Origins and evolution of language and speech Edited by Stevan R. Harnad, Horst D. Steklis, and Jane Lancasterw (review)

REVIEW ARTICLE Origins and evolution of language and speech. Edited by Stevan R. Harnad, Horst D. Steklis, and Jane Lancaster. (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 280.) New York, 1976. Pp. vii, 914. Reviewed by Jane H. Hill and Robert B. Most, Wayne State University This volume is a sort of vast monument, obviously conceived as a landmark in the history ofthe human sciences. It contains most of the proceedings ofa four-day conference on the issues of the title (there are hints that some discussion was not transcribed, but a good selection is included in the volume), held under the august auspices ofthe New York Academy ofSciences in September of 1975. Distinguished specialists in almost every language-related field contributed papers. OELS contains seventy-four papers, plus introductory and concluding remarks, and the proceedings of seventeen lively discussion sessions. The papers vary greatly in length, with most being relatively brief (certain ones are singled out as 'discussion papers' for reasons which are unclear: some of these attempt to tie up the threads of other papers in the sessions, or to reply to other papers, but others seem to be completely independent contributions). The bibliographies alone are valuable, offering a definitive overview of sources in the biology of language as of the date of the conference. A fair review article on OELS is an intimidating challenge, and would be accomplished better by a whole battery of specialists than by the present two reviewers (an anthropological linguist and a cognitive psychologist). The sessions included papers in a variety of subfields of linguistics, in language development , in animal communication, in animal and artificial intelligence, in human and primate paleontology, in prehistoric archaeology, in sign language, in speech perception and production, and in anatomy, neurology, and aphasiology. While the emphasis of the conference was, happily, on the presentation of primary data (though it sometimes takes some imagination to see how particular papers address the central issues of OELS), there is also a large helping of papers by the group of scholars whom Bender 1976 has called 'neo-speculationists', addressed to theoretical issues in language origins. It is clearly impossible to comment on all the specific contributions; but over-all, given the subject matter, the ratio of good stuff to nonsense seems quite favorable. (And nonsense there is: our personal favorite, among many strong candidates, is the confident pronouncement by Ashley Montagu that the gestation period of Australopithecus was 266 days; fortunately, this is followed by remarks from an outraged Sherwood Washburn, who notes that one could hardly know for australopithecines what is not certain for many living primates.) Rather than review the volume paper by paper, we will touch on a few of the major issues which OELS addresses. 1. The general organization of the volume is sometimes confusing. The organization into sections is often arbitrary; this may result from the fact that the organizers were not able to determine exactly what contributors would discuss until the moment they opened their mouths on the podium. For instance, Peter Marler's paper on an evolutionary framework for the origins of vocal learning fits 647 648LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) in well with papers on speech production and perception, 300 pages later; and John Lamandella's well-reasoned discussion of the recapitulation question would be very welcome as a preface to the series of papers on child language acquisition, 200 pages earlier—given that many readers might question the assumption that language ontogeny is relevant to language phylogeny. There are several orphaned papers on animal capacities; the editors should have put these in one section, rather than scattering all papers not about the chimpanzee language experiments through the volume at apparent random. However, given the complexity of the relationships between the various subfields treated in the volume, the organization is probably about as coherent as could be hoped for. We do miss the presence of synthetic papers (Earl Count's is the only one) ranging beyond individual subfields, although many of the papers which synthesize inside fields are among the best in the volume. 2. More serious than the organizational problem, however, are the sins of omission. Prominently absent is the discipline...