The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications
TLDR
It is concluded that progress in understanding the evolution of language will require much more empirical research, grounded in modern comparative biology, more interdisciplinary collaboration, and much less of the adaptive storytelling and phylogenetic speculation that has traditionally characterized the field.About:
This article is published in Cognition.The article was published on 2005-09-01 and is currently open access. It has received 539 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Biolinguistics & Empirical research.read more
Citations
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Neural Turing Machines
TL;DR: A combined system is analogous to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture but is differentiable end-toend, allowing it to be efficiently trained with gradient descent.
Journal ArticleDOI
The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science
TL;DR: This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once the authors honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages.
MonographDOI
The Evolution of Language
TL;DR: The authors exploit newly available massive natu- ral language corpora to capture the language as a language evolution phenomenon. But their work is limited to a subset of the languages in the corpus.
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Language as shaped by the brain
TL;DR: This work concludes that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable, and suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.
References
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Book
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
TL;DR: In this paper, secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles are presented. But the authors focus on the secondary sexual characteristics of fishes and amphibians rather than the primary sexual characters.
Book
The comparative method in evolutionary biology
Paul H. Harvey,Mark Pagel +1 more
TL;DR: The comparative method for studying adaptation why worry about phylogeny?
Book
Biological Foundations of Language
TL;DR: The coming of language occurs at about the same age in every healthy child throughout the world as mentioned in this paper, strongly supporting the concept that genetically determined processes of maturation, rather than env...
Journal ArticleDOI
The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex
TL;DR: The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex as mentioned in this paper, by Charles Darwin, &c. In two volumes. Pp. 428, 475, as mentioned in this paper.