Edmund Blair Bolles Blogging about the 2010 Evolution of Language Conference

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 talk, Tallerman mentioned that some of Chomsky's recent ideas on 'third factor principles,' physical laws, and general cognitive principles playing a part in constituting language are actually quite similar to people who criticize generativism.

I had the same impression after attending a talk Noam Chomsky gave a few weeks ago in Mainz, Germany. In the Q&A section there he even spoke of the importance of social factors like 'Theory of Mind' in the evolution or rather the evolutionary transmission of language once the cognitive property of 'merge' had been externalized linguistically.

I'm really interested in what the other people at the conference will say about Tallerman's talk so I'll stay tuned.

Update:

Bolles' other posts on the conference, which are based on the slides the presenters sent to him in advance, can be found here:

- Terrence Deacon's talk

- Peter Gardenförs' talk

- Stephen Anderson's talk

- Morten Christiansen' talk

Biolinguistics, Cooperation, the Importance of Theory of Mind for Language - and Dinosaurs

Some interesting links:

• The journal "Biolinguistics" now has a blog (here). On it they want to post "a variety of material pertaining to the field of biolinguistics." As of now there isn't very much content other than some information on conferences but I'll stay tuned.

• On a related note, Julia Fischer of the Cognitive Ethology Laboratory at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, Germany has written a short review of Michael Tomasello's book "Why We Cooperate." I've written a short summary of the slim volume myself, but I seem to have msiplaced the document... Anyway, this review is by somebody who really knows the stuff and is quite enlightening.

• Also, over at Babel's Dawn there is an interesting discussion of a paper by David Leavens and Tim Racine (abstract here) that questions whether it is really justified to attribute sophisticated psychological processes to preverbal infants in the way Michael Tomasello and many others do. Instead, they argue that learning and growing up in a human community play a much more important part that is normally acknowledged (first part here, second part here). Edmund Blair Bolles thinks that the argument has some merit but remains sceptical. In the comment section of his first post, the authors themselves weigh in.

• Lastly, and not really relatedly, I really like this cartoon:
hat tip: Richard Beck

New York Times Article on the Evolution of Language

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.

Be sure to check out Mark Liberman's short discussion of the article here. He writes that it is a "remarkably good article, in comparison to many that I've seen on similar topics," which may or may not be a real compliment :)

Hat tip: Babel's Dawn, Language Log

Combinatorial Structure in Monkey Vocalizations

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 correct, the Campbell’s monkeys can both vary the meaning of specific calls by adding suffixes and combine calls to generate a different meaning. Their call system, the researchers write, “may be the most complex example of ‘proto-syntax’ in animal communication known to date.”"

From Zuberbühler's previous work (e.g. Zuberbühler 2002, Zuberbühler 2006) it was already clear that some monkey species have very limited degree of flexibility in combining the vocalizations, but the fact that the combinatorics seem to be more complex than thought before seems quite interesting.

P.S.: Ed Yong also has a nice write-up

Another Proof of Life & Links

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 interesting.

First of all, and although it's already old news, the papers on Ardipithecus Ramidus published in Science caused a lot of excitement. John Hawks has a very nice FAQ on the subject and Edmund Blair Bolles considers the implications these findings have for accounts of the evolution of language.

Chris of the Lousy Linguist nicely rebuts a very confused article claiming that according to new research using 'analytical language' automatically leads to healthier discussions between couples. In this post Chris also invents the great term "the Full Liberman" (see also this Language Log post) for debunking nonsensical articles about linguistic research findings.
He also reposted a nice piece on the great work by Simon Kirby and his colleagues at the Language Evolution and Computation Unit at Edinburgh University who try to 'grow' an artifical language in the lab in order to understand how language might have evolved.

So if you wanna know what's up with these strange fruit check out Chris' post (picture taken from the University of Edinburgh)

My favourite journal, the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, has also published a quite controversial article called "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science." In this article, Nicholas Evans, a linguist at the Australian National University, and Stephen Levinson of The Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, argue that the Chomskyan and Generative approach fails in light of the stunning diversity of the world's languages. They argue that there are no real meaningful universals that can be found in all of the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. Instead, there are only "significant recurrent patterns in organization," but these "are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition" than by innate language-specific capacities.

The article is accompanied by some 20+ commentaries by quite illustrious figures in linguistics and cognitive science, who weigh in on both sides of the issue. The commentators include, for example: Mark Baker, William Croft, Adele Goldberg, Martin Haspelmath, Michael Tomasello (who, unsurprisingly, argues that "Universal Gramar is Dead"), Steven Pinker & Ray Jackendoff, Geoffrey Pullum, Paul Smolensky, Derek Penn, Daniel Povinelli & Keith Holyoak, and others.

Last but not least, there is also a very interesting article by Joseph Henrich et al. coming out in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences sometime in the future. It is in a similar vein as the one of Evans and Levinson and is titled "The weirdest people in the world?" The authors argue that people living in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies differ quite a lot cognitively from the rest of the world and thus "are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans."
I'm not sure about the general claim but the paper definitely has the best opening paragraph of any scientific paper ever:

"In the tropical forests of New Guinea the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member (Herdt, 1984; Kelley, 1980). In contrast, the nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually delivering the semen through the initiate’s anus, not his mouth. The Etoro revile these Kaluli practices, finding them disgusting."

(Hat tip: Deric Bownds' Mindblog)

Links: God and Dead Salmon

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 Downey's online version of his Presentation "‘Sympathy for Creationists, and Other Thoughts from a Sceptical Anthropologist,’" over at Neuroanthropology.net It has load of really cool and funny images and a lot of links as well

Downey's main point is that, although it is totally clear that Creationist arguments don't have any merit at all, "many ‘believers’ in evolutionary theory share some of the intellectual errors evidenced by Creationists. "
Downey argues that one of the main problems with evolutionary theory in general are our difficulties of conceptualizing and really grasping evolutionary processes and concepts properly. (This point is of course not new but it is still an important one to make - one nice proposal I think is the 'soap opera' view of evolution)


Another really entertaining and interesting topic are the many posts all over the blogosphere (e.g here and here) on an ingenious study that found neural activation for "emotional perspective-taking" in a brainscan of - wait for it - a dead atlantic salmon (for the poster, see here, some interesting comments by one of the authors of the study can be found here and here). The authors nevertheless try to make a serious point, namely that it is extremely important to find relaible methods that can control for and correct random noises and misleading correlations. Go check it out



P.S. Oh And I totally forgot: Edmund Blair Bolles is live-blogging like crazy from the "Ways to Protolanguage" conference that totally went under my radar.



His posts so far are:

Protolanguage builds on mimicry
Memes co-evolve
Simulation Suggests Steps to Speaking of the Unseen
Does the Recapitulation Principle Apply?
Protolanguage Was Symbolic
Five Ways to Investigate Speech Origins

Language, Thought, and Space (V): Comparing Different Species

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 space. As shown in my last post these linguistic differences boil down to certain cognitive differences.

Whether speakers mainly use a relative, ego-based FoR, a cardinal-direction/or landmark-based absolute FoR, or an object-based, intrinsic based FoR, also influences how they solve and conceptualise spatial tasks.

In my last post I posed the question whether there is a cognitive “default setting” that we and the other great apes inherited from our last common ancestor that is only later overridden by cultural factors – and, crucially, which Frame of Reference is might be the default one?


Haun et al. (2006: 16570) argue that

"there has been a great deal of speculation about the inherited structure of spatial relational thought. Immanuel Kant argued that the human body provides the source of our basic intuitions about the nature of space. In agreement, many cognitive scientists hold the assumption that spatial cognition is fundamentally egocentric [references omitted].”

In the same vein, Dirven et al. (2007: 1213), point out that

“The principle of corporeal deixis [i.e. body-based or body-centric spatial reference] is even so self-evident that it has been considered by most linguists, including cognitive linguists, as the default case, if not the universal one (Talmy 1983).”

I myself also thought this way and found Karl Bühler’s (1934) notion of the ego-based “Here-Now-I”-origo quite self-evident. In Bühler’s view, this deictic centre is the origin of a “coordinate system of subjective orientation,” which builds the basis and referential anchoring for all communicative acts and all social interaction and coordination,

However, we can still see the egocentric frame of reference as the universal default case and see absolute frames of reference as being cultural variations that transform our innate frame of reference. This would thus still be in line with the paradigm mentioned above as well as with developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s central assumption that in cognitive development infants start with an egocentric perspective on the world and only later learns to coordinate multiple perspectives on the world.

To test whether this is really the case, Haun et al. used a similar but simplified setting like in their first experiment that I described in my last post, and tested gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and 4-year-old German children.

This time there were only 3 identical cups on the table so the object-centred and the geocentric conditions from the previous experiment were collapsed.
The subject was first shown where a reward is hidden
(X = Cups | = Screen E= Experimenter O=Hidden Object)
and was then rotated 180° and brought to an identical table behind the screen where they could then again locate the reward.

In the Relative condition the reward was in relation to the subject. If it was hidden to his left on table 1 it was also hidden to his left on table 2 :
In the Absolute condition “the hiding and finding cups maintained position Relative to the larger, surrounding environment” and also to “a salient landmark between the two tables, namely the screen or the experimenter” (Haun et al. 2006 : 17569).
It turned out that the great apes including the 4-year old children deployed an allocentric/environment-based layout more readily than an ego/self-based spatial strategy. At the very least, these data indicate that

“Despite common expectations, [...] Hominid spatial cognition is at least not always primarily egocentric“ (Haun et al. 2006: 15751).

To further corroborate this evidence, Haun et al. 2006 tried an even simpler version of this task on the non-human great apes as they are known to have problems with abstract rule-learning and generally scored quite low on the second experiment.

Thus, in a third experiment, the subjects were directed to the first table and in the baseline condition were rewarded for picking a cup no matter which it was for 10 times. The animals were then led to the table that was on the other side of the screen and the experimenter started to only reward one of the cups until the apes consistently picked a particular cup ten out of twelve times in a row. If they had succeeded in doing so, they were redirected to the original table and in the test trials were again rewarded for all of their ten choices.
In this way, the experimenters induced a “response” or “training bias” in the apes: In the test condition they tended to preferably pick the same cup as the one for which they were rewarded 10 times in a row in the training condition. That is, if they were rewarded for picking the middle cup in the training session, they also preferred to pick the middle cup when rotated 180° and brought back to the original table in the test condition.



The interesting question then is: If they were rewarded for picking say this cup:

in the training condition: which cup would they show the response bias for in the test condition? Would they interpret this as being ‘the cup to their left’? Or would they interpret it as being allocentrically/environmentally based?
As in the second experiment, great apes showed a preference for environmental cues as opposed to self-based cues. That is if they developed a preference for the cup in the upper illustration, they then preferred to pick the following cup in the rotated test condition.
Haun et al. (2006: 17572) conclude that gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and we all have inherited “preference for allocentric spatial strategies” from our shared ancestor.

“Based on this result, we argue that, at least for small-scale spatial relations, the inherited cognitive mode of operation is not, as argued by Kant and others, egocentric but preferably deploys environmental cues as common reference between object.”

I think this is a fascinating result and I find the argument very convincing. It is also strengthened by findings from cognitive and linguistic development: By 16 months, when they have become successful mobile navigators, children competently use non-egocentric cognitive strategies. 3- to 5-year old English-speaking children even appear to be “better at allocentric strategies than at egocentric ones.” Moreover, in cultures where an absolute frame of reference is the dominant one, children master “this system as early as 4 and certainly by 7 years of age.” Children who live in cultures that dominantly employ a relative frame of reference, on the other hand, do not seem to master the full use of a left and right system until about 11 years of age. (Haun et al. 17572).

At first sight, this might seem like quite a blow for embodiment theories in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Linguistics who see embodied, egocentric experience as our primary way of making sense of the world.
But as Dirven et al. (2007) point out, “given the universality of human bodily experience,” it would not be “astonishing” if corporeal deixis constituted “the default case” of spatial cognition,

“but as a more refined conception of embodiment, the notion of situated embodiment incorporates and integrates man’s physical and social environment in his or her holistic bodily experience” (Dirven et al. 2007: 1217).

References:

Bühler, Karl. 1982. Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart,
New York: Fischer (Uni-Taschenbücher 1159).

Dirven, René, Hans-Georg Wolf, and Frank Polzenhagen. 2007. “Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Studies.” In: The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1203-1221.

Haun, Daniel B. M., Christian J. Rapold, Josep Call, Gabriele Janzen, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2006. “Cognitive Cladistics and Cultural Override in Hominid Spatial Cognition.” In: PNAS 103: 17568–17573.

Levinson, Stephen C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Stephen C., Sotaro Kita, Daniel B.M. Haun, Björn H. Rasch. 2002. “Returning the Tables: Language Affects Spatial Reasoning.” In: Cognition 84: 155–188.

Palmer, Gary B. 2007. “Cognitive Linguistics and Anthropological Linguistics.” In: The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1045-1073.

Pederson, Eric. 2007. “Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Relativity.” In: The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1012-1044.

Talmy, Leonard. 1983. “How Language Structures Space.” In: Spatial Orientation: Theory, Research and Application. ed. by Herbert L. Pick, Jr., and Linda P. Acredolo. New York: Plenum Books. 225–82.