Michael P. posted an article on
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Feb 1, 2012, 10:58 am
Over at replicated typo, Sean has recorded what very likely is the first song ever about language evolution: "You'll never teach a monkey how to sing" Go and listen to it, it's fantastic!
On a slightly more scientific note, James also discusses the latest work on Pirahã and the question whe... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Oct 4, 2011, 7:22 am
Yesterday I watched the second episode of Stephen Fry's four-part documentary series Planet Word which dealt with Identity and also had a short tidbit about Linguistic Relativity featuring an interview with Lera Boroditsky (although I must say that as a native speaker of German I'm still quite puzzl... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Sep 28, 2011, 4:18 am
Today marks the 4th Birthday of this Blog, and although I haven't managed to post anything in quite a while, I thought I'd use this happy occasion to point out some interesting links:
First, James Hurford's sequel to his 2007 "The Origins of Meaning" has finally been published: With, 808 pages "The ... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Jul 26, 2011, 4:53 pm
The current issue of First Language features some interesting articles on the evolution of language:It includes a book review of Michael Tomasello's "Origins of Human Communication" by Evan Kidd as well as a review of an edited volume titled "The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspecti... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Jun 19, 2011, 8:13 am
From Perlman & Miller (2009):
Powerful people are not very good at comprehending other people's point of view and taking their perspective: "If you ask powerful people to quickly drawn an "E" on their foreheads, they are much more likely than people of low power to draw the letter as if they were ... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Jun 18, 2011, 9:47 am
I just stumbled across this interesting website called "On The Human." Its "an online community of humanists and scientists dedicated to improving our understanding of persons and the quasi-persons who surround us. As persons are biological, psychological, historical, moral, and autobiographical bei... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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May 30, 2011, 3:05 am
Edmund Blair Bolles over at Babel's Dawn discusses a very interesting review of "FOXP2 and the role of cortico-basal ganglia circuits in speech and language evolution" by Wolfgang Enard. Be sure to check it out!
Below you can find the abstract of the review:"Purpose of the reviewA reduced dosage of ... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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May 18, 2011, 4:17 pm
It looks like Terrence Deacon, famed author of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997), the second most cited text in the Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography has a new book out in November this year called "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter".... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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May 7, 2011, 10:13 am
Does the language we speak influence or even shape the way we think? Last December, there was an interesting debate over at The Economist website with Lera Boroditsky defending the motion, and Language Log’s Mark Liberman against the motion (who IMO, both did a very good job).The result of the onl... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Apr 23, 2011, 4:27 pm
From the current issue of the Journal of Child Language: "The role of input frequency and semantic transparency in the acquisition of verb meaning: evidence from placement verbs in Tamil and Dutch" by Bhuvana Narasimhan and Marianne Gullberg
Here's the abstract:We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-sp... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Mar 27, 2011, 8:27 am
The December 2010 issue of 'Developmental Review' features a nice meta-analysis of of studies on pointing and language development by Cristina Colonnesia, Geert Jan J.M. Stamsa, Irene Kostera, and Marc J. Noomb. Here's their abstract and their 'research highlights'
AbstractThe use of the pointing ge... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Mar 21, 2011, 2:31 pm
Barbara King points to a very interesting article in press at Animal Behaviour. In their essay "The language void: the need for multimodality in primate communication research" Katie Slocombe, Bridget Waller and Katja Liebal analyse more than 550 studies on primate communication from 1960 to 2008 an... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Mar 2, 2011, 4:07 am
John Hawks has posted a fascinating discussion of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (here) by Bedny et al. that shows that in congenitally blind adults, "brain regions that are thought to have evolved for vision can take on language processing as a result o... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Feb 25, 2011, 8:58 am
In the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences there is an interesting (and free!) review of the linguistics of birdsong and its similarities and differences to human language:
Unlike our primate cousins, many species of bird share with humans a capacity for vocal learning, a crucial factor in... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Feb 22, 2011, 8:03 am
The latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth #112 is out over at Anthropology in Practice and contains a number of very interesting links.
For example, they link to a very interesting post by Barbara J. King in which she discusses work by David Leavens, Timothy P. Racine, and William D. Hopkins abou... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Feb 16, 2011, 5:37 am
Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies | Video on TED.com"At TEDxRainier, Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and ... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Feb 9, 2011, 5:50 pm
One of the most hotly debated issues in the study of language acquisition is whether the abstract syntactic principles of a language can be learned by children
1. by using domain-general capacities (such as pattern finding, analogy, statistical learning, categorization and generalization, etc.) or... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Feb 1, 2011, 7:01 am
The February issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences looks very interesting: It is a theme issue called 'Evolution and human behavioural diversity' and was compiled and edited by Gillian R. Brown, Thomas E. Dickins, Rebecca Sear and Kevin N. Laland. It con... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 19, 2010, 4:13 pm
Chris over at the Lousy Linguist has a very nice roundup of quotes about the new Google Ngram Viewer. The overall consensus as of now seems to be that although the are a majority of problems with the program,"Whatever misgivings scholars may have about the larger enterprise, the data will be a lot o... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 2, 2010, 10:17 am
There seems to be a very interestig article in a Special Issue of Interaction Studies with a focus on Human-Animal Interaction, which challenges some of the assumptions underlying Michael Tomasello's claim that the ability for shared intentionality and cooperation (see e.g. here) is what makes us un... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Nov 19, 2010, 3:30 am
There's a wealth of new and very interesting articles in the November Issue of Developmental Psychology relating to theory of mind and perspective taking:
in their article "True or false: Do 5-year-olds understand belief?" William V. Fabricius and his colleagues argue that conventional theory of min... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Nov 15, 2010, 8:07 am
cross-posted at Replicated Typo
In this post I will offer a short overview of some aspects of Michael
Tomasello’s latest book „Why We Cooperate,” which is based on his 2008 Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
Tomasello deals with the question howcooperative behaviour and itssocio-cognitive fo... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Nov 14, 2010, 5:38 am
There's an interesting new article in the new issue of Psychological Bullettin arguing that our ability for metaphoric thinking (e.g. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) plays a role in social cognition.
Here's the abstract (see here) :
"Social cognition is the scientific study of the cognitive events underlyin... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Nov 5, 2010, 11:59 am
The capacity for analogy and "higher order, abstract, role-governed, relational reasoning” seems crucial to human cognition (Penn et al. 2008). According to psychologist Dedre Gentner, this capacity may explain "why we're so smart." (Gentner 2003).
In an interesting new article in the journal Lang... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Oct 26, 2010, 3:48 am
There's an interesting article in the new of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences along with a number of equally interesting commentaries:
Michael L. Anderson (2010): "Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain:" (pre-print can be found here:)
An emerging class of theories conce... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Oct 23, 2010, 9:30 am
The lates issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences has just been published. Two of the articles look escpecially interesting:
Sara J. Shettleworth: Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychologyFrom the process of organic evolution to the analysis of insect societies as self-organizi... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Oct 16, 2010, 8:29 am
The lates two issues of the journal Topics in Cognitive Science feature a very interesting collection of reviews that cover "disciplines and perspectives that have been central to Cognitive Science for the past 30 years and that are likely to be central for the next 30 years and beyond." (see here a... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Sep 3, 2010, 6:22 am
Wow, I can't believe that it's been two months since I last posted anything. But I'm still working on my last term papers and preparing for writing my state examination thesis (similar to a master's thesis), so I rarely find any time to blog. But I've been meaning to repost a blog post I wrote over... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Jun 13, 2010, 7:05 am
On Thursday I went to a talk by Miriam Noel Haidle, who talked about tool use in human and non-human animals. Haidle is part of the research project "The role of culture in early expansions of humans," which looks extremely interesting.
In her talk, Haidle introduced the idea of "cognigrams," which... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Apr 14, 2010, 6:40 am
Over at Babel's Dawn Edmund Blair Bolles has started blogging on the 2010 Evolution of Language Conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
- his first critical discussion of Maggie Tallerman's talk defending the sense of a partly-language-specific innate 'language faculty' can be found here.
In her... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Jul 17, 2009, 11:18 am
In the second chapter of his book, Stephen Levinson discusses a concept that has been crucial to this blog: frames of reference. (see e.g. these posts) The term as it is used today was coined by Gestalt theorists of perception in the 1920s and was used to signify the steady and constant background a... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Jul 16, 2009, 9:50 am
Spatial orientation is crucial when we try to navigate the world around us. It is a fundamental domain of human experience and depends on a wide array of cognitive capacities and integrated neural subsystems. What is most important for spatial cognition however, are the frames of references we use t... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
As I’ve talked about in my last posts, different cultures employ different coordinate systems or Frames of References (FoR) "which serve to specify the directional relationships between objects in space, in reference to a shared referential anchor” (Haun et al. 2006: 17568) when talking about sp... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
I wanted to continue posting on Stephen Levinson’s 2003 book, but unfortunately, I only have very limited access to the internet right now, and as my year abroad at the University of Nottingham is over, I don’t have access to the e-book version anymore (The Library at the University of Heidelber... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
I'm really sad that I just don't get around to post anything at the moment, but I'm currently recieving my practical training for my teacher's degree and it's quite a handful. I really hope to be able to blog again soon, but right now I just don't find the time.
But you should all check out Greg Do... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
I know it's been ages since I posted anything and one of my new years resolutions is definitely going to be to post regularly again, but this year it seems that I just don't find the time.
But a lot of really interesting stuff has happened and I'll just post some links that I found particularly int... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Both John Hawks and Babel's Dawn link to an interesting article in the New York Times that reports on an as of yet unpublished paper by Klaus Zuberbühler and his colleagues on combinatorial (syntax-like) structure in the calls of Campbell's Monkeys:
"If the Zuberbühler team’s observations are c... Comment - Like
Michael P. posted an article on
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
There's a nice New York Times story by Nicholas Wade called "Deciphering the chatter of monkeys" that deals with the evolution of language. As Edmund Blair Bolles points out, it misses many things that are important about the topic but still its a comparatively good and well-written popular article... Comment - Like
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