Books by Nick Chater
The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World
by Morten Christiansen & Nick Chater
The Language Game is by cognitive scientist Morten Christiansen, a professor of psychology at Cornell, and Nick Chater, a professor of behavioural science at Warwick Business School. It's a book about the evolution of language, and how charades probably played a key part in how that happened. Anything about how human beings (or their predecessors) learned to speak is hard to prove, but the book is engaging—it opens with the British explorer Captain Cook and his crew communicating with inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego—and reads persuasively.
