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3rd Linguistic Conference for Doctoral Students: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse, and Culture, Heidelberg, April 5-6 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 08:50:00 +0000

The 3rd Linguistic Conference for Doctoral Students will take place at Heidelberg University, Germany from 05.-06. April 2013. The overarching topic of the conference will be: "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse, and Culture." The deadline for submissions is 15 February:

3rd Linguistic Conference for Doctoral Students: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse, and Culture

Universität Heidelberg, April 5th and 6th, 2013

We cordially invite you to the 3^rd Linguistic Conference for Doctoral Students (“Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende”, STaPs), which will be held on April 5^th and 6^th, 2013 at Heidelberg University. The overarching topic of the conference will be

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Discourse, and Culture.

We warmly invite doctoral students at all stages in their graduate work and of every linguistic field and discipline to present their projects and to exchange ideas and network with other doctoral students.

Additionally, the 3^rd STaPs is explicitly directed towards interested doctoral students in all other areas of the humanities, social sciences, and cultural sciences who would like to discuss the role of language, discourse, and culture in their doctoral projects in an interdisciplinary setting.

The conference provides doctoral students the opportunity to present specific aspects or current challenges within their projects in problem-oriented talks that leave a substantial amount of room for discussion. This allows students to discuss difficulties and develop strategies to solve these problems in an informal and interdisciplinary environment. In addition, the program will include interactive and interdisciplinary workshops on methodological and general questions regarding doctoral projects in the areas of language, discourse, and culture.

The 3rd StaPs offers doctoral students the possibility to share their experiences with other young researchers from a wide range of disciplines and receive feedback on their work from peers. In contrast to other academic conferences, participants do not need to present finished products. Instead, students can share and discuss work in progress and challenges in their doctoral project in a pressure-free environment.

Empirically-oriented and theoretically-oriented projects are equally welcome. Moreover, we warmly welcome participants who would like to exchange ideas and network with other doctoral students, but do not wish to give a talk.

In order to submit abstracts for talks (20 minute talk + 20 minute discussion) or workshops (60 minutes) as well as register as a participant, please send an email with the abstract attached to: staps.hd@gmail.com

The conference languages are German and English.

Deadline for Abstracts (German or English, max. 350 words): 15.02.2013

Deadline for Conference Registration: 15.03.2013

More Info at: www.staps.stuts.eu

Jim Hurford: What is wrong, and what is right, about current theories of language, in the light of evolution?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:17:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous post, the 2012 Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) features a thematic section on “Theory and evidence in language evolution research.” This section's invited speaker was Jim Hurford, who is Emeritus Professor at Edinburgh University. Hurford is a very eminent figure in language evolution research and has published two very influential and substantive volumes on “Language in the Light of Evolution”: The Origins of Meaning (2007) and The Origins of Grammar (2011). In his Talk, Hurford asked “What is wrong, and what is right, about current theories of language, in the light of evolution?” (you can find the abstract here). Hurford presented two extreme positions on the evolution of language (which nevertheless are advocated by quite a number of evolutionary linguists) and then discussed what kinds of evidence and lines of reasoning support or seem to go against these positions. Extreme position A, which basically is the Chomskyan position of Generative Grammar, holds that:

(1) There was a single biological mutation which (2) created a new unique cognitive domain, which then (3) immediately enabled the unlimited command of complex structures via the computational operation of merge. Further, according to this extreme position, (4) this domain is used primarily for advanced private thought and only derivatively for public communication and lastly (5) it was not promoted by natural selection.

On the other end of the spectrum there is extreme position B, which holds that:

(1) there were many cumulative mutations which (2) allowed the expanding interactions of pre-existing cognitive domains creating a new domain, which however is not characterized by principles unique to language. This then (3) gradually enabled the command of successively more complex structures. Also, on this view, this capacity was used primarily for public communication, and only derivatively for advanced private thought and was (5) promoted by natural selection.

Hurford then went on to discuss which of these individual points were more likely to capture what actually happened in the evolution of language. He first looked at the debate over the role of natural selection in the evolution of language. In Generative Grammar there is a biological neurological mechanism or computational apparatus, called Universal Grammar (UG) by Chomsky, which determines what languages human infants could possibly acquire. In former Generative Paradigms, like the Government & Binding Approach of the 1980s, UG was thought to be extremely complex. What was more, some of these factors and structures seemed extremely arbitrary. Thus, from this perspective, it seemed inconceivable that they could have been selected for by natural selection. This is illustrated quite nicely in a famous quote by David Lightfoot:

“Subjacency has many virtues, but I am not sure that it could have increased the chances of having fruitful sex (Lightfoot 1991: 69)”

However, with the rise of the minimalist programme (MP) in the 90s these arbitrary properties disappeared from mainstream Generative/MinimalistTheorizing. This means that in MP, Language isn’t that complicated, abstract and arbitrary as it once was. Instead, there is only one central property that is seen as characterizing the core linguistic system: The ability to combine elements via the operation of merge. If we follow this development, this means that Lightfoot’s problem goes away. Hurford argued that in addition, the ability to merge concepts in your head to form more complex conceptual representations obviously is adaptive in private thought so that from his perspective, natural selection now does play a role in this kind of account.

The process of Externalization, that is the ability to merge meaning-form pairs into signs in order to express complex meanings in public communication is also obviously adaptive. The ability to use merge in thinking and communication is thus highly adaptive. So even within Generative theorizing, it seems as if natural selection should play a role in accounts of how language evolved. However, Chomsky himself, and many Generativist following him, still insists that natural selection plays no part in the evolution of language. Hurford criticizes this view by stating that a completely non-adaptationist view would predict that people without merge were not evolutionary disadvantaged, which clearly isn’t the case. Hurford then addressed the Competence – Performance distinction as used in Generative Grammar. In the Generative tradition competence refers to a tacit knowledge of the unlimited possibilities of a combinatorial capacity of the linguistic system.

Quite obviously, accidental and temporary performance factors, e.g. distraction, drunkenness, or sudden death, do not factor into the underlying knowledge or linguistic competence. Such practical bounds are not relevant for a theory of competence. However, Hurford argues that performance is in fact relevant to determining what exactly competence is. Namely, there are also permanent limiting factors, like processing capacity, storage capacity or short term memory in conditions of alertness. These are not accidental and are just as ‘innate’ as any form of Language Acquisition device supposed by nativists. One example of this is complex birdsong, which is a very regular behaviour based on an innate template and environmental exemplars.

That is, its underlying biological foundations seem to function in a very similar way to how language is thought to be organized by some. However, the template already has limiting factors built into it, like the regularity and numerical upper and lower bounds of the number of repetitions of phrases as well as the overall durations. The fact that these are already built means that in birds, it doesn’t make sense to speak of competence and performance independently of each other. The same, Hurford argues, goes for language. Hurford thus coined the term Competence+™, as representing a package of competence plus statistical ingredients and the kinds of permanent limiting factors like storage or processing capacity mentioned above. This then led Hurford to coin the term of UG+™ (Universal Grammar Plus™), which refers to the fact that on this view the formal properties attributed to Universal Grammar (i.e. the ‘language acquisition toolkit’ a child is born with), on the one hand, and memory and processing power, on the other, would not have evolved independently. Instead, memory and processing power are inherently numerically bounded. UG+™, then, represents the coevolved package of formal and numerical information. That is, it refers to the coevolution of form and behavioural dispositions. On this view, a child is born with UG+™ and then acquires or develops Competence+™.

Hurford also criticized the position that the biological changes enabling languages primarily evolved for private thought, because this would imply that the first species in the Homo lineage that developed the capacity for unlimited combinatorial private thought (i.e. “merge”) were non-social and isolated clever hominids. This, as Hurford rightly points out, is quite unrealistic given everything we know about human evolution regarding, for example, competition, group size, neocortex side and tactical deception. There is in fact very strong evidence that what characterizes humans the most is the exact opposite as would be predicted by the “Merge developed in the service of enhancing private thought” position: We have the largest group size of any primate, the largest neocortex (which has been linked to the affordances of navigating a complex social world) and have the most pronounced capacity for tactical deception.

In terms of the timing of externalization and the evolution of merge there are two possibilities:

Externalization preceding Merge: On this view, even the simplest conceptual units were externalized from an early stage in hominid evolution onwards (confer Bickerton’s protolanguage). This means that merge would have been public from the start.

The other possibility is that the capacity to merge conceptual units for advanced thought precedes externalization and public communication. In normal humans it is important to note that complex thought and complex language go together. There are of course pathologies where they are dissociated but overall there is a lot of evidence that there is a correlation between verbal and noverbal IQ, that learning simple public labels modifies thought, especially in children, that bilinguals perform better in certain tasks, and that words can function as and aid to thought.
This suggests a less simple possibility: A coevolutionary spiral of successively more complex language and more complex thought. This also means there can’t have been only a single mutation: The grammatical system and the system supporting it (storage capacities, working memory, vocal manual skills, pragmatics, etc.) are highly interdependent. They all had to evolve in partnership. Hurford closed his talk by discussing the question whether evolution has produced a new unique domain. Hurford stresses that our evolved capacities for language have built on pre-existing capacities for, e.g.

Hierarchical organization of behaviour
Semantic memory for facts storage
Fast routinization of useful procedures

However, he holds that our language capacities go well beyond these pre-existing capacities, which seems for him indicates that evolution has in fact created a new unique domain. This goes against, for example Ray Jackendoff’s view, who holds that:

"So the conclusion is mixed: The wondrous recursive creativity in language is not as special as it is often claimed to be. Nevertheless language is a special system because of what is does and the particular structural materials it uses to do it" (Jackendoff 2007: 143, see also Hurford 2011: 510 ).

Beckner et al. (2009: 17), in their position paper on language as a complex adaptive system, go even further:

“[I]n a complex systems framework, language is viewed as an extension of numerous domain-general cognitive capacities such as shared attention, imitation, sequential learning, chunking, and categorization (Bybee, 1998b; Ellis, 1996). Language is emergent from ongoing human social interactions, and its structure is fundamentally molded by the preexisting cognitive abilities, processing idiosyncrasies and limitations, and general and speciﬁc conceptual circuitry of the human brain.”

According to them

“As soon as humans were able to string two words together, the potential for the development of grammar exists, with no further mechanisms other than sequential processing, categorization, conventionalization, and inference-making (Bybee, 1998b; Heine & Kuteva,2007).”

As a Cognitive Linguist I think that regarding this last point I agree more with Jackendoff and Beckner et al. than with Hurford, although this might also only be a terminology issue of how to define “new” or “unique.” I think it’s perfectly fine to say that the system supporting language becomes a specialized and unique domain due to the kinds of symbolic input it operates on, but many developmentalists would also stress that it is in fact not evolution which created this new unique domain, but ontogeny in a richly socio-interactive cultural setting or a “symbolic niche.” Saying that in normal modern language users’ there is a specialized system for language is quite compatible with Cognitive Approaches and the view of language as a complex adaptive system. However, as people like Elizabeth Bates or Anna Karmiloff-Smith have pointed out, a linguistic cognitive domain can emerge through multiple domain-general cognitive and processing factors in combination with dynamics of social interaction and actual language during a child’s individual development. So in this view it would not be evolution creating a new unique domain, but development, which is quite compatible with what we know about neural re-use:

“According to [theories of neural re-use], it is quite common for neural circuits established for one purpose to be exapted (exploited, recycled, redeployed) during evolution or normal development (my emphasis), and be put to different uses, often without losing their original functions. Neural reuse theories thus differ from the usual understanding of the role of neural plasticity (which is, after all, a kind of reuse) in brain organization along the following lines: According to neural reuse, circuits can continue to acquire new uses after an initial or original function is established; the acquisition of new uses need not involve unusual circumstances such as injury or loss of established function; and the acquisition of a new use need not involve (much) local change to circuit structure (e.g., it might involve only the establishment of functional connections to new neural partners)” (Anderson 2010)

In this perspective language was shaped by and adapted to the organization principles brain, and it is normal development and the connectivity patterns. Language, then, becomes more similar to other highly specialized neural systems like chess or driving (Karmiloff-Smith 1992). Thus, general cognitive capacities and constraints (e.g. constraints from the conceptual system, pragmatics, learning and processing mechanisms, perceptuo-motor factors and others, cf. Christiansen & Chater, 2008) and their interconnectivity might play a more crucial role than Hurford gives them credit for. As Michael Tomasello (2003: 284) argues:

“Everyone agrees that human beings can acquire a natural language only because they are biologically prepared to do so and only because they are exposed other people in the culture speak- ing a language. The difficult part is in specifying the exact nature of this biological preparation, including the exact nature of the cognitive and learning skills that children use during ontogeny to acquire competence with the language into which they are born.”

On this alternative view children have specialized capacities for intention-reading and pattern-finding, including general cognitive processes of cultural learning, a drive to communicate, shared intentionality, joint attentional capacities, schematization and analogy, symbolic processing, distributional analysis, entrenchment, and other cognitive mechanisms for constraining generalizations and language learning that not only apply to linguistic input. This view is advocated, for example, by usag usage-based (e.g. Michael Tomasello, Elena Lieven) cognitive-functional (e.g. Liz Bates), socio-cognitive (e.g. Eve Clark, Jerome Bruner) and emergentist (e.g. Brian MacWhinney) views of language acquisition, use, and processing,

The extent to which this architecture might also process other input is also a matter of debate. The CAS view for example predicts that:

“Speciﬁcally, language will depend heavily on brain areas fundamentally linked to various types of conceptual understanding, the processing of social interactions, and pattern recognition and memory. It also predicts that so-called “language areas” should have more general, prelinguistic processing functions even in modern humans [...].” (Beckner et al. 2009: 18)

So the jury is still out whether the interconnection and co-optation of domain-general processes alone can explain language acquisition and use, and this is a highly active and exciting area of research (see e.g. this paper published a couple of days ago in a special issue on "Pattern perception and computational complexity") that plays a fundamental role in answering the question of what is wrong, and what is right in language evolution research.

[cross-posted in a slightly modified version at Replicated Typo]

Pleyer & Winters (2012): Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 07:54:00 +0000

Today James Winters of Replicated Typo and I are giving a talk at the Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM) on “Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research.” It’s a talk in a thematic section on “Theory and evidence in language evolution research”, which I hope to blog about a bit tomorrow. We'll come back to our talk later on and talk about it in a bit more detail but for the time being here’s our abstract:

Integrating Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution Research

Cognitive Linguistics is a school of modern linguistic theory and practice that sees language as an integral part of cognition and tries to explain linguistic phenomena with relation to general cognitive capacities (e.g. Evans 2012; Geeraerts & Cuyckens, 2007). In this talk, we argue that there is a wealth of relevant research and theorizing in Cognitive Linguistics that can make important contributions to the study of the evolution of language and cognition. This is in line with recent developments in the field, which have attempted to apply key insights from Cognitive Linguistics on the nature of language and its relation to cognition and culture to the question of language evolution and change (cf. e.g. Evans, 2012; Pleyer, 2012; Sinha, 2009; Tomasello, 2008)

We illustrate this proposal with relation to the three timescales that have a bearing on explicating the structure and evolution of language (Kirby, 2012):

1.     The ontogenetic timescale of individuals acquiring language

2.     The glossogenetic timescale of historical language change

3.     The phylogenetic timescale of the evolution of the species

On the ontogenetic level, cognitive-functional and usage-based linguistic approaches investigate the importance of social, cultural, interactive and cognitive processes in language acquisition and learning (Beckner et al., 2009). In particular, they have demonstrated the crucial role that capacities and motivations for perspective-taking, shared intentionality, joint attention, as well as cognitive processes like analogy, statistical learning, generalization and entrenchment play in successfully acquiring and learning to use a language (e.g. Tomasello, 2003, 2008).

Through the repeated interaction between individuals we can observe regular patterns of change at the glossogenetic level. So, rather than simply appealing to historical contingency, diachronic language change is also dependent on biases and constraints that, through a continual cycle of innovation, amplification and fixation (Croft, 2000), are expressed as system-wide characteristics (Deacon, 2010: 124). Still, these are far from pre-determined paths, with the trajectories of change being much more similar than the resulting states (Beckner et al., 2009: 7). Such is the case in the well-attested process known as grammaticalization: “[a] subset of linguistic changes whereby lexical material in highly constrained pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts becomes grammatical, and grammatical material becomes more grammatical […]” (Traugott, 1996: 183). Grammaticalization might therefore be considered a canalizing process: that is, it limits the search space in which variation is allowed to explore.

Importantly, these Cognitive-Linguistic elucidations of the cognitive processes involved in and necessary for language acquisition, transmission and change can also inform accounts of the phylogenetic evolution of language. Namely, they can do so by helping to specify the cognitive and representational capacities that had to evolve beyond those found in other animals in order to support language and the interactive and dynamic processes of meaning construction fundamental to linguistic interaction. It is clear these general cognitive mechanisms influence language change. Yet the extent to which they have shaped the evolution of language is something that is currently under explored. Kirby (in press), for instance, posited that the grammaticalization process might offer an explanation for the division of labour between contentive and functional items in the lexicon (Kirby, in press: 13).

As Cognitive Linguistics sees the complex adaptive system (Beckner et al., 2009; Winters, Tissari & Allan, 2010) of language as well as its evolution as relying on general cognitive capacities and factors, it also actively seeks to integrate converging evidence from other disciplines in cognitive science (Evans 2012). This feature of Cognitive Linguistics thus makes the discipline highly amenable to interdisciplinary integration and presents another reason why a synergetic dialogue between Cognitive Linguistics and language evolution research seems worthwhile. A crucial question, then, concerns the relative roles of cultural evolution and biological evolution in accounting for the underlying structural hallmarks of language. By showing how general cognitive capacities can interact with cultural evolutionary processes, we might be able to extrapolate from well-attested processes observed in historical language change to the evolution of language. Thus, in focusing on the role of general cognitive capacities and constraints from the conceptual system, pragmatics, learning and processing mechanisms, perceptuo-motor and other factors in determining language structure and usage (Christiansen & Chater, 2008), Cognitive Linguistics can make a significant contribution to the highly interdisciplinary study of language evolution.

In our talk, we will present case studies from the three timescales discussed above in order to illustrate that a further integration of Cognitive Linguistics and language evolution in the future indeed promises to be a highly fruitful enterprise. For instance, we will focus on the Cognitive-Linguistic notion of construal, which denotes the fact that language can be conceived of as a structured inventory of constructions which enable language users to encode a situation in many different ways and from multiple perspectives (Evans 2012; Pleyer 2012). This facility plays a central role in language use and acquisition and can also be shown to be highly important in explicating the complex adaptive system of language on the ontogenetic, glossogenetic, and phylogenetic level.

References:

Beckner, C. et al. (2009). “Language is a complex adaptive system." Language Learning, 59(s1): 1-26.

Christiansen, M. H. & Chater, N. (2008). “Language as Shaped by the Brain” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31: 489-509.

Deacon, T. (2010). “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub.” In: Clayton, P. and Davies, P. (eds.). The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 111-150.

Evans, V. (2012). “Cognitive Linguistics.” In: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Cognitive Science 3: 129-141.

Geeraerts, D., & Cuyckens, H. (eds.) (2007). The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Kirby, S. (2012): “Language is an Adaptive System: The Role of Cultural Evolution in the Origins of Structure.” In: M. Tallerman & K. R. Gibson (eds): The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 589-604.

Kirby. S. (in press). “The Evolution of Linguistic Replicators.” In: Smith, K. and Binder, P. (eds). The Language Phenomenon. Springer.

Pleyer, M. (2012). “Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces and the Evolution of Language and Cognition.” In: T. C. Scott-Phillips, M. Tamariz, E. A. Cartmill und J. R. Hurford (eds.): The Evolution of Language. Proceedings of the 9th Conference on the Evolution of Language. Singapore: World Scientific, 288-295.

Sinha C. (2009). “Language as a biocultural niche and social institution.” In: New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 2009, 289–310.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tomasello, M. (2008). The Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press.

Winters, M.E., Tissari, H. & Allan, K. (2010). Historical Cognitive Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin.

Dirk Geeraerts: Corpus Evidence for Non-Modularity (Poznań Linguistic Meeting 2012 Plenary Talk)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 07:47:00 +0000

The first plenary talk at this year’s Poznań Linguistic Meeting was by Dirk Geeraerts, who is professor of linguistics at the The first plenary talk at this year’s Poznań Linguistic Meeting was by Dirk Geeraerts, who is professor of linguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

In his talk, he discussed the possibility that corpus studies could yield evidence against the supposed modularity of language and mind endorsed by, for example, Generative linguists (you can find the abstract here)

Geeraerts began his talk by stating that there seems to be a paradigm shift in linguistics from an analysis of structure that is based on introspection to analyses of behaviour based on quantitative linguistic studies. More and more researchers are adopting quantified corpus-based analyses, which test hypotheses using statistical testing of language behaviour. As a data-set they use experimental data or large corpora. In his talk, he discussed the possibility that corpus studies could yield evidence against the supposed modularity of language and mind endorsed by, for example, Generative linguists (you can find the abstract here)

Multifactoriality

One further trend Geeraerts identified in this paradigm shift is that these kinds of analyses become more and more multifactorial in that they include multiple different factors which are both internal and external to language. Importantly, this way of doing linguistics is fundamentally different than the mainstream late 20^th century view of linguistics. What is important to note here when comparing this trend to other approaches to studying language is that multifactoriality goes against Chomsky’s idea of grammar as an ideal mental system that can be studied through introspection. In the traditional view, it is supposed that there is some kind of ideal language system which everyone has access to. This line of reasoning then justifies introspection as a method of studying the whole system of language and making valid generalizations about it. However, this goes against the emerging corpus linguistic view of language. On this view a random speaker is not representative for the linguistic community as a whole. The linguistic system is not homogenous across all speakers, and therefore introspection doesn’t suffice.

Modularity

The main thrust of Geeraerts' talk was that research within this emerging paradigm also might call into question the assumption of the modularity of the mind (as advocated, for example by Jerry Fodor or Neil Smith): The view of the mind as a compartmentalized system consisting of discrete components or modules (for example, the visual system, language) plus a central processor.

The modularity thesis holds that these separate modules work independently and each feeds its information to the central processing unit. One of the main kinds of evidence adduced for this position are cases of double dissociation. One example would be the modularity of language and intelligence. This means that language skills can be intact while intelligence is negatively affected (an example for this +language – intelligence situation would be Down syndrome), or the other way around (e.g. - language + intelligence à aphasia). By analogy, this view of modularity was also taken to apply to the language, so that Grammar as a mental system is seen as consisting of independently operating modules (syntax, semantic, pragmatics etc.). In addition, most modularists think that there is one module that is more important than others, namely syntax. This differs from the view of cognitive-functional approaches, which Geeraerts advocates. They don’t assume a hierarchy between the levels of language. This is the point where it gets quite technical and I won’t go into detail into how Geeraerts proposed to use corpus evidence to falsify the idea of modularity in grammar, but the main idea is that according to him, a multifactorial corpus analysis can show that there are a variety of factors that influence the way utterances are produced. Importantly, such corpus studies (e.g. Speelman & Geeraerts 2009) indicate that these different factors, which include both language-internal (e.g. syntactic patterns, lexical collocations and conceptual closeness) and language-external factors (like speaker characteristics, regional, register variation, dialogues/multilogues vs monologues, private vs public, spontaneous vs prepared speech), seem to interact in such a way that is incompatible with the assumption of informationally encapsulated modules which work independently of each other. In summary then, Geeraerts makes the case that the corpus-based quantitative turn in linguistics offers an opportunity for falsifying deep seated assumptions of mainstream 20^th century linguistics, such as the homogeneity of linguistics and the modularity of grammar.

References:

Speelman, Dirk and Dirk Geeraerts. 2009. “"Causes for causatives: the case of Dutch 'doen' and 'laten'". In Ted Sanders and Eve Sweetser (eds.), Causal Categories in Discourse and Cognition 173-204. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

[cross-posted at Replicated Typo]

Evolang Preview: Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 13:31:00 +0000

Evolang is busy this year - 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We'll be positing a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you'd like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we'll give you a guest slot.

Michael Pleyer Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition Poster Session 1, 17:20-19:20, "Hall" (2F), 14th March

Perspective-taking and -setting in language, cognition and interaction is crucial to the creation of meaning and to how people share knowledge and experiences. As I’ve already written about on this blog (e.g. here, here, here), it probably also played an important part in the story of how human language and cognition came to be. In my poster presentation I argue that a particular school of linguistic thought, Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Croft & Cruse 2004; Evans & Green 2006; Geeraerts & Cuyckens 2007; Ungerer & Schmid 2006), has quite a lot to say about the structure and cognitive foundations of perspective-taking and -setting in language.

Therefore an interdisciplinary dialogue between Cognitive Linguistics and research on the evolution of language might prove highly profitable. To illustrate this point, I offer an example of one potential candidate for such an interdisciplinary dialogue, so-called Blending Theory (e.g. Fauconnier & Turner 2002), which, I argue, can serve as a useful model for the kind of representational apparatus that needed to evolve in the human lineage to support linguistic interaction. In this post I will not say much about Blending Theory (go see my poster for that ;-) or browse here ), but I want to elaborate a bit on Cognitive Linguistics and why it is a promising school of thought for language evolution research, something which I also elaborate on in my proceedings paper. So what is Cognitive Linguistics?Evans & Green (2006: 50), define Cognitive Linguistics as

“the study of language in a way that is compatible with what is known about the human mind, treating language as reflecting and revealing the mind.”

Cognitive Linguistics sees language as tightly integrated with human cognition. What is more, a core assumption of Cognitive Linguistics is that principles inherent in language can be seen as instantiations of more general principles of human cognition. This means that language is seen as drawing on mechanisms and principles that are not language-specific but general to cognition, like conceptualisation, categorization, entrenchment, routinization, and so forth.

From the point of view of the speaker, the most important function of language is that it expresses conceptualizations, i.e. mental representations. From the point of view of the hearer, linguistic utterances then serve as prompts for the dynamic construction of a mental representation. Crucially, this process of constructing a mental representation is fundamentally tied to human cognition and our knowledge of the world around us.

As Gilles Fauconnier (2004: 658) notes:

“Language is only the tip of a spectacular cognitive iceberg, and when we engage in any language activity, we draw unconsciously on vast cognitive and cultural resources, call up innumerable models and frames, set up multiple connections, coordinate large arrays of information, and engage in creative mappings, transfers, and elaborations.”

Now what is especially important about linguistic interaction are the following properties of language: Linguistic utterances

organize conceptual content with respect to a particular vantage point and perspective

construe the world in a specific way

embody a particular perspective onto it (cf. Geeraerts 2006)

serve as prompts for the allocation of attention to a particular aspect of the cognitive representation evoked in the listener (cf. Talmy 2007)

As "your theory of language evolution depends on your theory of language" (Jackendoff 2010), the following aspects of Cognitive Linguistics seem to be most important to evolutionary accounts of language:

the emphasis CL puts on the conceptual, interactive, symbolic and perspectival dimension of language and

the concept of cognitive construal operations, which are seen as one of the most important aspects involved in language use and understanding.

Construal operations refer to the specific ways in which a language can portray events and states of affairs from certain perspectives. They include things like expressing different viewing frames on a situation (e.g. "The train goes from Norwich to Peterborough” static and focusing on the whole journey vs. “The train is going from Norwich to Peterborough” dynamic, and only focussing on part of the journey vs. “); construing things at different levels of granularity (animals vs. mammal vs dog vs pug vs black pug vs Rico), spatial perspective (“e.g. “We are going to your party” with the speaker being the ‘deictic centre’ vs. “I’m coming to your party” with the hearer being the “deictic centre” towards who the movement is directed); degrees of involvement or subjectivity/objectivity in a situation (e.g. “the team are really looking forward to the derby” vs. “me and my mates are really looking forward to the derby”) words to denote different aspects of a situation (e.g.: ‘cost,’ ‘charge,’ ‘spend,’ ‘pay,’ ‘sell,’, ‘buy’ for a commercial transaction), and so forth (cf. Radden & Dirven 2007).

And it is this perspectival nature of language that might be most relevant from an evolutionary point of view:

How and when did the capacity (or set of capacities) evolve that allowed us to communicate and share our perspective on things and co-construct a joint perspective on topics?

From a CL point of view, two things are important here: the specific of construal operations of any invididual language certainly have evolved through cultural transmission (cf. Heine & Kuteva 2007; Christiansen & Chater 2008; Kirby 2012, see also here). But all construal operations are thought to be instantiations of and to rely on general cognitive capacities. These basic cognitive abilities include, for example, assigning prominence to certain foregrounded aspects of a conceptualization while backgrounding others, developing a shared point of view and taking different perspectives on the same topic.

While some Cognitive Linguists think the story ends here, I share the view that we need empirical and psychological work as well as evolutionary considerations to spell out in more detail what these grounding cognitive capacities look like, how they work and how they support language (cf. e.g. Gonzáles-Márquzez et al. 2007). Because from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, these are some of the most important questions that need to be addressed in tackling the evolution of language and cognition.

[cross-posted at Replicated Typo]

The first ever song about Language Evolution & Recursion

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:58:00 +0000

Over at replicated typo, Sean has recorded what very likely is the first song ever about language evolution: "You'll never teach a monkey how to sing" Go and listen to it, it's fantastic!

On a slightly more scientific note, James also discusses the latest work on Pirahã and the question whether it has recursion or not.

Animal Cognition & Consciousness (II): Metacognition & Mentalizing

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:30:00 +0000

As I wrote in my last post, three kinds of behaviours are most often discussed in debates about animal consciousness and cognition:

“1. Mirror self-recognition
2. Tests of metacognition;
3. Metacognition of others’ mental states” (Gómez 2009: 45)

After having discussed the first capacitiy in my previous post, I will discuss the latter two in this post, starting with metacognition, that is being aware of one’s own knowledge states, and then turn to being aware of other’s mental states.

Metacognition.

Being aware of one’s own mental states, i.e., reflective consciousness, surely seems to be one of the most crucial components of self-awareness. In one paradigm used to test for metacognitive awareness, monkeys were trained to select, out of a number of two or more images, the one that is identical to an image they have been shown earlier. As is to expected, the monkeys’ performance progressively deteriorated the longer the delay was between the sample image and the selection task.

source

After they had learned how the task worked, the monkeys were then given a choice between performing the task or not. If they chose to perform the task, they had the chance of getting a preferred reward when right or nothing when wrong. If they chose not to do the task they simply got a low quality reward.

Interestingly, when they chose to perform the test their success rate was significantly higher than when they opted for not doing it but were forced to perform the test nevertheless.

These results have been taken as evidence that monkeys are aware of their own knowledge states and base their decision on whether to take the test or not on some form of reflexive consciousness or metacognition. One significant problem of this setup, however, is that in principle there could be a wealth of different possible explanations for these behaviours. For example, the monkey’s decision could be a result of a low-level uncertainty monitoring mechanism that regulates its behaviours without the animal necessary having a conscious, second-order awareness of its own mental states (Gómez 2009: 46f.).

Similar experiments have also been conducted with dolphins, who were presented with different sounds and had to push one of three levers (one for ‘high’ tones, one for ‘low’ tones, and one if they were ‘uncertain’) in response. The dolphins tested performed similar to humans tested on the same task, and given what we know about dolphin cognition and encephalization in general it seems feasible to interpret these results as evincing self-awareness (Herman 2009: 44).

Metacognition of Others’ Mental States/ Mentalizing

The question whether chimpanzees have a ‘theory of mind’, that is, whether they are conscious of the mental states of others, has been a controversial topic for more than thirty years (Blackmore 2010: 214f., Hare 2011: 294ff.). Until quite recently, there was a broad consensus that theory-of-mind abilities and the ability for mentalizing, defined as the

“implicit or explicit attribution of mental states to others and self (desires, beliefs) in order to explain and predict what they will do” Frith & Frith 2012)

were uniquely human. There was an overall consensus that there was a

“vast qualitative gap […] between the social cognition of human and non-human apes” (Hare 2011: 296).

This view is echoed for example in the statements by Penn et al. (2008) mentioned in my first post and also by Susan Blackmore (2010: 215), who reports on experiments which showed that when begging for food, chimpanzees did not discriminate between an experimenter who could see them and one who could not (e.g. because s/he had a bucket over her/his head) but randomly gestured to both of them. The conclusion from this experiment was that chimpanzees had no concept of seeing, something which human children develop as early as in their second year of life.

However, this view has changed dramatically over the last ten years, when researchers started to test chimpanzees in competitive, as opposed to cooperative contexts, which are much more natural and ecologically valid for them. In competitive paradigms, chimpanzees do indeed show an understanding of seeing, e.g. by taking the piece of food that is hidden from the view of a dominant competitor instead of the piece of food seen by both (Hare 2011: 298f.).

source

What is more, chimpanzees even know that others make inferences. For example, in the context of searching for a single piece of food, chimpanzees were presented with two opaque boards on a table, one lying flat, and one slanted. Chimpanzees normally chose the one that is slanted because there could be food lying under it. However, when there was another chimpanzee there before them, they tend to avoid the slanted board, because they assume that their competitor has already looked under it guided by the same inference they themselves would make (Schmelz et al. 2011).

This, taken together with a wealth of other recent results on the sophisticated sociocognitive abilities of chimpanzees, suggests that chimpanzees are conscious of at least some psychological states in others, although not to the same degree as humans, who from early age on outperform all other animals in every regard (Hare 2011: 300f.; Carpenter 2011, see also this post). It should be noted here that these conclusions not only extend to great apes, but that similar capacities have also been demonstrated, for example, in ravens (Blackmore 2010: 215). As Hannah wrote last month (see here), they even point declaratively to conspecifics with their beaks in order to show them something (Pika & Bugnyar 2011), a behaviour made even more remarkable by the fact that it is not found in great apes at all (Tomasello 2006, although this conclusion is hotly debated see, e.g. here).

source

As my two posts should have illustrated, it is far from clear that Darwin really made a mistake when speaking of the difference between human and nonhumans as “one of degree, not of kind.” This does not only hold for cognition. Instead, the experiments I’ve written about here, taken from the domains of mirror self-recognition, metacognition of one’s own mental states and metacognition of the mental states of others, suggest “that animals other than humans are conscious and have subjective experiences that rely on some degree of consciousness” (Burkhard & Bekoff 2009: 42).

References:

Blackmore, Susan (2010): Consciousness: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Burkhardt, Gordon M. and Marc Bekoff (2009): "Animal Consciousness." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 39-43.

Carpenter, Malinda (2011): "Social Cognition and Social Motivation in Infancy." In: Usha Goswami (ed.): The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development. 2_nd Edition. Malden, MA [et al.]: Blackwell, 106-128.

Frith, Chris D. and Uta Frith (2012): "Mechanisms of Social Cognition." In: Annual Review of Psychology 63: 287-313.

Gómez, Juan-Carlos (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Great Apes." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 45-48.

Hare, Brian (2011) "From Hominoid to Hominid Mind: What Changed and Why?" In: Annual Review of Anthropology 40(1): 293-309.

Herman, Louis M. (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Dolphins." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 43-45.

Penn, Derek C, Keith J. Holyoak and Daniel J. Povinelli (2008): “Darwin's Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity between Human and Nonhuman Minds.” In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31.2: 109-130.

Pika, Simone and Thomas Bugnyar (2011): "The Use of Referential Gestures in Ravens (Corvus Corax) in the Wild." In: Nature Communications 2: 560.

Schmelz, Martin, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello "Chimpanzees know that Others Make Inferences." In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108: 17284-17289.

Tomasello, Michael (2006): "Why Don't Apes Point?" In: Nick. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.): Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford: Berg, 506-524.

[cross-posted at Replicated Typo]

Animal Cognition & Consciousness (I): Mirror Self-Recognition

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Darwin made a mistake. At least that is what Derek Penn and his colleagues (2008) claim in a recent and controversial paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Darwin (1871) famously argued that the difference between humans and animals was “one of degree, not of kind.”

This, according to Penn et al. is of course true from an evolutionary perspective, but in their view,

“the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds” (Penn et al. 2008: 109).

They hold that humans are not simply smarter, but human cognition differs fundamentally and qualitatively from that of other animals.

One pervasive proposal is that we do not simply possess a unique set of cognitive capacities, but that it might be consciousness itself that is uniquely human as well, a view that goes back at least to Descartes (Burkhardt & Bekoff 2009: 41). However, there are also many scholars and researchers who agree that there is evidence for higher-order cognition in nonhuman animals ( ‘animals’ after this) and that they might possess at least some degree of consciousness (Burkhard & Bekoff 2009: 40f.).

In this and my next post, I will write about three kinds of phenomena that are most often discussed in debates on whether animals have some form of higher-order cognition and consciousness or not: self-awareness, awareness of one’s own cognitive states, and awareness of others’ cognitive states and intentions.

Animal Cognition & Consciousness

In the article by Penn and colleagues (2008) mentioned above, it is argued that it is our evolved capacity for relational, role- and rule-governed analogical thought that fundamentally transforms human cognition (see also Deacon 1997: 435-438).

Apart from this proposal and the idea that consciousness might be the rubicon separating humans and animals, there are, of course, countless other proposals for what it is that makes humans unique. These include, for example, language (Bickerton 2009), symbolic thought (Deacon 1997), unique social cognitive capacities and motivations (Carpenter 2011), the capacity for mental time travel and autobiographic memory (Suddendorf & Corballis 2007) or conscious, higher-order, domain-general intelligence (Evans 2003) (see also these posts, i, ii, iii, iv).

As these examples amply demonstrate, the debate on human uniqueness and animal consciousness are hot and controversial topics in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science more generally. One seemingly insurmountable problem that immediately arises is of course what we mean by the term ‘consciousness’ in the first place (e.g. Blackmore 2010: 8ff.; Burkhardt & Bekoff 2009: 40f.).

However, it is widely acknowledged that there are at least some behavioural and physical criteria that can be taken as indicators for at least some form of consciousness (Blackmore 2010: 208f.).

Three behaviours that have been highlighted repeatedly in debates of this kind. :

“1. Mirror self-recognition

2. Tests of metacognition;

3. Metacognition of others’ mental states” (Gómez 2009: 45).

In this posts I will deal with mirror self-recognition. I’ll discuss the other two in my next post. These capacities are most often mentioned in discussions of the mentality of primates, especially great apes, but there are also relevant results from other ‘clever’ species outside the primate lineage such as, for example, dolphins (e.g. Herman 2009), ravens, and elephants (Blackmore 2010: 208ff.).

Mirror self-recognition

When they are about 18 months of age, children begin to recognize themselves in the mirror. This is tested by applying a spot of rouge somewhere the child cannot see it by herself, e.g. her forehead, without the child noticing. By about 18 months of age, children begin to notice and touch the spot on their forehead when they stand in front of a mirror. Around the same age, children also start using personal pronouns to refer to themselves, such as ‘me’, ‘mine’, and ‘I.’ Together with some other indicative behaviours at this age this has been taken as evidence for the emergence of a concept of self and of consciousness of one’s own self around that age (Lewis 2005: 363).

Similar methods have demonstrated mirror self-recognition (MSR) in a number of other species, including the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas), but also elephants, dolphins and magpies (Blackmore 2010: 210-214). Although there were also some claims that some monkey species (e.g. macaques and cotton-top tamarins) could recognize themselves in a mirror, these results could either not be replicated or were flawed methodologically (Anderson & Gallup 2011).

If we take MSR to be evidence for a concept of self, self-awareness, and consciousness, than this would mean that the species mentioned above who pass this test have some form of consciousness. However, there is a lively debate revolving around this contentious issue and it is possible that MSR only requires some form of complex body-concept. This means that MSR might not imply self-consciousness but just the ability to represent “body schemas, rather than cognitive schemas: i.e., awareness of oneself as a physical entity rather than awareness of oneself as a psychological entity” (Gómez 2009: 46).

source

The results of the following experiment do indeed suggest that MSR is not equivalent to conscious self-awareness: In a scenario similar to that of MSR, three- and five-year old children were filmed while playing with an experimenter, in the course of which the experimenter surreptitiously attached a sticker to the child’s forehead. When the children were shown a video of what just happened immediately afterwards, only the five-year-olds touched their foreheads when they saw what happened in the video. Three-year-olds, on the other hand, seemed not to be able to integrate information about their past self into a coherent, conscious present self and did not realize that the sticker was still on their forehead (Gopnik 2009:146).

Consequently, it is not clear whether animals passing the MSR test possess this important aspect of self-awareness, i.e. whether they are capable of perceiving themselves as a continuous, conscious entity, and have an autobiographic memory (Burkhard & Bekoff 2009: 40f.; Suddendorf & Corballis 2007).

In my next post I will deal with the two other markers for some kind of higher-order cognition in animals: kowing what and that you know (metacognition) and knowing about others’ mental states (mentalizing/theory of mind/metacognition of other’s mental states)

References:

Anderson, James R. and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. (2011) "Which Primates Recognize Themselves in Mirrors?" In: PLoS Biol 9(3): e1001024.

Blackmore, Susan (2010): Consciousness: An Introduction. 2nd Edition.Oxford:Oxford University Press

Herman, Louis M. (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Dolphins." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 43-45.

Bickerton, Derek (2009): Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language. How Language Made Humans.New York: Hill and Wang.

Deacon, Terrence William (1997): The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York / London: W.W. Norton.

Evans, Jonathan St B. T. (2003): "In Two Minds: Dual-Process Accounts of Reasoning." In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(10): 454-459.

Gómez, Juan-Carlos (2009): "Animal Consciousness: Great Apes." In: Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans and Patrick Wilken (eds.): The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press, 45-48.

Gopnik, Alison (2010): The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life.London: Bodley Head.

Lewis, Michael (2005): "Selfhood." In: Brian Hopkins (ed.): The Cambridge Encyclopedia of´Child Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 361-365.

Suddendorf, Thomas and Michael C. Corballis (2007): "The Evolution of Foresight: What is Mental Time Travel, and is it Unique to Humans?" In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30.3, 219-313.

[cross-posted at replicated typo]

Annual Review of Psychology 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:11:00 +0000

The Annual Review of Psychology for the year 2012 is now available. From a language evolution/evolution of human cognition point of view, there are two articles that look particularly interesting:

"Mechanisms of Social Cognition by Chris D. Frith and Uta Frith"

"Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct."

The Evolutionary Origins of Friendship by Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney

Social animals including humans share a range of social mechanisms that are automatic and implicit and enable learning by observation. Learning from others includes imitation of actions and mirroring of emotions. Learning about others, such as their group membership and reputation, is crucial for social interactions that depend on trust. For accurate prediction of others' changeable dispositions, mentalizing is required, i.e., tracking of intentions, desires, and beliefs. Implicit mentalizing is present in infants less than one year old as well as in some nonhuman species. Explicit mentalizing is a meta-cognitive process and enhances the ability to learn about the world through self-monitoring and reflection, and may be uniquely human. Meta-cognitive processes can also exert control over automatic behavior, for instance, when short-term gains oppose long-term aims or when selfish and prosocial interests collide. We suggest that they also underlie the ability to explicitly share experiences with other agents, as in reflective discussion and teaching. These are key in increasing the accuracy of the models of the world that we construct.

Accent Forecasts in the UK and Germany

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:22:00 +0000

Yesterday I watched the second episode of Stephen Fry's four-part documentary series Planet Word which dealt with Identity and also had a short tidbit about Linguistic Relativity featuring an interview with Lera Boroditsky (although I must say that as a native speaker of German I'm still quite puzzled that I apparently tend to associate feminine attributes with bridges because they have feminine gender in German ("Die Brücke" ), whereas Spanish speakers associate male attributes with bridges because they have male gender in Spanish (el puente).

I also liked Stephen Fry's "Accent Forecast" for the UK

However, I wonder whether he was inspired by this German sketch

Update: Two (again quite negative) reviews of this episode, one by linguist Pauline Foster and one by syntactican Manuela Rocchi can be found here and here

4th Birthday!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 08:18:00 +0000

Today marks the 4th Birthday of this Blog, and although I haven't managed to post anything in quite a while, I thought I'd use this happy occasion to point out some interesting links:

First, James Hurford's sequel to his 2007 "The Origins of Meaning" has finally been published:

With, 808 pages "The Origins of Grammar"is twice as long as his 2007 volume and consists of three parts. To quote from the book description:

"The book is divided into three parts. In the first the author surveys the syntactic structures evident in the communicative behaviour of animals, such as birds and whales, and discusses how vocabularies of learned symbols could have evolved and the effects this had on human thought. In the second he considers how far the evolution of grammar depended on biological or cultural factors. In the third and final part he describes the probable route by which the human language faculty and languages evolved from simple beginnings to their present complex state."

An almost 100-page-long sample chapter, dealing with the question whether non-human animals have syntax, can be found here. In this chapter, Hurford analyses the structure of whale song, bird song, and primate calls, and comes to the conclusion that:

"No non-human has any semantically compositional syntax, where the form of the syntactic combination determines how the meanings of the parts combine to make the meaning of the whole."

Second, in the first part of a 5-part documentary series on language, Stephen Fry explores the evolution of language. Although there are some minor quibbles (e.g. Stephen Fry stating that language arose from primates grunts about 50,000 years ago, and him speculating that "it really is" language that makes us different from other primates without anyone to back him up), it's a thoroughly enjoyable documentary featuring interviews with people like Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello and Wolfgang Enard (of FOXP2-fame) at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Hat tip: */ˈdɪːkæf/

Update: Sean of Replicated Typo points to a pretty detailed (and pretty harsh) critique over at badlinguistics

Communication in Bonobos, Chimpanzees, and the Evolution of Language

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 20:53:00 +0000

The current issue of First Language features some interesting articles on the evolution of language:

It includes a book review of Michael Tomasello's "Origins of Human Communication" by Evan Kidd as well as a review of an edited volume titled "The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives" by Thomas Scott-Phillips, who rightly argues that the term Biolinguistics - which is mainly used by people from the Generative Grammar camp - is "not a theory-neutral term for the study of language origins."

Last but not least, there's also an interesting article by Heidi Lyn, Patricia Greenfield and E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh about "Semiotic combinations in Pan: A comparison of communication in a chimpanzee and two bonobos."

Here's the abstract:

Communicative combinations of two bonobos (Pan paniscus) and a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) are compared. All three apes utilized ordering strategies for combining symbols (lexigrams) or a lexigram with a gesture to express semantic relations such as agent of action or object of action. Combinatorial strategies used by all three apes revealed commonalities with child language, spoken and signed, at the two-year-old level. However, many differences were also observed: e.g., combinations made up a much smaller proportion and single symbols a much larger proportion of ape production compared with child production at a similar age; and ape combinations rarely exceeded three semiotic elements. The commonalties and differences among three sibling species highlight candidate combinatorial capacities that may underlie the evolution of human language.

Power and Perspective Taking

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:13:00 +0000

From Perlman & Miller (2009):

Powerful people are not very good at comprehending other people's point of view and taking their perspective: "If you ask powerful people to quickly drawn an "E" on their foreheads, they are much more likely than people of low power to draw the letter as if they were reading it, which makes it backward and illegible for anyone else - like this:"∃ " (Galinsky et al. 2006)"

On The Human: Terrence Deacon - Rethinking The Natural Selection Of Human Language

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:47:00 +0000

I just stumbled across this interesting website called "On The Human." Its

"an online community of humanists and scientists dedicated to improving our understanding of persons and the quasi-persons who surround us. As persons are biological, psychological, historical, moral, and autobiographical beings, we employ modes of inquiry from the sciences and humanities. Contributors explore issues in metaphysics and biology, ethics and neuroscience, experimental philosophy and evolutionary psychology."

Anyway, there are some interesting articles at the interface of Cognitive Science, Evolution, and Language on the site, written by quite well-known researchers, and what's even more interesting is that there are often comments by other researchers. For example, there's an article by Terrence Deacon called Rethinking The Natural Selection Of Human Language which features a lively discussion including, among others, Mark Turner, Talmy Givón, Derek Bickerton, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Salikoko Mufwene.

There's also an article by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh called "Human Language - Human Consciousness", which focuses on her work with enculturated bonobos like Kanzi, Panzi and Panbanisha and also includes a very heated discussion of her claims.

Review of FOXP2 and its role in brain development, speech, and the evolution of language

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Mon, 30 May 2011 07:05:00 +0000

Edmund Blair Bolles over at Babel's Dawn discusses a very interesting review of "FOXP2 and the role of cortico-basal ganglia circuits in speech and language evolution" by Wolfgang Enard. Be sure to check it out!

Below you can find the abstract of the review:

"Purpose of the review
A reduced dosage of the transcription factor FOXP2 leads to speech and language impairments probably owing to deficits in cortical and subcortical neural circuits. Based on evolutionary sequence analysis it has been proposed that the two amino acid substitutions that occurred on the human lineage have been positively selected. Here I review recent studies investigating the functional consequences of these two substitutions and discuss how these first endeavors to study human brain evolution can be interpreted in the context of speech and language evolution.
Recent findings
Mice carrying the two substitutions in their endogenous Foxp2 gene show specific alterations in dopamine levels, striatal synaptic plasticity and neuronal morphology. Mice carrying only one functional Foxp2, show additional and partly opposite effects suggesting that FOXP2 has contributed to tuning cortico-basal ganglia circuits during human evolution. Evidence from human and songbird studies suggest that this could have been relevant during language acquisition or vocal learning, respectively.
Summary
FOXP2 could have contributed to the evolution of human speech and language by adapting cortico-basal ganglia circuits. More generally the recent studies allow careful optimism that aspects of human brain evolution can be investigated in model systems such as the mouse.
Highlights
► First functional studies investigate human FOXP2 evolution in a mouse. ► Human-specific properties of FOXP2 are specific to cortico-basal ganglia circuits. ► These properties might be relevant for language acquisition and/or vocal learning."

Terrence Deacon - Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:17:00 +0000

It looks like Terrence Deacon, famed author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997), the second most cited text in the Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography has a new book out in November this year called "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter". I don't know to what extent this book will have anything interesting to say about the evolution of language per se, but as it seems to focus on the evolution of cognition, it certainly looks like its well worth a read.

Here's the book description:

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.

Leading biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon, whose acclaimed book The Symbolic Species explained how the human brain evolved its capacity for language, now offers a radical new approach to the riddle of consciousness. The fact that minds emerged from life and life emerged from inanimate matter leads Deacon to reexamine this mystery from the bottom up. While the same kinds of atoms make up rivers, bacteria, and human brains, Deacon shows how their dynamical relationships produce their different properties. In Incomplete Nature he reveals a missing link: emergent processes that are neither fully mental nor merely material, which provide a bridge connecting the two. He demonstrates how functions, intentions, representations, and values-despite their apparent nonmaterial character-can nevertheless produce physical consequences. Origins of life, information, sentience, meaning, and free will all fall into place in a fully integrated scientific account of the relationship between mind and matter.

Does Language Shape Thought? Different Manifestations of the Idea of Linguistic Relativity (I)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sat, 07 May 2011 14:13:00 +0000

Does the language we speak influence or even shape the way we think? Last December, there was an interesting debate over at The Economist website with Lera Boroditsky defending the motion, and Language Log’s Mark Liberman against the motion (who IMO, both did a very good job).

The result of the online poll was very clear: 78% agreed with the motion, while 22% disagreed.

There are, however, three main problems with this way of framing the question: First, it’s not really clear what ‘language’ really is, second, the same goes for “thought”, and third, there are many many ways of “influencing” and “shaping” something an bee conceptualized.

In this post I want to focus on the third problem and present a very useful classification system for hypotheses about linguistic relativity outlined in an article by Phillip Wolff and Kevin J. Holmes, which was published in the current issue Wiley Interdisciplinary Review: Cognitive Science.

Different manifestations of the idea of linguistic relativity

Language as Language-of-Thought

In its most extreme form, thought is simply equated with language. But this view, in which the units of thought are simply words from natural language, clearly can’t be right. For example, we can have thoughts that are difficult to express, we can understand ambiguous expressions (like “Kids make nutritious snacks”), and we are able to coin new words that express new meanings. All this would not be possible if we didn’t have a more fine-grained mental representation that that is encoded in words. In addition, research on non-human primates and human infants suggests that they are capable of some sophisticated forms of thought even in the absence of language.

This line of reasoning points to a representational format for concepts, categorization, memory, and reasoning that is separate from language.

On a very general level, then, we can all agree that thought is separate from language. But what about the many different ways language can affect thought?

Here, we can first make a distinction between views that hold that language determines thought (linguistic determinism), and those that hold that there are structural differences between language and thought, but that, nevertheless, language influences the way we think.

Linguistic Determinism

Linguistic determinism, a position most often connected to the name of Benjamin Lee Whorf, separates language from the conceptual system, but holds that the language we speak determines the basic categories of thought. This influence is seen as so strong that it can even overwrite pre-existing perceptual and categories in a way analogous to the way infants lose the ability to notice phonetic distinctions that do not exist in their native language. For example, at 6 months, infants growing up in English-speaking households are able to discriminate sounds that in Hindi are seen as different but in English are not, but at 12 months they have lost this ability and only pay attention to sound distinctions relevant to English (e.g. Dirven et al. 2007).

The linguistic determinism-hypothesis poses that this process also holds for many other areas of perception and, critically, cognition. To quote Whorf:

“The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which have to be organized largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.”
“We cut up nature—organize it into concepts—and ascribe significances as we do, largely because of absolutely obligatory patterns of our own language.”

(Please note that in most of his writings, Whorf actually argues for a position that is much more sophisticated and subtle than the one expressed in these popular quotes)

If language is given the role of organizing “the kaleidoscopic flux of impressions” presented to us by the world, this means that on this view, there is a very tight connection between what we can call the conceptual system/thought, and language, one the one hand, and a very loose connection between the conceptual system/thought and the world on the other.

A lot of research in the cognitive sciences, however, indicates that the relationship between thought and the world is much tighter than is assumed in linguistic determinism. For example, languages differ in the way they talk about motion events, especially in the way they encode the direction or path of a motion, on the one hand, and the manner of motion on the other:

"Manner languages (e.g.,English, German, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese) typically code manner in the verb(cf. English skip, run, hop, jog), and path in a variety of other devices such as particles (out), adpositions (into the room), verb prefixes (e.g.,German raus- ‘out’; cf. raus-rennen ‘run out’), etc. Path languages(e.g.,Modern Greek, Romance, Turkish, Japanese, and Hebrew) typically code path in the verb (cf. Greek vjeno ‘exit’, beno ‘enter’, ftano ‘arrive/reach’,aneveno ‘ascend’, diashizo ‘cross’), and manner in adverbials(trehontas‘running’, me ta podia ‘on foot’, grigora ‘quickly’)." (Papafragou & Selimis 2010: 227)

However, studies by Anna Papafragou and others suggest that although, say, English and Spanish speakers talk differently about the same motion event, the still remember it similarly:

"both manner and path seem to be available to an equal extent to speakers of different languages for purposes of (non-linguistic) categorisation and memory, regardless of whether these components are prominently and systematically encoded in the language." (Papafragou & Selimis 2010: 229)

These results and other experiments suggesting that in some respects 'thought and language' are less well aligned than 'thought and world' of course pose a serious problem for linguistic determinism.

Other Ways Language Might Have an Effect on Thought

In sum, this means that two versions of the Sapir-Whorf-Thesis – the Language-as-Thought and Linguistic Determinism hypotheses – can be rejected. But this still leaves us with the many ways language can have an effect on thought.

As Wolff & Holmes note it is precisely because" language and the conceptual system differ that we might expect a tension between them, driving each system to exert an inﬂuence on the other."

Wolff & Holmes use 5 different metaphors to classify the ways this can happen.

Thinking for speaking: Language influences thinking when we think about how to express something in language immediately prior to speaking
Language as meddler: linguistic representations/language and non-linguistic representations/thought can conflict and compete with each other
Language as augmenter: Language enables or extends certain kinds of thought
Language as spotlight: Language directs attention to /makes certain aspects very salient in thinking
Language as inducer: Language can be seen as a primining mechanisms that induces certain ways of thinking about something

In my next post, I’ll elaborate on these 5 subclasses of how language might affect thought.

[Cross posted at Replicated Typo]

References:

Dirven, René, Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen (2007): "Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Studies." In: Dirk Geeraerts und Hubert Cuyckens (Hrsg.): The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1203-1221.

Papafragou, Anna and Stathis Selimis (2010): "Event categorisation and language: A cross-linguistic study of motion." In: Language and Cognitive Processes 25: 224-260.

Wolff, P., & Holmes, K. (2011). Linguistic relativity Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2 (3), 253-265

How do children learn the difference between 'laying' and 'standing' a bottle on a table in Tamil, Dutch (and other languages)?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 20:27:00 +0000

From the current issue of the Journal of Child Language: "The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch" by Bhuvana Narasimhan and Marianne Gullberg
Here's the abstract:

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs (‘lay/stand a bottle on a table’) to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii ‘make stand’; paDka veyyii ‘make lie’), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent: they are monomorphemic (zetten ‘set/stand’; leggen ‘lay’), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in Tamil input corpora; in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately whereas Dutch children use high-frequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children's verb meaning acquisition.

The relation between pointing and language development

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:27:00 +0000

The December 2010 issue of 'Developmental Review' features a nice meta-analysis of of studies on pointing and language development by Cristina Colonnesia, Geert Jan J.M. Stamsa, Irene Kostera, and Marc J. Noomb. Here's their abstract and their 'research highlights'

Abstract

The use of the pointing gesture is one of the first ways to communicate with the world. This gesture emerges before the second year of life and it is assumed to be the first form of intentional communication. This meta-analysis examined the concurrent and longitudinal relation between pointing and the emergence of language. Twenty-five studies were included into the meta-analysis, including 734 children. The role of several moderators was examined: pointing modality, pointing motive, age at which the pointing was measured, the assessment method of the pointing gesture and language development, the modality of language, SES, and country. The results showed both a concurrent (r = .52) and a longitudinal (r = .35) relation between pointing and language development.

The relation between pointing and language development became stronger with age, and was found for pointing with a declarative and general motive, but not for pointing with an imperative motive. It is concluded that the pointing gesture is a key joint-attention behavior involved in the acquisition of language.

Research highlights

► Pointing gesture is concurrently (r = .52) and longitudinally (r = .35) related to language development. ► The relation between pointing gesture and language becomes stronger with age, in particular during the end of the second year of life. ► Both the production (r = .33) and the comprehension (r = .38) of pointing gesture are related to language development. ► Pointing with a declarative (r = .39) and with a general motive (r = .39), rather than with an imperative motive (r = .04), are related to language.

The need for multimodality in primate communication research

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:31:00 +0000

Barbara King points to a very interesting article in press at Animal Behaviour. In their essay "The language void: the need for multimodality in primate communication research" Katie Slocombe, Bridget Waller and Katja Liebal analyse more than 550 studies on primate communication from 1960 to 2008 and argue that research in one modality (e.g. gesture) often differs so strongly in its methodology from research on another modality (e.g. alarm calls) that the results can hardly be reliably compared. Here's their abstract:

Theories of language evolution often draw heavily on comparative evidence of the communicative abilities of extant nonhuman primates (primates). Many theories have argued exclusively for a unimodal origin of language, usually gestural or vocal. Theories are often strengthened by research on primates that indicates the absence of certain linguistic precursors in the opposing communicative modality. However, a systematic review of the primate communication literature reveals that vocal, gestural and facial signals have attracted differing theoretical and methodological approaches, rendering cross-modal comparisons problematic. The validity of the theories based on such comparisons can therefore be questioned. We propose that these a priori biases, inherent in unimodal research, highlight the need for integrated multimodal research. By examining communicative signals in concert we can both avoid methodological discontinuities as well as better understand the phylogenetic precursors to human language as part of a multimodal system.

Barbara King's discussion of the article is also very illuminating.

John Hawks: How language eats brains, and why it matters to language evolution.

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:07:00 +0000

John Hawks has posted a fascinating discussion of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (here) by Bedny et al. that shows that in congenitally blind adults, "brain regions that are thought to have evolved for vision can take on language processing as a result of early experience." (to quote from the abstract) (see also John Lehrer's discussion, here)

These results show the brain's immense plasticity, especially in early development. Crucially, the fact that "brain regions that did not evolve for language can nevertheless participate in language processing" (Bedny et al.) poses the questions whether language-specific processing functions need to have evolved at all.

To quote from John Hawk's discussion at lenght:

"The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.
I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all"

To me, these results also seem compatible with arguments made by Morten Christiansen, Nick Chater, and others, who argue that language was shaped by the human brain and its learning and processing mechanisms, instead of there being a language-specific biological endowment. On this view, then "language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms" (Chater & Christiansen 2010).

UPDATE [21/03/11]: John Hawks has written another highly interesting post that is also relevant to this topic and the question of the evolution of language and cognition more generally: The development of sharing and cooperation from infancy to school-age and (here).

The Linguistics of Birdsong - Review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:58:00 +0000

In the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences there is an interesting (and free!) review of the linguistics of birdsong and its similarities and differences to human language:

Unlike our primate cousins, many species of bird share with humans a capacity for vocal learning, a crucial factor in speech acquisition. There are striking behavioural, neural and genetic similarities between auditory-vocal learning in birds and human infants. Recently, the linguistic parallels between birdsong and spoken language have begun to be investigated. Although both birdsong and human language are hierarchically organized according to particular syntactic constraints, birdsong structure is best characterized as ‘phonological syntax’, resembling aspects of human sound structure. Crucially, birdsong lacks semantics and words. Formal language and linguistic analysis remains essential for the proper characterization of birdsong as a model system for human speech and language, and for the study of the brain and cognition evolution.

Robert C. Berwick, Kazuo Okanoya, Gabriel J.L. Beckers and Johan J. Bolhuis (2011) "Songs to syntax: the linguistics of birdsong." In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences." Volume 15, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 113-121

Update: Edmund Blair Bolles of Babel's Dawn has also just published a very short article about human speech, birdsong and convergent evolution in the journal Bioscience (here)

Four Stone Hearth 112, Chimpanzees, Hosts, and Goats

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:03:00 +0000

The latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth #112 is out over at Anthropology in Practice and contains a number of very interesting links.

For example, they link to a very interesting post by Barbara J. King in which she discusses work by David Leavens, Timothy P. Racine, and William D. Hopkins about pointing behaviour in chimpanzees. These authors question claims made by people like Michael Tomasello and others that only humans point declaratively to provide information and share attention (something which I blogged about previously, e.g. here; see also this post and a very interesting post about a new article by Hopkins and colleagues at Babel's Dawn)

Also, Four Stone Hearth is in dire need of hosts so please check out its announcement page if you might be interested in hosting it.

Hat tip: Daniel Lende

P.S. on a lighter note Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | Video on TED.com

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:37:00 +0000

Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | Video on TED.com

"At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world."

Can children learn abstract syntactic principles by using general cognitive capacities?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pleyer) — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:50:00 +0000

One of the most hotly debated issues in the study of language acquisition is whether the abstract syntactic principles of a language can be learned by children

1. by using domain-general capacities (such as pattern finding, analogy, statistical learning, categorization and generalization, etc.)

or whether they need

2. innately specified knowledge of language that enables them to form the right abstract syntactic categories that cannot be infered from the surface level of linguistic utterances (Chomsky's Poverty of Stimulus Argument)

In a new paper in the journal Cognition, Perfors et al. (2011) argue that domain-general capacities are sufficient for children to be able to learn abstract syntactic principles inherent in the linguistic input.

Here's the abstract:

Children acquiring language infer the correct form of syntactic constructions for which they appear to have little or no direct evidence, avoiding simple but incorrect generalizations that would be consistent with the data they receive. These generalizations must be guided by some inductive bias – some abstract knowledge – that leads them to prefer the correct hypotheses even in the absence of directly supporting evidence. What form do these inductive constraints take? It is often argued or assumed that they reflect innately specified knowledge of language. A classic example of such an argument moves from the phenomenon of auxiliary fronting in English interrogatives to the conclusion that children must innately know that syntactic rules are defined over hierarchical phrase structures rather than linear sequences of words (e.g., [Chomsky, 1965], [Chomsky, 1971],[Chomsky, 1980] and [Crain and Nakayama, 1987]). Here we use a Bayesian framework for grammar induction to address a version of this argument and show 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. We discuss the implications of this analysis for accounts of human language acquisition.