Abstract:

Biolinguistics is an interdisciplinary discipline dedicated to exploring the biological foundation of human language and its origin. Speech and language disorders along with the language evolution are the centers of biolinguistics. Recently, the study of the vocal behavior of animals by neuroimaging, neurophysiological technologies as well as identifying and manipulating specific neural circuits by the cellular and molecular technologies has significantly advanced the understanding of the neurobiology of human language. This paper takes three types of prevalent speech and language disorders-developmental dyslexia, post-stroke aphasia and autism spectrum disorder-as examples to review how the researchers constructed the knockout mice, middle-cerebral-artery-occlusion rats and songbird models to simulate the endophenotypes like auditory processing, neural migration, brain lateralization and ultrasonic vocalization so as to reveal the functions of the candidate genes like KIAA0319,astrotactin 2 and how neuroplasticity contributes to the restructuring of linguistic function. Regarding the language evolution, this paper focuses on how the research of primates and songbirds elucidates the coevolutionary path of human language in terms of anatomical structure, neural mechanism and cognition, as well as the multi-modal origin. These studies lead to the findings like "anatomical simplification leads to the neurocognitive complexification" and "the gesture, language,and music are intertwined in terms of origin". At the end of the paper, the challenges regarding ethics and cross-species translation are discussed. Future research needs to adhere to "3R" principles and construct multi-species joint validation systems, and integrate the frontier technologies such as pluripotent stem cell models and brain organoids.

Key words: Biolinguistics, Speech and language disorders, Language evolution, Animal models