The evolutionary transition from intentional to overt communication: The role of script recognition

Human communication is generally overt: We address each other with verbal cues, use eye contact, and point for each other, all to be understood and avoid misunderstandings. What are the cognitive underpinnings and evolutionary roots of overt communication? For decades, the Gricean interpretation of overt communication was taken for granted, despite two widely recognized problems: a developmental paradox in language acquisition and a methodological barrier to identifying the presence of its signature features in nonhuman animals. We introduce a further challenge: the "signaler assumption problem." This concerns the mechanism of how signalers are supposed to establish "common ground." We avoid these problems by replacing the Gricean approach with an evolutionarily grounded version of script theory, originally developed to model procedural knowledge. Our updated version of script theory posits that individuals recognize recurring situations as belonging to basic event schemata that form larger sets of patterned social interactions. In social interactions, individuals follow a finite number of scripts and understand others as following the same scripts. If the scripts of different individuals align during a social interaction, common ground is established. It is this common ground rather than mutual higher order mentalizing that renders a predominantly overt communication system possible. We review the theoretical and empirical literature and argue that the perception of social events as hierarchically structured scripts fostered the evolution of overt communication. Script theory offers an empirically more plausible and more parsimonious evolutionary explanation of the emergence of human linguistic communication than Gricean assumptions of complex mentalizing abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).