Changes to the blog

In an effort to bring you more and better biolinguistic content, your friendly blog team has joined forces with the Biolinguistics Initiative Barcelona. The "news roundup" section will now be hosted there. You can read the latest edition by following this link, and be sure to check out the rest of the blog as well.

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Think twice, speak once: bilinguals process both languages simultaneously
• SD: Ability to move to a beat linked to brain's response to speech: musical training may sharpen language processing
• BBC: Moving to the rhythm 'can help language skills'
• SD: Why humans are musical
• SD: Responsive interactions key to toddlers' ability to learn language
• NYU: The signing brain: what sign languages reveal about human language and the brain (video of Karen Emmorey lecture)
• SD: Aphasia and bilingualism: using one language to relearn another
• SD: Colonizing songbirds lost sense of syntax
• SD: Understanding how infants acquire new words across cultures

Recently in the headlines

• Quanta: Evolution as opportunist
• SD: New evidence that orangutans and gorillas can match images based on biological categories
• SD: Learning a new language alters brain development
• SD: Primate calls, like human speech, can help infants form categories
• SD: Language and tool-making skills evolved at the same time
• SD: Discovery helps to unlock brain's speech-learning mechanism
• SD: Look at what I'm saying: engineers show brain depends on vision to hear
• SD: Neuroscientists show that monkeys can decide to call out or keep silent
• NS: Why your brain may work like a dictionary
• SD: Brain scans may help diagnose dyslexia
• SD: Piano fingers: how players strike keys depends on how muscles are used for keystrokes that occur before and after (comparison to coarticulation in speech)

Today's installment is less narrowly linguistic and more broadly bio than in the past. Feedback on whether this is a positive or negative development is welcome.

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Brain picks out salient sounds from background noise by tracking frequency and time
• BBC: Dolphins give each other 'names' (video)
• BBC: Dolphins 'call each other by name'
• Language Log: Dolphins using personal names, again (includes several links)
• SD: Ability to learn new words based on efficient communication between brain areas that control movement and hearing
• SD: Bird brain? Birds and humans have similar brain wiring
• Quanta: The surprising origins of life's complexity
• SD: Inner speech speaks volumes about the brain
• SD: Bilingual children have a two-tracked mind
• SD: Neandertals shared speech and language with modern humans, study suggests
• NS: First man to hear people before they speak
• SD: Why do we gesticulate?
• NYT: From the mouths of babes and birds

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Gene deletion affects early language and brain white matter
• SD: Songbirds turn on and tune up
• NS: Mind-reading monkey brains look similar to ours

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Genetics of dyslexia and language impairment unraveled
• SD: How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants?
• SD: Songbirds may give insight to nature vs. nurture
• SD: Picking up a second language is predicted by ability to learn patterns
• Science News: Dog sniffs out grammar
• SD: How bilinguals switch between languages

Recently in the headlines

• NS: Early hominins couldn't have heard modern speech
• SD: Grammar errors? The brain detects them even when you are unaware
• SD: Brain anatomy of dyslexia is not the same in men and women, boys and girls
• SD: How we decode 'noisy' language in daily life
• SD: Evolving genes lead to evolving genes: selection in European populations of genes regulated by FOXP2

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Young children have grammar and chimpanzees don't
• BBC: Primate call gives clues to human speech origins
• SD: Shift of language function to right hemisphere impedes post-stroke aphasia recovery

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Language by mouth and by hand
• SD: Speaking a tonal language primes the brain for musical training
• SD: Mice show innate ability to vocalize: deaf or not, courting male mice make same sounds

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Language protein differs in males, females
• NS: Conductor of speech uncovered in the brain
• SD: Secrets of human speech uncovered
• SD: How human language could have evolved from birdsong
• Replicated Typo: The evolution of speech: lip-smacking monkeys (links to Ghazanfar et al. PNAS article and Fitch's news article on it in Nature)

Deadline extended: Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop

The deadline for abstracts for the Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop at the 2013 LSA Summer Institute has been extended to March 15. Please see the original announcement for details.

CFP: ESHE 3rd Annual Meeting

European Society for the Study of Human Evolution (ESHE) 3rd Annual Meeting
Vienna, Austria - September 20-21, 2013
http://www.eshe.eu/meetings.html

From the ESHE website:
We are pleased to announce the 3rd annual ESHE Meeting in Vienna, Austria. The meeting will be hosted by the local organizer Professor Gerhard Weber, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna. On Thursday 19 September, the eve of the opening of the meeting, a special Keynote presentation will be given by Professor Tecumseh Fitch, from the University of Vienna, on the evolution of speech, language and music. The meeting will be held on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 September in the spectacular Groβer Festsaal and Kleiner Festsaal at the University of Vienna. Each day will be composed of plenary podium sessions in the morning, specialized workshops in the afternoon and poster sessions in the early evening. An open bar will be organized during the first poster session on Friday and on Saturday evening a General Assembly of the members of the society will take place, followed by a closing party at a traditional Austrian ‘Heuriger’. On Sunday, 22 September an optional excursion will be offered to some of Austria’s most important archaeological sites, namely Willendorf and Krems Wachtberg, and will include a cruise along the beautiful Wachau section of the Danube river.

Abstracts are due on May 31, 2013.

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Roots of language in human and bird biology
• SD: Cultural evolution changes bird song
• SD: Learning and memory may play a central role in synesthesia 
• SD: Brain structure of infants predicts language skills at one year

Recently in the headlines

• BBC: Birdsong secrets revealed in 3D model
• SD: How do songbirds sing? In 3-D!
• SD: Language learning begins in utero, study finds
• SD: Birdsong study pecks theory that music is uniquely human
• SD: How songbirds learn to sing: mathematical model explains how birds correct mistakes to stay on key
• SD: Rhesus monkeys cannot hear the beat in music

CFP: Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop

Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop
at the LSA Summer Institute
Ann Arbor, MI - July 12, 2013

In conjunction with the LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, we invite the submission of abstracts for a workshop on methodology in biolinguistics, to be held on July 12, 2013 at the LSA Summer Institute at the University of Michigan.

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.”

In this workshop, we will foster dialogue on biolinguistic methodology. This topic emerged as a topic of interest and concern during the roundtable discussion at the end of the Workshop on Biolinguistics Organized Session at the LSA Annual Meeting in Portland, January 2012. Specifically, we aim with this workshop to field presentations about how biolinguists (both practicing and aspiring ones) can contribute to interdisciplinary dialogue and be informed consumers of data and literature from fields such as genetics, archaeology, and evolutionary biology. We will also feature morning and afternoon roundtable discussions with the speakers.

Invited speakers:      Noam Chomsky, MIT (T.B.C.)

                                 Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland

Abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations should be anonymous and between 200-500 words. Please, no more than one single-authored and one joint-authored abstract per person.

Abstracts are due March 1, 2013.

Please send abstracts, preferably in .PDF format, to both:

Kleanthes Grohmann – kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy

Bridget Samuels – bridget.samuels@gmail.com

CFP: Ways to Protolanguage 3

Ways to Protolanguage 3
Call deadline: 1 March 2013
Event Dates: 25-26 May 2013
Event Location: Wrocław, Poland 
Event URL:  http://protolanguage2013.wsf.edu.pl/

Plenary speakers

Prof. Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist specialising in the study of primate behaviour. Particular interest has been generated by his hypothesis that language evolved as a substitute grooming mechanism (Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language) and Dunbar’s number hypothesis, whereby 150 constitutes the approximate cognitive limit on the number of individuals with whom a person can maintain stable relationships. He is currently the chair of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Prof. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is a psychologist and primatologist, best known for her work with the bonobos Kazni and Panbanisha, investigating their linguistic and cognitive abilities through the use of lexigrams and computer-based keyboards. Originally based at Georgia State University’s Language Research Center), she now acts as the Executive Director and Head Scientist at Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa.  

Prof. Tomasz P. Krzeszowski is a cognitive linguist and a full professor at the University of Warsaw. A scholarship-holder of universities in Albany, New York and Oxford, he is also a member of Neophilological Committee and Linguistic Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Currently based in the School of English at the University of Social Sciences, Warsaw. He authored over seventy original publications home and abroad, including continuously reissued English teaching handbooks. 

Prof. Peter Gärdenfors represents cognitive science; his research interests include problems related to the evolution of thinking and language (Conceptual Spaces, How Homo Became Sapiens, The Dynamics of Knowledge). His proposals regarding intentionality and imitation have received considerable attention among language evolution researchers. He is Professor of cognitive science at the University of Lund, Sweden, and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Josep Call is a comparative psychologist specializing in the study of cognitive as well linguistic abilities of non-human great apes. He has authored more than a hundred research papers, mostly experimental studies on primate cognition. Since 1999 he has been based at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, where he is director of Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center.

Thematic scope

Ways to Protolanguage is a biennial conference organised by the Department of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Committee for Philology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Wroclaw Branch and Philological School of Higher Education in Wroclaw. One of the primary goals of this conference is bringing together researchers representing a variety of areas in order to gain a multidisciplinary perspective on the range of currently available evidence relevant to early language evolution. The focus of the conference is on the early stages of the emergence of symbolic, language-like communication in hominids. The conference will reflect the inherently interdisciplinary nature of research into the evolution of language. We invite papers from a wide range of subjects related to language evolution, including:

- anthropological linguistics,
- general evolutionary theory,
- evolutionary psychology,
- comparative psychology,
- pleistocene archaeology,
- palaeoanthropology,
- genetics of language disorders,
- cultural anthropology,
- speech physiology,
- contact linguistics,
- history of writing,
- gesture studies,
- neuroscience of language,
- computational modelling,
- primatology,
- animal cognition,
- animal communication.

We invite presentations in English. However, papers in other languages are also welcome. 

Publication changes for Biolinguistics journal

From the editors of Biolinguistics:

"Open access, the next step: Publication changes in BIOLINGUISTICS"
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/announcement/view/22

Over the past year or so we have received many excellent submissions, so much so that we found ourselves in an uncomfortable situation: We had to tell some authors that their accepted submissions would not come out until 2014. We felt that this was a departure from our ideal for the journal -- the dual promise of fast review and fast publication --, and that we had to do something about it. As a result, we have decided to follow the example of other Open Access, online-only journals, and publish accepted submissions as soon as they are accepted and properly formatted, instead of waiting to compile entire issues. This change will make it possible for us to publish more material and in a more speedy fashion. Beginning with volume 7 (2013), there will be no more issues; rather, each piece gets published when it's ready, with consecutive page numbering within each given annual volume.

Recently in the headlines

• Replicated Typo: The origin of language in gesture-speech unity (links to blog posts by David McNeil on How Language Began)
• BBC: Parrot mimics address individuals
• SD: Parrots imitate individuals when addressing them
• SD: Call that a ball? Dogs learn to associate words with objects differently than humans do
• SD: Evolution of human intellect: human-specific regulation of neuronal genes
• NS: Our true dawn: pinning down human origins

And don't forget to check out the newest issue of Biolinguistics (vol 6 no 3-4), published this week.

Recently in the headlines

• SD: Read my lips: it's easier when they're your own
• SD: New brain gene gives us edge over apes, study suggests
• New blog: Faculty of Language

Call for papers: GLOW workshop on biolinguistics

Workshop on Biolinguistics at GLOW 36
University of Lund - 2 April 2013
Abstracts due: November 15, 2012
http://konferens.ht.lu.se/glow-36/call-for-papers/workshop-1-biolinguistics

Organizer: Anna Maria di Sciullo
Invited speakers: Robert Berwick, Charles Yang

This workshop addresses fundamental questions on the properties of the Language Faculty from a biolinguistic perspective, with a particular attention on how this perspective contributes to further understanding of linguistic phenomena with large empirical coverage.

The study of the relation between humans’ biology and the Language Faculty is central in Biolinguistics (Lenneberg 1967; Chomsky 1983, 2005; Jenkins 2000, 2004; Gallistel, 2009; Di Sciullo et al 2010; Berwick and Chomsky 2011; Di Sciullo and Boeckx 2011).

While theoretical hypotheses about this relation emerged in the generative enterprise since its beginnings, recent developments directly address the issue in terms of the properties of the ‘language organ’. Different hypotheses about the properties of the generative procedure giving rise to the discrete infinity of language are still under discussion, and their connection with biology is open to important cross-disciplinary work (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch 2002; Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka 2008; Larson 2011; Lasnik 2011, 2012; Arsenijević and Hinzen 2012).

Advances have been made in human-animal studies to differentiate human language from animal communication (Jarvis 2004; Fitch and Hauser 2004; Friederici 2009; Fitch 2010). Contributions from neuroscience also point to the exclusive properties of the human brain for language (Moro 2010; Friederici et al. 2011; Patel 2008, 2012). Studies of genetically based language impairments also contribute to the understanding of the properties of the language organ (Ross and Bever 2004; Bishop et al. 2005; Hancock and Bever 2012; Patel et al. 2008; Wexler 2003).

This workshop invites contributions showing how the theoretical and experimental works on the biological basis of language shed light on core linguistic phenomena.

The relation between language variation and biology is another important area of research in biolinguistics, as variation is a constant in the observable biological world, as it is in language variation and historical evolution (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Lewontin 2000). Theoretical approaches to language variation stemming from works on population genetics, and syntactic approaches to language phylogeny opened new horizons for the study of language variation, and more broadly for language development, including its development in the child (Bever 1981; Longobardi and Guardiano 2011; Niyogi 2006, Niyogi and Berwick 2009; Di Sciullo 2011, 2012, Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts 2012). Recent works on the poverty of the stimulus bring additional arguments to the biological nature of language, and they address central issues related to deterministic/probabilistic theories of language learning and language variation (Berwick et al 2011; Yang 2002, 2008, 2011).

Other works address the question of why parameters emerge and why resetting of parameters occurs, and consider the role of external, environmental factors in language variation and change. This workshop invites contributions with large empirical coverage that address fundamental questions on language development and language variation and their technical instantiations as feature-valuing, symmetry-breaking, functional flexibility, as a distinctive instance of variation and development in the natural world.

The relation between Language as a computational procedure and principles reducing complexity has been part of the research agenda in the generative enterprise since the 1950’s. Framed within biolinguistics, the principles of efficient computation are natural laws affecting the properties of the operations and the derivations of the (Narrow) Language Faculty (Chomsky 2005, 2011). They apply to Merge (No Tampering Condition), as well as to the derivational procedure (minimal search, phases, Agree), to SM (Pronounce the Minimum, Chomsky 2011), and CI (Reference Set, Reinhart 2006; Local Economy, Fox 1999) interfaces. They reduce the specific properties of the Language Faculty, while they affect all aspects of the generative procedure.

Several questions arise regarding the properties of the so-called ‘third factor’ in language development, including the following:  How do the principles of efficient computation address classical computational notions of complexity, such as Kolmogorov’s 1965 definition, as well as novel notions of complexity? How are they related to natural laws? What is their relation with the Strong Minimalist Thesis? This workshop invites contributions with large empirical coverage that address fundamental questions on principles of efficient computation in the study of the biology of language.