The Language Design

Hi from Montréal, reporting to you (almost-)live from the Language Design conference. The Biolinguistics team was well-represented at this exciting event, with both editors, three advisory board members, and about a half dozen editorial board members in attendance. Thank you to the organizers at UQAM, especially fearless leader Anna Maria Di Sciullo, for bringing together a very interesting group of linguists, biologists, and others to address a wide variety of topics. For me personally, notable highlights included Richard Palmer's talk on morphological asymmetries in animals & plants as well as Partha Mitra's on zebra finch song.

It looks like next year's Biolinguistics Network conference will be in Milan, with the theme of "language and the brain." Start thinking of abstracts now; you won't want to miss this one!

Seyfarth videos

Here are a couple of videos of Robert Seyfarth talking about vervet monkey calls and theory of mind:

Chomsky in Stuttgart

A video of Noam Chomsky's lecture "Restricting stipulations: consequences and challenges" at Universität Stuttgart on March 24 is now available online. (The website is in German; a direct link to download the video is here.)

Recently in the headlines

• NS: Talking evolved from walking in caterpillars
• SD: First direct recording made of mirror neurons in human brain
• SD: Language dysfunction in children may be due to epileptic brain activity
• NYT: Observatory - For some birds, it's not always the same old song
• Telegraph: Video - Migraine leaves woman speaking with Chinese accent
• SD: 'Ancestral Eve' crystal may explain origin of life's left-handedness
• SD: Mathematicians offer elegant solution to evolutionary conundrum
• arXiv: Algorithm reveals secrets of leaf shape
• SD: Sign language study shows multiple brain regions wired for language
• NS: 'Mirror gene' clue to brain's right-to-left links