Download or read book Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax written by Alistair Knott and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal that the syntactic structure of a sentence reporting a concrete episode in the world can be interpreted as a description of the sensorimotor processes involved in experiencing that episode. How is the information we gather from the world through our sensory and motor apparatus converted into language? It is obvious that there is an interface between language and sensorimotor cognition because we can talk about what we see and do. In this book, Alistair Knott argues that this interface is more direct than commonly assumed. He proposes that the syntax of a concrete sentence—a sentence that reports a direct sensorimotor experience—closely reflects the sensorimotor processes involved in the experience. In fact, he argues, the syntax of the sentence can be interpreted as a description of these sensorimotor processes. Knott focuses on a simple concrete episode: a man grabbing a cup. He presents detailed models of the sensorimotor processes involved in experiencing this episode (drawing on research in psychology and neuroscience) and of the syntactic structure of the transitive sentence reporting the episode (drawing on Chomskyan Minimalist syntactic theory). He proposes that these two independently motivated models are closely linked—that the logical form of the sentence can be given a detailed sensorimotor characterization and that, more generally, many of the syntactic principles understood in Minimalism as encoding innate linguistic knowledge are actually sensorimotor in origin. Knott's sensorimotor reinterpretation of Chomsky opens the way for a psychological account of sentence processing that is compatible with a Chomskyan account of syntactic universals, suggesting a way to reconcile Chomsky's theory of syntax with the empiricist models of language often viewed as Mimimalism's competitors.
Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by Andrew D. M. Smith and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2010 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts of the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG8), held in Utrecht on 1417 April 2010. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterized by an invigorating, multidisciplinary approach to the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, biology, cognitive science, computer science, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, palaeontology, primatology and psychology. The latest theoretical, experimental and modelling research on language evolution is presented in this collection, including contributions from many leading scientists in the field.
Download or read book Language Biology and Cognition written by Prakash Mondal and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the relationship between human language and biology in order to determine whether the biological foundations of language can offer deep insights into the nature and form of language and linguistic cognition. Challenging the assumption in biolinguistics and neurolinguistics that natural language and linguistic cognition can be reconciled with neurobiology, the author argues that reducing representation to cognitive systems and cognitive systems to neural populations is reductive, leading to inferences about the cognitive basis of linguistic performance based on assuming (false) dependencies. Instead, he finds that biological implementations of cognitive rather than the biological structures themselves, are the driver behind linguistic structures. In particular, this book argues that the biological roots of language are useful only for an understanding of the emergence of linguistic capacity as a whole, but ultimately irrelevant to understanding the character of language. Offering an antidote to the current thinking embracing ‘biologism’ in linguistic sciences, it will be of interest to readers in linguistics, the cognitive and brain sciences, and the points at which these disciplines converge with the computer sciences.
Download or read book Instruction Grammar written by Simon Kasper and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together evidence from natural and social sciences, the work introduces the non-reductionist Instruction Grammar programme. Viewed from within the practicalities of the lifeworld, utterances are described as instructions to simulate perceptions and attributions for action. The approach provides solutions to long-standing philosophical problems of cognitive grammar theories and traditionally puzzling syntactic phenomena.
Download or read book Communicative Action written by Tzu-Wei Hung and published by Springer Science & Business. This book was released on 2014-04-21 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the connection between action and verbal communication, exploring topics such as the mechanisms of language processing, action processing, voluntary and involuntary actions, knowledge of language and assertion. Communication modelling and aspects of communicative actions are considered, along with cognitive requirements for nonverbal and verbal communicative action. Contributions from expert authors are organised into three parts in this book, focussing on language in communication, action and bodily awareness and sensorimotor interaction and language acquisition. Readers will discover various methods that have been employed in investigations presented here, including neurological experiment, computational modeling and logical and philosophical analysis. These diverse expert perspectives shed light on the extent to which a mechanism for processing actions also facilitates the processing of language and the authors’ work prompts further interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between language and action. This book is written for readers from different academic backgrounds; from graduate students to established academics in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychology, philosophy, linguistics and beyond. Earlier versions of the selected essays in this book were presented at the 2013 IEAS Conference on Language and Action, held in Taipei, Taiwan.
Download or read book Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning ICANN 2011 written by Timo Honkela and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two volume set (LNCS 6791 and LNCS 6792) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN 2011, held in Espoo, Finland, in June 2011. The 106 revised full or poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. ICANN 2011 had two basic tracks: brain-inspired computing and machine learning research, with strong cross-disciplinary interactions and applications.
Download or read book From Aristotle to Cognitive Neuroscience written by Grant Gillett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Aristotle to Cognitive Neuroscience identifies the strong philosophical tradition that runs from Aristotle, through phenomenology, to the current analytical philosophy of mind and consciousness. In a fascinating account, the author integrates the history of philosophy of mind and phenomenology with recent discoveries on the neuroscience of conscious states. The reader can trace the development of a neuro-philosophical synthesis through the work of Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Brentano and Hughlings-Jackson, among others, and so explore contemporary philosophical puzzles surrounding consciousness and its relation to cerebral synchrony and connectedness. Of interest to students and scholars of neuroethics, neurophilosophy and philosophy of mind, as well as philosophy of psychiatry, From Aristotle to Neuroscience demonstrates the real essence of consciousness as it increasingly connects with philosophy, law, morality, aesthetics, and spirituality.
Download or read book The Truth about Language written by Michael C. Corballis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Background to the problem -- The Rubicon -- Language as miracle -- Language and natural selection -- The mental prerequisites -- Thinking without language -- Mind reading -- Stories -- Constructing language -- Hands on to language -- Finding voice -- How language is structured -- Over the Rubicon
Download or read book Beyond Evolutionary Psychology written by George Ellis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a compelling unifying theory of which aspects of the brain are innate and which are not.
Download or read book Dancing to Learn written by Judith Lynne Hanna and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing to Learn: Cognition, Emotion, and Movement explores the rationale for dance as a medium of learning to help engage educators and scientists to explore the underpinnings of dance, and dancers as well as members of the general public who are curious about new ways of comprehending dance. Among policy-makers, teachers, and parents, there is a heightened concern for successful pedagogical strategies. They want to know what can work with learners. This book approaches the subject of learning in, about, and through dance by triangulating knowledge from the arts and humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and cognitive and neurological sciences to challenge dismissive views of the cognitive importance of the physical dance. Insights come from theories and research findings in aesthetics, anthropology, cognitive science, dance, education, feminist theory, linguistics, neuroscience, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology. Using a single theory puts blinders on to other ways of description and analysis. Of course, all knowledge is tentative. Experiments necessarily must focus on a narrow topic and often use a special demographic—university students, and we don’t know the representativeness of case studies.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology written by Giovanni Stanghellini and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 1217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of phenomenological psychopathology (PP) is concerned with exploring and describing the individual experience of those suffering from mental disorders. The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology is the first ever comprehensive review of the field.
Download or read book Mind in Action written by Pentti Määttänen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-11 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms’ interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.
Download or read book The Adaptable Mind written by John Zerilli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-20 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A familiar trope of cognitive science, linguistics, and the philosophy of psychology over the past forty or so years has been the idea of the mind as a modular system-that is, one consisting of functionally specialized subsystems responsible for processing different classes of input, or handling specific cognitive tasks like vision, language, logic, music, and so on. However, one of the major achievements of neuroscience has been the discovery that the brain has incredible powers of renewal and reorganization. This "neuroplasticity," in its various forms, has challenged many of the orthodox conceptions of the mind which originally led cognitive scientists to postulate hardwired mental modules. This book examines how such discoveries have changed the way we think about the structure of the mind. It contends that the mind is more supple than prevailing theories in cognitive science and artificial intelligence acknowledge. The book uses language as a test case. The claim that language is cognitively special has often been understood as the claim that it is underpinned by dedicated-and innate-cognitive mechanisms. Zerilli offers a fresh take on how our linguistic abilities could be domain-general: enabled by a composite of very small and redundant cognitive subsystems, few if any of which are likely to be specialized for language. In arguing for this position, however, the book takes seriously various cases suggesting that language dissociates from other cognitive faculties. Accessibly written, The Adaptable Mind is a fascinating account of neuroplasticity, neural reuse, the modularity of mind, the evolution of language, and faculty psychology.
Download or read book How the Mind Comes Into Being written by Martin V. Butz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an interdisciplinary perspective, helping the reader to develop an understanding of how the mind works that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries Adopts a computational approach, helping the reader to understand the mind on a functional level, in contrast to purely conceptual, verbalized levels Includes exercises and examples, helping the reader to consolidate the covered material and encouraging them to think 'outside of the box'
Download or read book Ideophones and the Evolution of Language written by John Haiman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideophones have been recognized in modern linguistics at least since 1935, but they still lie far outside the concerns of mainstream (Western) linguistic debate, in part because they are most richly attested in relatively unstudied (often unwritten) languages. The evolution of language, on the other hand, has recently become a fashionable topic, but all speculations so far have been almost totally data-free. Without disputing the tenet that there are no primitive languages, this book argues that ideophones may be an atavistic throwback to an earlier stage of communication, where sounds and gestures were paired in what can justifiably be called a 'prelinguistic' fashion. The structure of ideophones may also provide answers to deeper questions, among them how communicative gestures may themselves have emerged from practical actions. Moreover, their current distribution and behaviour provide hints as to how they may have become conventional words in languages with conventional rules.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior written by Lance Workman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 1570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformative wave of Darwinian insight continues to expand throughout the human sciences. While still centered on evolution-focused fields such as evolutionary psychology, ethology, and human behavioral ecology, this insight has also influenced cognitive science, neuroscience, feminist discourse, sociocultural anthropology, media studies, and clinical psychology. This handbook's goal is to amplify the wave by bringing together world-leading experts to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of evolution-oriented and influenced fields. While evolutionary psychology remains at the core of the collection, it also covers the history, current standing, debates, and future directions of the panoply of fields entering the Darwinian fold. As such, The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior is a valuable reference not just for evolutionary psychologists but also for scholars and students from many fields who wish to see how the evolutionary perspective is relevant to their own work.
Download or read book The Comparative Psychology of Intelligence Macphail Revisited written by Michael Colombo and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
