Recently in the headlines

• PLOS One: Of mice, birds, and men: the mouse ultrasonic song system has some features similar to humans and song-learning birds
• SD: Applying information theory to linguistics
• SD: Language learning makes the brain grow, Swedish study suggests
• SD: Music underlies language acquisition, theorists propose
• SD: How birds master courtship songs: zebra finches shed light on brain circuits and learning
• Discover: Same gene linked to bigger brains of dolphins and primates
• SD: Babies' ability to detect complex rules in language outshines that of adults, research suggests
• SD: Neandertal's right-handedness verified, hints at language capacity

Recently in the headlines

• BBC - Related birds evolve different songs and colours
• SD - Deaf brain processes touch differently
• BBC - Study says chimpanzees use 'human-like gestures'
• SD - Infants can use language to learn about people's intentions
• SD - How elephants produce their deep 'voices': same physical mechanism produces vocalizations in elephants and humans
• SD - Of mice and melodies: research on language gene seeks to uncover the origins of the singing mouse
• SD - Brain's code for pronouncing vowels uncovered
• SD - More sophisticated wiring, not just bigger brain, helped humans evolve beyond chimps
• Nat Geo - Gibbons and opera singers use the same voice tools
• SD - Primate of the opera: what soprano singing apes on helium reveal about the human voice
• BBC - Helium-huffing gibbons 'sing with soprano technique'

ICREA International Symposium on BIolinguistics

ICREA International Symposium on Biolinguistics
October 1-3, 2012
Barcelona, Spain

The meeting, sponsored by the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and organized by Cedric Boeckx, will take place at the Aula Magna of the Universitat de Barcelona (historic building).  The meeting, open to the public (no registration fee required), will provide an interdisciplinary forum focused on the biological foundations of the human capacity for language. It will bring together eminent scholars in cognitive science, ethology, genetics, neuroscience, comparative psychology, theoretical linguistics, philosophy of mind, paleoneurology, robotics, paleogenomics, and more. Here is an alphabetical list of invited participants:

-Albert Bastardas (U. Barcelona, ICREA Academia program)
-Luca Bonatti (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra)
-Emiliano Bruner (CENIEH, Burgos)
-Ruth de Diego Balaguer (ICREA/U. Barcelona)
-Tecumseh Fitch (U. Vienna)
-Koji Fujita (U. Kyoto)
-Judit Gervain (CNRS, U. Paris Descartes)
-Toni Gomila (U. Balearic Islands)
-Kleanthes Grohmann (U. Cyprus)
-Simon Kirby (U. Edinburgh)
-Carles Lalueza-Fox (U. Pompeu Fabra)
-Kazuo Okanoya (U. Tokyo)
-Christophe Pallier (CNRS/INSERM-CEA, Paris)
-Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells (ICREA/U. Barcelona)
-Joana Rossello (U. Barcelona)
-Douglas Saddy (U. Reading)
-Wendy Sandler (U. Haifa)
-Ricard Sole (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra; Santa Fe Institute)
-Luc Steels (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra)
-Sonja Vernes (Max Planck, Nijmegen)
-Charles Yang (U. Pennsylvania)

In addition to these invited talks, members of the Barcelona Biolinguistics Inititative and their collaborators will present posters featuring their recent works.

A complete program will be available next month.

Origin of Language session at ICL 19

Origin of Language & Human Cognition
ICL 19 - Geneva, July 22-27, 2013
http://www.cil19.org/en/sessions/session-2/
Call for papers: http://www.cil19.org/en/calls-for-papers/second-call-for-papers/ due Sept 1, 2012

This parallel session will be structured around five major issues that arise in the domain of the evolution of language. Abstracts are solicited which address one or more of the following issues:

1. The relevance of the distinction between I-language and E-languages for the question of language evolution. Chomsky introduced a major distinction between I-language (the inner, psychological, knowledge of grammar) and E-languages (the public languages, such as English, French, Italian, Japanese, etc.). E-languages are public by contrast with I-language, which is private. This may mean that there are not one, but two evolutionary stories to be told, one relevant to the evolution of I-language and one relevant to the evolution of E-languages. Additionally, the evolutionary processes involved might be different, e.g., one could be biological while the other one could be cultural. However, the distinction between I-language and E-languages has been largely ignored in the literature on language evolution.

2. The specificity of language(s) as compared to other animal communication systems. Hockett is famous (and widely quoted in most works on language evolution) for having proposed (see Hockett 1960) a list of thirteen essential features of language that supposedly sets it apart from other animal communication systems. However, it has been claimed (see Fitch 2009) that, though the set as a whole is specific to human language, each feature can be found in some animal communication system or other. A major question, given that the whole set seems specific to human language, is whether it is complete and what implications the fact that each feature could be shared with other species has for the field of language evolution.

3. Evolution of language: biological or cultural. When Pinker and Bloom revived the field of language evolution in 1990, their approach was firmly biological. However, nowadays, "social" accounts, emphasizing cultural rather than biological evolution, seem prominent. An important question is whether such social scenarios can entirely do away with biological approaches, given that they seem to rest on notions such as "cooperation", usually understood as "altruistic" in the biological sense (i.e., benefiting to the addressee, but detrimental to the agent). How exactly biological and cultural evolutions interact in such social accounts is a major question.

4. Cognitive vs. social scenarios. While cultural evolution views are squarely social, they nevertheless tend to sneak in some cognition: for instance, Dunbar's defense of his social account, based on the prevalence of gossip in pub conversations, seems to ignore the fact that gossip is contentful and hence necessitates fairly important cognitive (e.g., conceptual) abilities. On the other hand, biological evolution views could be either social (in line with the so-called Machivellian hypothesis on cognition) or cognitive. Disentangling cognitive from social issues, or at least articulating them precisely seems fairly urgent.

5. Biolinguistics. Biolinguistics is a lively field (as shown by the existence of a dedicated ejournal), concerned with the biological underpinnings of language, from brain circuits to evolution, thus covering all fields of linguistics (phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) and looking further towards psycho- and neurolinguistics. It is also concerned with the development of language and with its neuro-developmental as well as neuropsychological deficits.

Recently in the headlines

• Science: News focus on evolution of language (coverage of EVOLANG)
• SD: Between ear and brain, an orderly orchestra of synapses
• BBC: Gorillas use 'baby talk' gestures (with video)
• Nat Geo: Gorillas seen using 'baby talk' gestures - a first (with video)
• SD: How brain performs 'motor chunking' tasks

Call for papers: Workshop on Advances in Biolinguistics

Workshop: Advances in Biolinguistics 

Date: 22-Jul-2013 - 27-Jul-2013 
Location: Geneva, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Anna Maria Di Sciullo

This workshop focuses on advances on the understanding of the biological basis of language (Lenneberg 1967, Jenkins 2000, 2004, Chomsky 2002, 2005, 2011, Piattelli-Palmarini et al. 2009, Larson et al 2010, Di Sciullo et al. 2010, Di Sciullo and Boeckx 2011). The workshop invites discussions where specific biolinguistic hypotheses are substantiated by theoretical linguistics evidence, empirical data and biological/natural world evidence. The workshop includes the following thematic sessions: 

1. Language and biology 
2. Language typology and language universals 
3. The effects of natural laws 

Session 1: Language and biology, addresses the question of how studies in language and genetics, language and the brain contribute to our understanding of the nature of syntax, morphology, the lexicon, and their interfaces with the other cognitive systems. 

Session 2: Language typology and language universals, considers how biolinguistic studies on language evolution and variation shed new light on language typology, and the study of language universals. The questions raised in this session are the following: how is variation and change in the natural world related to language variation and change, and how the biolinguistic perspective may lead to new approaches to language typology and universals. 

Session 3: The effects of natural laws, discusses recent proposals on the effect of natural laws, such as prominence, symmetry breaking, reaction-diffusion, preservation of shape etc. on language derivations and representations, on language variation and evolution, and on language acquisition. How do these laws interact with natural language? 

The invited speakers are Lyle Jenkins, Angela Friederici, and Giuseppe Longobardi.

See the workshop website for the call for papers (abstracts due 15 July 2012).

Videos from Evolang 9

Videos of the plenary lectures from the recent Evolang9 conference in Kyoto are now available online at:
http://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/international-conference-en/31 

The videos of the Kyoto Conference on Biolinguistics are also now available at:
http://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/international-conference-en/30

(via Evolutionary Linguistics)