Human Honest Signalling and Nonverbal Communication – ScienceOpen
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      Human Honest Signalling and Nonverbal Communication

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      Psychology of Language and Communication
      Walter de Gruyter GmbH

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          Abstract

          The issue of signal reliability (‘honesty’) is widely recognised in language evolution research as one of the most fundamental problems concerning the evolutionary emergence of protolanguage, i.e. early language-like communication. We propose that nonverbal communication is likely to have played an important but underestimated role in language evolution: not directly in the transfer of message contents, but rather in stabilising the emerging protolanguage. We single out one subset of nonverbal cues - nonvocal nonverbal paralinguistic adaptors (NNPAs) - based on their role as indicators of reliability in present-day communication of humans. We suggest that the relatively involuntary and therefore reliable NNPAs might have served to stabilise more volitionally controlled, and therefore less reliable, verbal communication at the initial, bootstrapping stages of its phylogenetic development.

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          Most cited references5

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          Signalers and receivers in animal communication.

          In animal communication natural selection favors callers who vocalize to affect the behavior of listeners and listeners who acquire information from vocalizations, using this information to represent their environment. The acquisition of information in the wild is similar to the learning that occurs in laboratory conditioning experiments. It also has some parallels with language. The dichotomous view that animal signals must be either referential or emotional is false, because they can easily be both: The mechanisms that cause a signaler to vocalize do not limit a listener's ability to extract information from the call. The inability of most animals to recognize the mental states of others distinguishes animal communication most clearly from human language. Whereas signalers may vocalize to change a listener's behavior, they do not call to inform others. Listeners acquire information from signalers who do not, in the human sense, intend to provide it.
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            The language void: the need for multimodality in primate communication research

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              TELLING IT LIKE IT ISN'T: A REVIEW OF THEORY AND RESEARCH ON DECEPTIVE COMMUNICATIONS

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Psychology of Language and Communication
                Walter de Gruyter GmbH
                2083-8506
                1234-2238
                December 1 2012
                December 1 2012
                : 16
                : 2
                : 113-130
                Article
                10.2478/v10057-012-0009-5
                28d4843d-0384-4448-9ffc-7033f3f8bfca
                © 2012

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0

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