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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Journal ArticleDOI
The Phonological Loop: A Key Innovation in Human Evolution
TL;DR: The acquisition of a functional phonological circuit can be considered as a key innovation that made possible a series of subsequent changes in human evolution leading to the complex and recursion‐based language of modern humans.
Journal ArticleDOI
Spoken language processing: Piecing together the puzzle
TL;DR: It is argued that progress is hampered by the fragmentation of the field across many different disciplines, coupled with a failure to create an integrated view of the fundamental mechanisms that underpin one organism's ability to communicate with another.
Journal ArticleDOI
Brevity is not always a virtue in primate communication
TL;DR: Analysis of the frequency of use of signals of different duration in the vocal repertoires of two Neotropical primate species studied in the wild found the key prediction of the law of brevity was not supported in either species: although the most frequently emitted calls were relatively brief, they were not the shortest signals in the repertoire.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Bayesian phylogenetic approach to estimating the stability of linguistic features and the genetic biasing of tone
TL;DR: Test the hypothesis that linguistic tone is biased by two genes involved in brain growth and development using a Bayesian phylogenetic framework applied to a large set of linguistic features and language families, and shows a large agreement, suggesting that this approach produces reliable estimates of the stability of linguistic data.
Journal ArticleDOI
Lack of selectivity for syntax relative to word meanings throughout the language network.
TL;DR: Contrary to many current proposals of the neural architecture of language, syntactic/combinatorial processing is not separable from lexico-semantic processing at the level of brain regions-or even voxel subsets-within the language network, in line with strong integration between these two processes that has been consistently observed in behavioral and computational language research.
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.