Speech: a Cognitive Perspective

The idea that cognitive processes can be fully simulated by algorithmic procedures belongs indeed to the prehistory of the discipline. There are, however, many reasons to believe that this idea survives in other forms, both in neuroscience and in neuropsychology, and in the same philosophy of mind. In the last twenty years, with these artificialistic and anthropocentric residues we are measuring the evolutionary biology that tried to move again the final objective by placing the brain - the ascendant metaphor of the current cognitive sciences - inside the living organism. This is the biggest lesson of the contemporary evolution: organisms and individuals fit, and not their structures in isolation, as if they were self-sufficient. This article is focused on this lesson which has pushed to strengthen the investigation of the biological basis of language that find in the centrality of the speech one of the turning points of the future research program.