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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How human infants deal with symbol grounding
TL;DR: In this article, a distributed view of language is used to trace the rise of human-style autonomy in the early stages of speech and learning to talk, which can be traced to not categorizing speech sounds, but events that shape the emergence of human style autonomy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication
TL;DR: Computational and corpus evidence is reported for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties—those related to word order—result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with theneed to reduce ambiguity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mice lacking the cerebral cortex develop normal song: Insights into the foundations of vocal learning.
TL;DR: Mice might be less suitable to study the mechanisms supporting vocal learning than previously assumed, despite their value for studying the genetic foundations of neurodevelopment more generally.
Journal ArticleDOI
A neuroanatomical predictor of mirror self-recognition in chimpanzees
TL;DR: The results suggest that self-recognition may have co-emerged with adaptations to frontoparietal circuitry, and chimpanzees with more human-like behavior show morehuman-like SLFIII connectivity.
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.