了而不是产生了人类认知的标志性复杂性。
