24.11.2026 Elliot Howard-Spink

Language is highly sequential: phonemes combine to form words, words combine to form sentences, and sentences combine into conversation turns, paragraphs, or scientific abstracts. Understanding the evolution of human sequential cognition is therefore key to understanding the evolution of language itself, yet it remains poorly understood. The sequential behaviours of non-human primates offer a way to identify homologous or analogous capacities for human sequence organization, and to examine how socioecological factors shape the organisation of such sequences. In this talk, I will present research on sequentially organised behaviours across several non-human primate species, and discuss the structure and variation within their behavioural sequences. I will then consider what these findings may imply for the evolutionary foundations of the sequential organisation we see in human language.