260 Citations
The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
- Psychology, BiologyScience
- 2002
We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in…
The Question of Capacity: Why Enculturated and Trained Animals have much to Tell Us about the Evolution of Language
- Psychology, BiologyPsychonomic bulletin & review
- 2017
Experimental exploration of the capacities of nonhumans is the only option to determine which, if any, language-associated capacities are unique to humans.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE (Editorial for the special issue of Journal of Evolutionary Psychology on the evolution of language)
- Psychology
- 2010
A naive observer would be forgiven for assuming that the field of language evolution would, in terms of its scope and methodologies, look much like the field of evolutionary psychol- ogy, but with a…
Ever since language and learning: afterthoughts on the Piaget-Chomsky debate
- PsychologyCognition
- 1994
Evolutionary Linguistics: A New Look at an Old Landscape
- Linguistics
- 2007
This article explores the evolution of language, focusing on insights derived from observations and experiments in animals, guided by current theoretical problems that were inspired by the generative…
The Language of Animal Language Research: Reply to Schusterman and Gisiner
- Linguistics
- 1988
Language, as a cognitive process, is a legitimate, fruitful area of study in animal cognition. Its study in animals should not be encumbered by proscriptions against the use of linguistic terms…
Symbol and Structure: A Comprehensive Framework for Language Evolution
- Linguistics
- 2003
An overall framework is proposed that would dissociate the symbolic element of language (words) from the structural element (syntax), since the two probably have distinct sources.
The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion
- BiologyFront. Psychol.
- 2015
It is argued that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations, and that the authors' ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on domain-general sequence learning abilities.
Evolution as a constraint on theories of syntax : the Case against Minimalism
- Linguistics
- 2006
This thesis investigates the evolutionary plausibility of the Minimalist Program and makes a comment on the manner in which theories of language can and should be constrained.
References
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Abstract It is hypothesized that creole languages are largely invented by children and show fundamental similarities, which derive from a biological program for language. The structures of Hawaiian…
The codes of man and beasts
- Computer Science, PsychologyBehavioral and Brain Sciences
- 1983
Abstract Exposing the chimpanzee to language training appears to enhance the animal's ability to perform some kinds of tasks but not others. The abilities that are enhanced involve abstract judgment,…
Apes and Language: The Search for Communicative Competence
- Psychology
- 1983
In the years since Gardner and Gardner (1969), Patterson (1978), Premack (1972), and Rumbaugh, Gill, and Glaserfeld (1973) first demonstrated that apes could acquire a set of symbols (gestural signs,…
Can an ape create a sentence?
- PsychologyScience
- 1979
More than 19,000 multisign utterances of an infant chimpanzee (Nim) were analyzed for syntactic and semantic regularities, showing similar non-human patterns of discourse.
The ontogenesis of speech acts
- LinguisticsJournal of Child Language
- 1975
ABSTRACT A speech act approach to the transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication is adopted in order to consider language in relation to behaviour generally and to allow for an…
A functional analysis of language.
- LinguisticsJournal of the experimental analysis of behavior
- 1970
This paper tries to give the most general answers possible to the questions of language, general in the sense of relieving them of their exclusively human form.
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Word and Object
- Philosophy
- 1960
This edition offers a new preface by Quine's student and colleague Dagfinn Follesdal that describes the never-realized plans for a second edition of Word and Object, in which Quine would offer a more unified treatment of the public nature of meaning, modalities, and propositional attitudes.
Formal Principles of Language Acquisition
- Linguistics
- 1980
The authors of this book have developed a rigorous and unified theory that opens the study of language learnability to discoveries about the mechanisms of language acquisition in human beings and has important implications for linguistic theory, child language research, and the philosophy of language.