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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Simulating others: the basis of human cognition?
TL;DR: The authors argue that if language mediated "perspective-taking" depends on cultural process, no innate linguistic representations are necessary in learning to talk, and they follow Dennett in treating intention as folk constructs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Regularity Extraction Across Species: Associative Learning Mechanisms Shared by Human and Non‐Human Primates
TL;DR: The second result indicates that the extraction of global regularities cannot be accounted for by mere associative learning mechanisms and suggests that humans probably benefit from their language recoding abilities for extracting these regularities.
Book
Tinbergen's Legacy: Function and Mechanism in Behavioral Biology
TL;DR: In this article, an international cast of leading animal biologists reflect on the enduring significance of Niko Tinbergen's groundbreaking proposals for modern behavioural biology, including a reprint of the original article on the famous 'four why' and a contemporary introduction, after which each of the four questions are discussed in the light of contemporary evidence.
Journal ArticleDOI
Precursors to numeracy in kindergartners with specific language impairment
TL;DR: Phonological awareness and grammatical ability explained the variance in logical operations and numeral representations whereas naming speed turned out to be an additional factor in predicting these early numeracy skills of children with SLI.
Book
The Minimalist Program: The Nature and Plausibility of Chomsky's Biolinguistics
TL;DR: This book will encourage graduate students and researchers in linguistics to reflect on the foundations of their discipline, and the interdisciplinary nature of the topics explored will appeal to those studying biolinguistics, neurolinguistics, the philosophy of language and other related disciplines.
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.