Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Evidence supporting a rich memory for associations suggests that people can store perceptual details in the form of exemplars. The resulting particulate model of category contents allows the application of evolution theory in modeling category change, because variation in categorized percepts is reflected in the distribution of exemplars in a category. Within a production-perception feedback loop, variation within an exemplar-based category provides a reserve of variants that can serve as the seeds for shifts in the system over time through random or selection-driven asymmetries in production and perception. Here, three potential pathways for evolutionary change are identified in linguistic categories: pruning of lines of inheritance, blending inheritance and natural selection. Simulations of each of these pathways are shown within a simple exemplar-based model of category production and perception, showing how consideration of evolutionary processes may contribute to our understanding of linguis...

If we accept the view that language first evolved from the conceptual structure of our pre-linguistic ancestors, several questions arise, including: What kind of structure? Concepts about what? Here we review research on the vocal communication and cognition of nonhuman primates, focusing on results that may be relevant to the earliest stages of language evolution. From these data we conclude, first, that nonhuman primates' inability to represent the mental states of others makes their communication fundamentally different from human language. Second, while nonhuman primates' production of vocalizations is highly constrained, their ability to extract complex information from sounds is not. Upon hearing vocalizations, listeners acquire information about their social companions that is referential, discretely coded, hierarchically structured, rule-governed, and propositional. We therefore suggest that, in the earliest stages of language evolution, communication had a formal structure that grew out of its speakers' knowledge of social relations.

The major ''contribution'' of generative grammar to cognitive science is negative. The hermetic disjuncture of linguistic research from biological principles and facts has influenced cognitive science. Linguists have followed the pied piper taking a different path from that pointed out by Charles Darwin. As Dobzhansky (1973) noted, ''Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.'' The hermetic nature of much linguistic research is apparent even in phonology which must reflect biological facts concerning speech production. For example, studies dating back to 1928 show that tongue ''features'' do not specify vowel distinctions. However, the irrefutable findings of these cineradiographic and MRI studies are generally ignored by linguists. Chomsky's central premise, that syntactic ability derives from an innate ''Universal Grammar'' common to all human beings constitutes a strong biological claim. But if a UG genetically similar for all ''normal'' individuals existed, one of the central premises of Darwinian evolutionary biology, genetic variation would be false. Concepts and processes borrowed from linguistics such as ''modularity'' have impeded our understanding of brain-behavior relations. Some aspects of behavior are regulated in specific localized ''modules'' in the brain, but current research demonstrates that the neural architecture regulating human language is also implicated in motor control, cognition, and other aspects of behavior. The neural bases of enhanced human language are not separable from cognition and motor ability. The supposed unique aspect of syntax, its ''reiterative'' productivity, appears to derive from subcortical structures that play a part in neural circuits regulating motor control. Natural selection aimed at enhancing adaptive motor control ultimately yielded a basal ganglia ''sequencing engine'' that can produce a potentially infinite number of novel actions, thoughts , or ''sentences'' from a finite number of basic elements. Recent studies suggest that the human FOXP2 gene, which differs from similar regulatory genes in chimpanzees and other mammals, acts on the basal ganglia and other subcortical structures to confer enhanced human reiterative ability in domains as different as syntax and dancing. The probable date of the critical mutations on FOXP2 is coincident with the appearance of anatomically modern human beings about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Humans thus can create more complex sentences than chimpanzees, but has anyone ever seen an ape dancing?