In the research on literacy learning the concept of language awareness has come forward as a unifying framework for understanding the underlying knowledge that supports ability in reading and writing. Consensus is gathering around the idea that language awareness is an essential foundation. If subsequent work in this area confirms it, this factor may turn out to be the key cognitive-domain explanation for successful literacy learning in school (and for academic purposes in general). In this review we examine two cross-cultural (...) comparisons regarding this claim. The comparisons point to the need to examine cases that juxtapose contrasting conditions. Relevant contrasts place side by side examples that appear to be typical and examples that appear to be exceptional. Taking what appear on the surface as sharply diverging cases, how is access to requisite underlying competencies similar, and how different, from one instance to the other? (shrink)

The verbal and musical arts across languages and cultures -- The cognition of stories and poems -- In the beginning -- Poetry across languages and cultures -- First music and second music acquisition -- The origin of music in art and science -- Creationist pseudoscience in the American university -- New opportunities for narrative inquiry -- Theory and creativity in literary and musical education.

Recent advances in cognitive science have been enriched by integrating findings from research on evolution. This convergence, in turn, has led to greater interest in understanding important domains of competence and ability in the arts and literature. This evolutionary point of view in the study of human creativity promises to shed light on a number of controversies that have come to be stalled for lack of a clear research program and mired in currently fashionable unscientific conjecture. The study of narrative (...) in particular will play an important role in the emerging synthesis between psychology and evolutionary science, laying the groundwork for a new dialogue with creative writers and analysts of literature. (shrink)

Research on learning, the structure of attained knowledge, and the use of this competence in performance has repeatedly returned to longstanding proposals about how to better understand proficient use of knowledge and how humans acquire it. The following article takes up an exchange between Chiappe & Gardner and Barrett & Kurzban on the concept of modularity, one of these proposals. Despite the disagreements expressed, a careful reading of the contributions shows that they also left us with lines of discussion that (...) will eventually sort out the relevant hypotheses and integrate findings for future research. These lines of work will contribute to a clearer understanding of an updated version of the modularity hypothesis that is also compatible with evolutionary science perspectives on learning. How might the categories of domain-specific and domain-general correspond to the distinction between competence and performance and to that of narrow faculty and broad faculty? (shrink)

To better understand the knowledge of language we study how it interacts with other kinds of knowledge in the performance of different abilities and their corresponding knowledge structures, for example in reading and writing or in comparing prose and singing. The more difficult study is to gain a better understanding of how language emerged in our species. Comparative research with other species focused on communication, especially when expression is vocal and reception is auditory, may help us to formulate the right (...) questions. In the comparisons in which the mechanisms of communication and aspects of the underlying knowledge are learned, another dimension of the research program presents itself. A recent survey of the field by Nicolas Mathevon maps out some of the main results of this research in The Voices of Nature: How and Why Animals Communicate (2023). The following review essay will be selective, as the survey is wide-ranging and covers related topics that will take us too far, even though they are, ultimately, related. (shrink)