Language evolution is not limited to speech acquisition: a large study of language development in children with autism highlights the importance of the voluntary imagination component of language

Resumen

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is the component of voluntary imagination defined as the ability to juxtapose mental visuospatial objects at will. We hypothesized that PFS has fundamental importance for language acquisition. To test this hypothesis, we designed a PFS-targeting intervention and administered it to 6,454 children with language deficiencies (age 2 to 12 years). The results from the three-year-long study demonstrated that children who engaged with the PFS intervention showed 2.2-fold improvement in combinatorial language comprehension compared to children with similar initial evaluations 1. These findings suggest that language can be improved by training the PFS and exposes the importance of the visuospatial component of language. This manuscript reflects on the experimental findings from the point of view of human language evolution. When used as a proxy for evolutionary language acquisition, the study results suggest a dichotomy of language evolution with its speech component and its visuospatial component developing in parallel. The study highlights the radical idea that evolutionary acquisition of language was limited primarily by the speed of the development of the voluntary imagination rather than by improvements in the speech apparatus.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Vyshedskiy, A. (2022). Language evolution is not limited to speech acquisition: a large study of language development in children with autism highlights the importance of the voluntary imagination component of language. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/79qd2