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
Citations
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From the Revolution to Embodiment: 25 Years of Cognitive Psychology
TL;DR: This work describes what has come to be called embodied cognition: how cognition arises through the dynamic interplay of brain controlling bodily action controlling perception, which changes the brain.
Journal ArticleDOI
Molecular Mapping of Movement-Associated Areas in the Avian Brain: A Motor Theory for Vocal Learning Origin
Gesa Feenders,Miriam Liedvogel,Miriam V. Rivas,Manuela Zapka,Haruhito Horita,Erina Hara,Kazuhiro Wada,Henrik Mouritsen,Erich D. Jarvis +8 more
TL;DR: This study is the first global mapping that is aware for movement-associated areas of the avian cerebrum and it indicates that brain systems that control vocal learning in distantly related birds are directly adjacent to brain systems involved in movement control.
Journal ArticleDOI
The consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of socio-cultural influences on linguistic form
Alison Wray,George W. Grace +1 more
TL;DR: This paper explored the possibility that the linguistic forms and structures employed by our earliest language-using ancestors might have been significantly different from those observed in the languages we are most familiar with today, not because of a biological difference between them and us, but because the communicative context in which they operated was fundamentally different from that of most modern humans.
Journal ArticleDOI
Conscious thought is for facilitating social and cultural interactions: how mental simulations serve the animal-culture interface.
TL;DR: This work proposes that conscious thought is for internal processing, to facilitate downstream interaction with the social and cultural environment.
Journal ArticleDOI
Projection in interaction and projection in grammar
TL;DR: The authors argue that there are fundamental common features shared by interaction and grammar that suggest some kind of interdependence between the two and a nonautonomy of the language faculty; one of these fundamental common feature is that of "projectability".
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.