- SD: Bird brains follow the beat
- SD: Norwegian success in creating an artificial child's voice
- BBC: Digital tools 'to save languages'
- BBC: Goat kids can develop 'accents'
- NS: Young goats can develop distinct accents
- NS: The only primate to communicate in pure ultrasound
- NYT: They're, like, way ahead of the linguistic currrrve
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Recently in the headlines
Friday, February 3, 2012
Recently in the headlines
- NS: Grouse have signature drumming styles
- SD: Prenatal testosterone linked to increased risk of language delay for male infants
- SD: Tiny crooners: male house mice sing songs to impress the girls
- SD: Gene mutation in autism found to cause hyperconnectivity in brain's hearing center
- SD: Scientists decode brain waves to eavesdrop on what we hear
- ScienceNOW: Do dolphins speak whale in their sleep?
- CBS: The secret language of elephants (2010 from 60 Minutes that replayed recently)
- Royal Soc B: Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic & linguistic coevolution
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Biolinguistics in Japan
The website for the Biolinguistics Project, Japan is here: http://www.bioling.jp/english/
Please visit http://www.bioling.jp/english/events/ for information about biolinguistic events in Kyoto this March:
Please visit http://www.bioling.jp/english/events/ for information about biolinguistic events in Kyoto this March:
Kyoto Conference on Biolinguistics
- The Human Language Faculty: Its Design, Development and Evolution -
March 12, Monday, 2012, 10am – 6pm
Shirankaikan Inamori Hall, Kyoto University, Medical School Area
Yoshida Konoe-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan [ access map ]
Special Lectures
Cedric Boeckx (ICREA/University of Barcelona) Clarifying the Content of the Third Factor in Language Design
Denis Bouchard (University of Quebec at Montreal) Solving the UG Problem
Naoki Fukui (Sophia University) Merge and (A)symmetry
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (University of Arizona) (in collaboration with Juan Uriagereka and David Medeiros) Steps towards the Physics of Language
Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania) Toward a Natural History of Language
Following KCB, EVOLANG IX will be held at Campus Plaza Kyoto on March 13-16, 2012. There will be five workshops on the first day, two of them co-organized by the Biolinguistics Project Japan:
Theoretical Linguistics/Biolinguistics
Invited Speakers:
- Cedric Boeckx & Youngmi Jeong
- Denis Bouchard
- Anna Maria Di Sciullo
- Angel Gallego
- Koji Sugisaki
Organizers: Roger Martin (Yokohama National University) & Koji Fujita (Kyoto University)
Contact Address: martin@ynu.ac.jp
Language and Brain
Invited Speakers:
- Michael A. Arbib (University of Southern California): Evolving the Direct Path in Praxis as a Bridge to Duality of Patterning in Language
- Stefano F. Cappa (Vita-Salute University and San Raffaele Scientific Institute): Imaging Syntax and Semantics in the Brain
Organizers: Noriaki Yusa (Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University) & Hajime Ono (Kinki University)
Contact Address: n_yusa@me.com
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Recently in the headlines
- PLoS Computational Biology: A hierarchical neuronal model for generation & online recognition of birdsongs
- NS: Chimp brains may be hard-wired to evolve language
- NS: Do thoughts have a language of their own?
- SD: Babies track word patterns long before word-learning starts
- SD: Synesthesia linked to a hyper-excitable brain
- SD: To children (but not adults) a rose by any other name is still a rose
- SD: Children don't give words special power to categorize their world
- NS: Pigeons match monkeys in abstract counting skills
- SD: I know something you don't know! Wild chimpanzees inform ignorant group members of danger
- SD: Bat brains parse sounds for multitasking
- NS: Learn language faster with gestures
- SD: Deaf sign language users pick up faster on body language
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Biolinguistics Initiative Barcelona
Be sure to check out the new website for the Biolinguistics Initiative Barcelona: http://biolinguistics-bcn.blogspot.com/
Friday, December 2, 2011
2012 LSA Meeting: Organized Session on Biolinguistics
The Organized Session on Biolinguistics will be held from 4-7pm on 5 January 2012 at the LSA Annual Meeting in Portland, OR. All are welcome to attend but must register for the LSA Annual Meeting in order to do so.
Moderators: LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics coordinators
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, University of Cyprus (kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy)
Bridget Samuels, California Institute of Technology (bridget.samuels@gmail.com)
The goal of biolinguistics is to explore theories of language that are biologically plausible as part of an effort to explain how the faculty of language arises both ontogenetically (over the course of an individual's lifetime) and phylogenetically (on an evolutionary timescale). The LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, founded in 2009, seeks to explore these questions as well as to help the field of biolinguistics define itself by, as stated in the SIG description, 'helping to identify what makes biolinguistics 'bio' (and 'linguistic'), initiate discussions on how it differs from previous models of generative grammar (and how it doesn't), debate whether generative grammar is actually a prerequisite […] and so on.'
This session is thematically arranged into three blocks concerning questions that have emerged at the forefront of current biolinguistic research: (1) How do linguistic operations relate to other cognitive abilities? (2) More specifically, where does the syntactic operation Merge come from? And (3) how can archaeology and other inquiries into the past inform our knowledge of language evolution? The presenters selected to address these questions include both linguists and biologists from across North America and Europe; some are young researchers, while others are already established as recognized leaders in the field.
'Language faculty': The first two talks address question (1), how the language faculty relates to other cognitive abilities, in particular in light of Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch's (2002) distinction of a language faculty in the broad sense (FLB) and a language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN). They will discuss matters such as whether linguistic categorization can be considered an exaptation of an FLB property and how the process of language acquisition can be framed from a biolinguistic perspective.
Alexander Clark, 'Distributional learning as a biologically plausible theory of language acquisition'
Rose-Marie Déchaine & Mireille Tremblay, ‘Categorization, cognition and biolinguistics’
'Merge & more': Moving on to FLN, two talks will address further properties. One examines the relation between language and arithmetic from a biolinguistic perspective on the basis of complex numerals, which are assembled and interpreted though Merge and the recursive procedure of FLN. The other deals with the minimal properties of Merge within FLN in an attempt to reach conclusions about the possible evolutionary steps necessary to arrive at the complexities of human language.
'Past, present, and future': The final presentation on (prehistoric) geometric engravings draws on research from paleoanthropology and archaeology in order to further specify the properties of the computational system, with particular reference to language. The biolinguistic core underlying all five presentations will be debated further at a concluding roundtable discussion involving the moderators, the speakers, and the participating audience.
Víctor Longa, ‘Prehistoric geometric engravings and language: A computational approach’
All participants, moderated by the organizers: Roundtable Discussion
Moderators: LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics coordinators
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, University of Cyprus (kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy)
Bridget Samuels, California Institute of Technology (bridget.samuels@gmail.com)
The goal of biolinguistics is to explore theories of language that are biologically plausible as part of an effort to explain how the faculty of language arises both ontogenetically (over the course of an individual's lifetime) and phylogenetically (on an evolutionary timescale). The LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, founded in 2009, seeks to explore these questions as well as to help the field of biolinguistics define itself by, as stated in the SIG description, 'helping to identify what makes biolinguistics 'bio' (and 'linguistic'), initiate discussions on how it differs from previous models of generative grammar (and how it doesn't), debate whether generative grammar is actually a prerequisite […] and so on.'
This session is thematically arranged into three blocks concerning questions that have emerged at the forefront of current biolinguistic research: (1) How do linguistic operations relate to other cognitive abilities? (2) More specifically, where does the syntactic operation Merge come from? And (3) how can archaeology and other inquiries into the past inform our knowledge of language evolution? The presenters selected to address these questions include both linguists and biologists from across North America and Europe; some are young researchers, while others are already established as recognized leaders in the field.
'Language faculty': The first two talks address question (1), how the language faculty relates to other cognitive abilities, in particular in light of Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch's (2002) distinction of a language faculty in the broad sense (FLB) and a language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN). They will discuss matters such as whether linguistic categorization can be considered an exaptation of an FLB property and how the process of language acquisition can be framed from a biolinguistic perspective.
Alexander Clark, 'Distributional learning as a biologically plausible theory of language acquisition'
Rose-Marie Déchaine & Mireille Tremblay, ‘Categorization, cognition and biolinguistics’
'Merge & more': Moving on to FLN, two talks will address further properties. One examines the relation between language and arithmetic from a biolinguistic perspective on the basis of complex numerals, which are assembled and interpreted though Merge and the recursive procedure of FLN. The other deals with the minimal properties of Merge within FLN in an attempt to reach conclusions about the possible evolutionary steps necessary to arrive at the complexities of human language.
Anna Maria Di Sciullo, ‘Arithmetic and language as biologically grounded in FLN’
Bradley Larson, ‘A vestigial operation’
'Past, present, and future': The final presentation on (prehistoric) geometric engravings draws on research from paleoanthropology and archaeology in order to further specify the properties of the computational system, with particular reference to language. The biolinguistic core underlying all five presentations will be debated further at a concluding roundtable discussion involving the moderators, the speakers, and the participating audience.
Víctor Longa, ‘Prehistoric geometric engravings and language: A computational approach’
All participants, moderated by the organizers: Roundtable Discussion
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Recently in the headlines
- Australian Geographic: Birds of a feather talk together
- SD: Babies understand thought process of others at 10 months old
- NS: Baby apes' arm waving hints at origins of language
- NS: Hyperactive neurons build brains in synaesthesia
- NYT: Profiles in science: Steven Pinker, human nature's pathologist
- SD: How the brain strings words into sentences
- BBC: St Andrews scientists ask if whales have dialects
- SD: Ravens gesture with their beaks to point out objects to each other
- SD: Is there a central brain area for hearing melodies and speech cues? Still an open question
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