MPI Books 2025: Exploring Language, Interaction, and the Predictive Mind

These works exemplify MPI’s commitment to advancing our understanding of what makes human communication - and the human mind - unique.
 

A Comprehensive Guide to Language Evolution Research:
The Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution

Edited by Limor Raviv and Cedric Boeckx

This handbook provides an authoritative overview of the methods, models, and theoretical frameworks used in the study of language evolution. It charts recent developments in this multidisciplinary field and demonstrates how diverse methodologies - from comparative approaches and experimental paradigms to computational modelling and field studies - help address fundamental questions about how language emerged and developed in our species.

Understanding the ‘Interaction Engine’ in Human Evolution:
The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution
By Stephen C. Levinson

Drawing on extensive cross-cultural fieldwork, this book examines how human communicative interaction shapes both our everyday lives and our evolutionary past. Levinson explores how verbal and nonverbal signals - words, glances, laughter, and the subtle dynamics of face-to-face communication - form the core of the “interaction engine,” a uniquely human system that has played a central role in shaping our species.

The New Science of the Predictive Mind
Looking Ahead: The New Science of the Predictive Mind
By Falk Huettig

In this book, Huettig introduces the core principles of predictive processing and evaluates major theories across psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The work offers an accessible yet critical exploration of how brains anticipate the future and why prediction is such a fundamental aspect of human cognition. It also highlights how our fascination with what lies ahead is deeply rooted in how the mind operates.

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