Linguaggio, evoluzione, cognizione. Per una revisione della grounded cognition

In the last few years, investigations about embodied nature of language have had a crucial role in the definition of linguistic function as a biological one. This perspective accounts for a more general epistemological domain which aims to consider human cognition as the result of a process of natural selection. According to this view human mind cannot be considered only as an epiphenomenon of the brain. Neither one can assume a phrenologically based perspective, as the majority of the first neuroscientific researches. This perspective includes the grounded cognition approach by Barsalou (1999), which shows that language is strictly constrained by basic cognitive abilities “vampirized” by language during evolutionary path. In this work we propose to review the classical argument of anchored cognition – in which basic linguistic skills influences language – by developing the idea that even language (as a “pervasive” cognitive function) has a return effect on our perceptive abilities. Studies on the shift of visual attention in linguistic tasks, for example, demonstrate a selective influence of language on visual perception. In this view, linguistic function, from one hand, is constrained by our perceptive abilities, from the other, it influences and redefines perceptive abilities, often considered neutral, that is free from com- plex cognitive processes.