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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The songbird syrinx morphome: a three-dimensional, high-resolution, interactive morphological map of the zebra finch vocal organ
Daniel Normen Düring,Alexander Ziegler,Christopher K. Thompson,Christopher K. Thompson,Andreas Ziegler,Cornelius Faber,Johannes Müller,Constance Scharff,Coen P. H. Elemans +8 more
TL;DR: The results show that the syringeal skeleton is optimized for low weight driven by physiological constraints on song production, and a cartilaginous structure suited to play a crucial role in the uncoupling of sound frequency and amplitude control, which permits a novel explanation of the evolutionary success of songbirds.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Learnability of Abstract Syntactic Principles.
TL;DR: A Bayesian framework for grammar induction is used to address a version of this argument and shows that, given typical child-directed speech and certain innate domain-general capacities, 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
Modeling Tonal Tension
Fred Lerdahl,Carol L. Krumhansl +1 more
TL;DR: This study applies a theory of tonal tension to predict tension patterns in Classical diatonic music and then extends the theory to chromatic tonal music and discusses the underlying perceptual and cognitive principles engaged by the theory9s components.
Journal ArticleDOI
Genome-wide analyses of human perisylvian cerebral cortical patterning
Brett S. Abrahams,D. Tentler,Julia V. Perederiy,Michael C. Oldham,Giovanni Coppola,Daniel H. Geschwind +5 more
TL;DR: A genome-wide analysis of human cerebral patterning during midgestation, a critical epoch in cortical regionalization, identified 345 genes as differentially expressed between superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the remaining cerebral cortex.
Journal ArticleDOI
Insensitivity of the Human Sentence-Processing System to Hierarchical Structure
Stefan L. Frank,Rens Bod +1 more
TL;DR: This investigation of the role of hierarchical structure in sentence processing by implementing a range of probabilistic language models suggested that a sentence’s hierarchical structure, unlike many other sources of information, does not noticeably affect the generation of expectations about upcoming words.
References
More filters
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.