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"In the past, we thought that if we name the things for children, the labels will do the rest: children would infer that the two things that have the same name are alike in some way or that they go together," he said. "We can't assume that anymore. We really need to do more than just label things."
FOXP2 is crucial for language in humans and for tweeting in birds.
A British family with a bizarre speech deficit has led linguists to FOXP2: a gene that begins to explain how our ancestors acquired language.
Using similar shapes to those in the original experiment, but changing the names of the invented terms slightly, they found that an astonishing 95 per cent of people labelled the spiky object as "kiki" and the curvy one as "bouba". One possible explanation is that this might be down to the shapes of the lips as we form the vowels in these words; in "bouba" they are more curved than in "kiki".
"collaboration and interaction are essential elements in the evolution of language. They also have shown that the most effective forms of communication can propagate in a community in a similar way to a virus."
"Hoffecker said the formation of the super-brain was a consequence of a rare ability to share complex thoughts among individual brains. Among other creatures on Earth, the honeybee may be the best example of an organism that has mastered the trick of communicating complex information -- including maps of food locations and information on potential nest sites from one brain to another -- using their intricate "waggle dance.""
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The roots of the mind and the super-brain lie deep in our past and are likely tied to fundamental aspects of our evolution like bipedalism and making stone tools, he said. It was from the making of tools that early humans first developed their ability to project complex thoughts or mental representations outside the individual brain -- our own version of the honeybee waggle dance, Hoffecker said.
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“Each language family is evolving according to its own set of rules. Some were similar, but none were the same,” said Dunn. “There is much more diversity, in terms of evolutionary processes, than anybody ever expected.”
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nstead of a simple set of brain switches steering language evolution, cultural circumstance played a role. Changes were the product of chance, or perhaps fulfilled as-yet-unknown needs. For whatever reason, “the fence over, ball kicked” might have been especially useful to Indo-European speakers, but not Austronesians.
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"Phrase-structure rules were used in early transformational-generative grammars (TGG) to describe a given language's syntax. This was accomplished by attempting to break language down into its constituent parts (also known as syntactic categories) namely phrasal categories and lexical categories (aka parts of speech)."
...one of the most influential ideas in the study of language is that of universal grammar. Put forward by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, it is widely interpreted as meaning that all languages are basically the same and that the human brain is born language-ready, with an in-built program that is able to decipher the common rules underpinning any mother tongue. For five decades this idea has dominated work in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. To understand language, it implied, you must sweep aside the dazzling diversity of languages and find the common human core.
In April 2010, Twitter had approximately 106M registered users. The volume of data that flows through the Twitter pipe dwarfs any other publicly available linguistic corpus in existence (except the web itself), and unlike fixed corpora, it still flows. Such a huge dataset has proven itself to be a fertile resource for a number of natural language processing tasks (such as trend detection and sentiment analysis), but its value as a collection of colloquial language begs to be used for lexicography as well: if the purpose of a dictionary is to record actual usage, then Twitter data allows us to broaden the scope of our corpus beyond newswire, literary works and other forms of privileged publication and include the unedited language of everyday folks as well.
I have always thought that babbling was the critical shift toward phonology, but now I see there was a second equally important one: wanting to be like your teacher. This step is just assumed by the simulation, but at least we have identified a pivotal point. Along with a need to make sounds, cooperate and trust, there has to be a drive/urge/instinct/whatever-you-call-it to imitate the signals of another. Where did that come from? Babel's Dawn
Chomsky's theory has played a pivotal role in the cognitive revolution and is often seen as one of the pillar of cognitive sciences, especially in the cognition and culture field. It is therefore quite exciting to see some cognitive scientists attacking such a venerable theory and proposing a radical alternative.
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