Language
edyong | February 17, 2009Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean "No". These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking…
edyong | January 31, 2009
Hollywood cavemen typically communicate with grunts and snorts, reflecting a belief that human language originated like this and slowly evolved into the rich and sophisticated tongues we use today. But researchers from Emory University, Atlanta have found evidence that the origins of human language could lie in gestures, not words. If they are right, then high-fives, V-signs and thumbs-ups could more closely reflect the beginnings of human language than conversations do.
All primates can communicate with each other through facial expressions, body postures and calls, but humans and apes are…
edyong | January 22, 2009The area collectively known as Austronesia covers half the globe. It stretches from South-East Asia and Taiwan, across New Guinea and New Zealand, to the hundreds of small islands dotted around the Pacific. Today, it is home to about 400 million people.
They are the descendants of early humans who spread throughout the Pacific in prehistoric times. These forebears are long dead but they left several unexpectedly important legacies that are evident in their modern descendants. The languages they used evolved and splintered into over 1,200 tongues spoken by modern Austronesians. The bacteria…
ddobbs | January 20, 2009Today's inaugural oath got bumpy, and I was among many who dropped the ball got confused about whether it was Roberts or Obama who originally dropped the ball. Benjamin Zimmer explains:
Chief Justice John Roberts' administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth. ... the error that emerged from their momentary disfluency came down to a problem of adverbial placement.
Get the rest at the Language Log.
Hat tip to Carl.
gregladen | October 18, 2008You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online.
Here is the summary of the article:
Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…
gregladen | August 20, 2008A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little.
When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in the mirror, it sees another monkey. Typical adult male macaques stuck in a cage with a mirror will treat the image as a fellow adult male macaque until you take the mirror out of the cage.
(Experiments that attempt to determine if an individual can recognize themselves in the mirror ultimately derive from what is known as the Gallup Test, after Gordon…
edyong | February 28, 2008
Chimpanzees may not be able to recite Hamlet or giving rousing speeches but there is no doubt that they are excellent communicators. They exchange a wide variety of sophisticated calls and gestures that carry meaning and can be tailored to different audiences.
The sophistication of chimp communication doesn't stop there. Jared Taglialatela from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center has found that chimp signals and human speech are both strongly influenced by the same area in the left half of the brain - a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).
In humans, the left IFG is home…
gregladen | February 15, 2008Evolution: The Mind's Big Bang
I've known Shea for years ... since before grad school. Going out drinking with this guy was a little dangerous. Almost as dangerous as going out drinking with me.
gregladen | December 4, 2007A recent paper in PLoS Biology examines the role of the so called "language gene" in neural development related to vocalization. It was previously found that FOXP2 gene is up-regulated in a certain area of the brain that is important for neural plasticity related to vocalization. The present study reduces the levels of expression of FOXP2 gene using "FOXP2 Knockdown" individuals (individuals with a somewhat broken FOXP2 gene) in this area prior to an important stage in brain development that is related to vocalization. The effect on learning vocalization, is negative.
This experiment was…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2007tags: Alex, African grey parrot, Psittacus erithacus, cognition, learning, speech disabilities, Irene Pepperberg
Alex, the African grey parrot, Psittacus erithacus,
who worked with Irene Pepperberg for more than 30 years.
Image: Mike Lovett/Brandeis University [larger size]
Alex, the African grey parrot who worked with Irene Pepperberg, has managed something that most of us never will: his obituary is in today's NYTimes;
Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex's language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than…