+* [Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w) - ***Nature***, 2024. [[All Versions](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13724799649075764503)]. This perspective brings recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. The authors begins by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. They then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. This perspective concludes that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with humans' thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.
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