Anticipation, cooperation and language: how our ways of looking ahead may support the emergence of a unique communication system

Our ability to look ahead and predict upcoming circumstances is essential to our survival, and it is hard to imagine the existence of any animal species that does not anticipate somehow. A lot of our anticipatory behavior is learned, but the aptitude to foresee future situations and decide on our current acts accordingly seems universal. We use this skill while communicating as well, throughout multiple aspects of our language - for example, we use subtle prosodic hints to predict when our turn in a conversation is coming up, and we notice when so-called garden path sentences turn out not to conform to our previously anticipated syntactic structure. Often we can even predict the specific words finishing a given sentence beginning. Even though we might not do it consciously, anticipating our partner’s linguistic behavior seems to be an important part of human communication. For this study, I wanted to examine what kind of anticipatory behavior is most essential for human linguistic interaction and what role this could have played in the evolution of language. In my presentation, I will discuss different observed types of anticipation and their biological origins. I will then derive elements that are unique to human communication, and touch upon the role that cooperation might have played in the emergence of human language. An interesting correlation between levels of anticipatory behavior and the capacity for language will be shown. I have tried to incorporate these behavioral patterns in a neural networks model simulating the evolution of a communication system over multiple generations. These kinds of simulations form a useful way of investigating the minimal conditions for the emergence of language, and this particular model examines the effect of a seemingly critical component of human communication.