Language Is Primarily A Tool For Communication Rather Than Thought Evelina Fedorenko Steven T Piantadosi Edward A F Gibson by Evelina Fedorenko & Steven T. Piantadosi & Edward A. F. Gibson instant download after payment.

Language is a defning characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, Published online: 19 June 2024that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from Check for updatesneuroscience 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 refects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.