Editorial: Reviews in psychology of language

Traditionally, research on language facts has focused on overt linguistic behaviors. Linguists have examined human languages to learn about their fundamental components and how these basic pieces are arranged into more complex sets, from syllables to words to sentences to discourses. Typologists have described hundreds of languages and found that they share a core set of components and structural principles, supporting the view that all human languages are similarly designed and fulfill similar roles equally well. Dialectologists and sociolinguists have characterized different varieties of each single language and show that intralinguistic variation follows similar paths and results from similar triggering factors as interlinguistic diversity. And the same is true for language change as characterized by historical linguistics. Nonetheless, for a long time, languages were regarded as cultural artifacts mostly, like food practices, religions, or types of costumes. In the second half of the twentieth century, insights on how languages are acquired by children started to change this traditional conceptualization of languages (and of language as a human distinctive trait). Nowadays, language is generally construed as a key component of the human phenotype, particularly, of our mind/brain. Nativist views of language gained preeminence during the last decades, to the extent that language was even thought of as an organ that grows in our brain under genetic guidance. This view has been toned down, so that both our genome and our environment are thought to contribute to our distinctive linguisticality. In any case, it is generally acknowledged that if we want to understand the ultimate nature of language, it is necessary to delve into the brain black box in order to know which aspects of our mind/brain support language and in particular, if they are specific to language or domain-general by nature.