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The Evolution of LanguageEHAP Culture and Cognition Lecture Series for Winter Term, 2005 This lecture series was organized by Scott Atran. Noam Chomsky's revolutionary analysis of syntactic structures as a universal and innate part of human cognition has spurred numerous evolutionary inquiries into the emergence of language. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom (BBS, 1990) and Ray Jackendoff (BBS, 2004) furnish perhaps the most compelling "adaptationist" story for the idea that language emerged as a vehicle for "thoughts struggling to get out" by communicating propositional structures over a serial channel. Chomsky himself, in his fall 2004 lecture at UM, "Biolinguistics and Human Cognitive Capacities," proposes an alternative approach that assumes no direct natural selection (no task-specific adaptation to distinctive features of ancestral environments) for language's 'creative core,' that is, the computational faculty of syntactic recursion that allows potentially infinite production of words and well-formed word-combinations with relatively few and finite means. Putting aside the argument from design as too open-ended or nearly circular, this "minimalist program" operates on the (huge but bold) assumption that language's creative core is a recently evolved accommodation to more general physical or biological properties of the world. Ray Jackendoff and Robert Berwick (Chomsky's colleague at MIT) will present adaptationist and minimalist rationales for the evolution of language. Dan Sperber and Gary Marcus will discuss possible evolutionary precursors to language and related aspects of cognition, and Leila Gleitman will present findings from child development on the relation between language and thought. Sam Epstein asks whether a proper science of language requires evolutionary explanations at all.
Robert
Berwick, Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dan Sperber, Directeur de Recherche,
Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique
Lila Gleitman Psychology, University of
Pennsylvania
Ray Jackendoff, Professor of
Linguistics. Chair, Linguistics Program,
Brandeis University
Gary Marcus, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural
Science
New York
University
Partha Niyogi, Professor, Computational
Science & Statistics, University of Chicago |
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College of LS&A - Department of Psychology - Research Center for Group Dynamics | |
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