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Rudy Garns

The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain - 0 views

www.hum.au.dk/...krc-coevol.pdf

brain deacon evolution language pinker

shared by Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08 - No Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08
     
    The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain: A Review of two contrastive views (Pinker & Deacon). (Printed 2001 in Grazer Linguistische Studien GLS 55, 1-20) Ken Ramshøj Christensen Department of English, University of Aarhus
Rudy Garns

Steven Pinker: Evolution of the Mind (PBS) - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...l_072_03.html

azb evolution mind pinker

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    "Well, there was six million years in which our brains expanded and got rewired in ways that allow us to do completely different things. We can exchange information by making noise as we exhale -- the gift that we call language. We figure out how the world works, we make many different kinds of tools, we coordinate our behavior and exchange information. And all of these changes in cognitive evolution, in the evolution of the powers of the brain, account for why humans are making a film in which they can talk about chimpanzees rather than vice versa."
Rudy Garns

Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/1070

psychology evolution azb

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Evolutionary psychology is the attempt to understand our mental faculties in light of the evolutionary processes that shaped them.
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    By Harold Kalant, Werner Kalow, Steven Pinker, Reply by Stephen Jay Gould In response to Darwinian Fundamentalism (June 12, 1997) - The New York Review of Books
Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species | john hawks weblog - 0 views

johnhawks.net/...deacon.html

azb deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08 - Cached
  • the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities.
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
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  • The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
  • when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
  • innate features of the brain
  • grammatical organization
  • symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
  • But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
  • What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
  • Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
  • Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08
     
    Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
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