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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).

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Journal ArticleDOI

The evolution of language: a comparative review

TL;DR: It is concluded that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of the authors' most distinctively human trait: language.
Book

A Theory of Syntax: Minimal Operations and Universal Grammar

TL;DR: Norbert Hornstein provides a theory of the basic grammatical operations and suggests that there is only one that is distinctive to language, which narrows the evolutionary gap between verbal and non-verbal primates, thus facilitating the rapid evolutionary emergence of the authors' linguistic capacity.
Journal ArticleDOI

The song system of the human brain

TL;DR: Melody repetition and harmonization produced highly similar patterns of activation, however, whereas all three tasks activated secondary auditory cortex (posterior Brodmann Area 22), only melody repetition and Harmonization activated the planum polare (BA 38), implying that BA 38 is responsible for an even higher level of musical processing than BA 22.
Journal Article

The learnability of abstract syntactic principles

TL;DR: This article used a Bayesian framework for grammar induction and showed that an ideal learner could recognize the hierarchical phrase structure of language without having this knowledge innately specified as part of the language faculty.
Journal ArticleDOI

Learning at a distance II. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies in a non-human primate.

TL;DR: Differences among learners in the elementary units perceived in speech (syllables, consonants, and vowels) and/or the distance over which such units can be related are suggested, and therefore differences in the types of patterned regularities they can acquire.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

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

Noam Chomsky
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

Noam Chomsky
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.