Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Which Way to the Dawn of Speech?      (click for link to PowerPoint)Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech scienceLouis-Jean Boë  & Thomas R. Sawallis 1 GIPSA-lab, CNRS, Grenoble Alpes University, France2 New College, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USAIn the weeks around New Years, 2017, two complementary articles discussing speech evolution appeared in respected general science journals: Fitch et al., 2016, in Science Advances and Boë et al., 2017, in PLOSOne. These two articles announced the final failure of a theory that had been widely propagated and broadly accepted for half a century, despite numerous critiques and partial falsifications: the laryngeal descent theory (LDT) of Lieberman and colleagues (Lieberman, 1968; Lieberman et al., 1969; Lieberman & Crelin, 1971). Taken together, those studies represented – and continue to represent – an extremely powerful research paradigm, drawn directly from the core understanding of speech science, that the acoustic speech