Journal ArticleDOI
The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
TLDR
It is argued that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation and how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience is suggested.Abstract:
We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)and in the narrow sense (FLN) . FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. We further argue that FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations).read more
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Beyond speech balloons and thought bubbles: The integration of text and image
TL;DR: Four types of interfaces that characterize the connections between modalities are details, including Inherent, Emergent, Adjoined, and Independent relationships, that facilitate different levels of multimodal integration.
Intermodular Argumentation and the Word-Spell-Out-Mystery
TL;DR: In this paper, it is shown that syntax-based arguments are only valid in phonology if morphemes and words are spelled out by the same spell-out mechanism, but there is a bug: the word-spell-out-mystery there are phonological effects of the cyclic spellout of morphological words, but not of words.
Journal ArticleDOI
Hierarchy processing in human neurobiology: How specific is it?
TL;DR: This question will be evaluated with respect to those human cognitive abilities that are assumed to require hierarchy building, such as music, mathematics and Theory of Mind, to indicate domain-selective neural networks as the neurobiological basis for processing hierarchy in different cognitive domains.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evolution of protolinguistic abilities as a by-product of learning to forage in structured environments
TL;DR: Using agent-based simulations in a range of virtual environments, it is demonstrated that challenges of foraging for food can select for cognitive mechanisms supporting complex, hierarchical, sequential learning, the need for which arises in language acquisition.
Journal ArticleDOI
Distinctive signatures of recursion
TL;DR: It is proposed that only a definition focused on representational abilities allows the prediction of specific behavioural traits that enable us to distinguish recursion from non-recursive iteration and from hierarchical embedding.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Ann S. Ferebee,Noam Chomsky +1 more
TL;DR: Methodological preliminaries of generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammar; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning.
Book
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
TL;DR: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence as discussed by the authors have been used as a theory of performance for language learning. But they have not yet been applied to the problem of language modeling.
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 Minimalist Program
TL;DR: This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues Noam Chomsky's classic work The Minimalist Program with a new preface by the author, which emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory."
Journal Article
The descent of man and selection in relation to sex: documento
TL;DR: Part I. Sexual Selection (continued): Secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles, and secondarySexual characters of birds.