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

Linguistics @ Cyprus

Here a quick post, on a more or less personal note. Even though we may be far away from a lot of places, Cyprus does have a growing (bio)linguistic community. Here are just three interesting events:

LOT 1 (international postgraduate student conference): http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-675.html
GACL 4 (forget the acronym): http://www.punksinscience.org/kleanthes/GACL-4/index.html
LDG 3 (Language Disorders in Greek): http://www.euc.ac.cy/easyconsole.cfm/id/1056

If any BIOLINGUISTICS BLOG reader is interested in participating, and even giving a paper, please send me a quick email! LOT 1 and LDG 3 don't have much of a "website" and GACL 4's is basic (should I say "crappy"?), but there you are. Naama Friedmann, Theo Marinis, Alex Perovic, and Ken Wexler, all in two days, and Sonja Eisenbeiss, Tom McFadden, Peter Patrick, and Barbara Lust in three days a month earlier is no small feat by anyone's reckoning.

These events are, of course, to some extent pushed by the recently formed Cyprus Acquisition Team (CAT) and the new Gen-CHILD Project we were awarded. (Both sites are also still in development.)

We can organize crash space and try to keep all other costs low if anyone's interested in coming out here!

Kleanthes

Recently in the headlines

• Nature EMBOR: Speak to me, melody: Music's biological roots with language under scrutiny
• SD: Form or function: Evolution takes different paths, genetic study shows
• NYT: From a songbird, new insights into the brain (this has gotten a lot of coverage)
• SD: New period of brain 'plasticity' created with transplanted embryonic cells
• arXiv: The pace of evolution across fitness valleys
• SD: Why certain symmetries are never observed in nature
• SD: Hyenas' laughter signals decoded
• SD: How does a heart know when it's big enough?
• SD: In brain-injured children, early gesturing predicts language delays
• SD: Autism susceptibility genes identified
• SD: Words influence infants' cognition from first months of life
• SD: Human brain becomes tuned to voices and emotional tone during infancy

Conference on Language, Nature, & Cognition at VSSoL

Conference on Language, Nature, and Cognition at the Verbum Summer School of Linguistics
July 16-17, 2010 in Vigo, Galicia, Spain.

Abstracts are invited for presentation at the Verbum Summer School of Linguistics (VSSoL) Conference on Language, Nature, and Cognition, on any aspect of theoretical linguistics, experimental linguistics, and biolinguistics. There will also be a poster session.

Invited speakers are Juan Uriagereka (University of Maryland) and Manuel Carreiras (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language).

Call for papers (due May 21, 2010): here.