Selection of Words in Ontogeny

This article suggests a framework for integrating a conceptual and an empirical approach to understanding human speech. Verbal activities may be understood as a result of conjoint phylogenetic and ontogenetic selection processes. The present article situates an experimental procedure investigating verbal activities as a function of ontogenetic events in the larger context of Darwinian selection. In this experimental procedure, the experimenter uttered “hmm” and “yes” contingently and contiguously on a participant’s mentioning of predefined words. To test if the experimenter’s verbal activity modified the participant’s rate of those words, 63 Norwegian participants reported individually on video recordings. Resembling the results of previous studies, cumulative relative frequency distributions of target word rates showed that three of four target words occurred at a higher rate when the experimenter uttered “hmm” and “yes” during a participant’s report than when she was silent. Methodological challenges of investigating the selection of verbal activities by their contingencies with Phylogenetically Important Events are discussed.