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.