Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language [Hardcover]

Scientists have long theorized that abstract, symbolic thinking evolved to help humans negotiate such classically male activities as hunting, tool making, and warfare, and eventually developed into spoken language. InFinding Our Tongues, Dean Falk overturns this established idea, offering a daring new theory that springs from a simple observation: parents all over the world, in all cultures, talk to infants by using baby talk or Motherese. Falk shows how Motherese developed as a way of reassuring babies when mothers had to put them down in order to do work. The melodic vocalizations of early Motherese not only provided the basis of language but also contributed to the growth of music and art.

Combining cutting-edge neuroscience with classic anthropology, Falk offers a potent challenge to conventional wisdom about the emergence of human language.Dean Falkis Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University. She is the author ofBraindanceandPrimate Diversity, and co-author ofThe Face in the Mirror. Her putting the baby down theory, published inBehavioral and Brain Sciences, has been featured in theNew York Times, Washington Post, Scientific American, New Scientist, National Geographic, andNewsweek. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.New Scientist
“Falk makes a strong case that communication between mothers and babies is a linguistic crucible.”

The Nation
“The origin of language is a hot topic – contentious and impossible to prove, but hot. Falk points out that anthropologists have a blind spot where women and babies are concerned: it's always assumed that the hunters and their toolmaking technologies drive evolution, but in the case of language the childcare hypothesis is more grounded in data than others…. The drab thought of our ancestors – hunger on the brain – hacking away at lse