Download or read book Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution written by Partha Niyogi and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution written by Partha Niyogi and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learning is the mechanism by which language is transferred from old speakers to new.
Download or read book Creating Language written by Morten H. Christiansen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.
Download or read book Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition written by Ted Briscoe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-08 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of how children acquire language and how this affects language change over generations. Written by an international team of experts, the volume proceeds from the basis that we can not only address the language faculty per se within the framework of evolutionary theory, but also the origins and subsequent development of languages themselves; languages evolve via cultural rather than biological transmission on a historical rather than genetic timescale. The book is distinctive in utilizing computational simulation and modelling to help ensure the theories constructed are complete and precise. Drawing on a wide range of examples, the book covers the why and how of specific syntactic universals; the nature of syntactic change; the language-learning mechanisms required to acquire an existing linguistic system accurately and to impose further structure on an emerging system; and the evolution of language(s) in relation to this learning mechanism.
Download or read book Simulating the Evolution of Language written by Angelo Cangelosi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to provide a comprehensive survey of the computational models and methodologies used for studying the evolution and origin of language and communication. Comprising contributions from the most influential figures in the field, it presents and summarises the state-of-the-art in computational approaches to language evolution, and highlights new lines of development. Essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of evolutionary and adaptive systems, language evolution modelling and linguistics, it will also be of interest to researchers working on applications of neural networks to language problems. Furthermore, due to the fact that language evolution models use multi-agent methodologies, it will also be of great interest to computer scientists working on multi-agent systems, robotics and internet agents.
Download or read book The Nature and Origin of Language written by Denis Bouchard and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at how the human brain got the capacity for language and how language then evolved. Its four parts are concerned with different views on the emergence of language, with what language is, how it evolved in the human brain, and finally how this process led to the properties of language. Part I considers the main approaches to the subject and how far language evolved culturally or genetically. Part II argues that language is a system of signs and considers how these elements first came together in the brain. Part III examines the evidence for brain mechanisms to allow the formation of signs. Part IV shows how the book's explanation of language origins and evolution is not only consistent with the complex properties of languages but provides the basis for a theory of syntax that offers insights into the learnability of language and to the nature of constructions that have defied decades of linguistic analysis, including including subject-verb inversion in questions, existential constructions, and long-distance dependencies. Denis Bouchard's outstandingly original account will interest linguists of all persuasions as well as cognitive scientists and others interested in the evolution of language.
Download or read book The Biolinguistic Enterprise written by Anna Maria Di Sciullo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity - the 'evo-devo revolution' - which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, The Biolinguistic Enterprise will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.
Download or read book Creating Language written by Morten H. Christiansen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.
Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by W. Tecumseh Fitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.
Download or read book Why Only Us written by Robert C. Berwick and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it. “A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.
Download or read book Language Cognition and Human Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time much of Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker's seminal research explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, perception, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. This eclectic collection spans Pinker's thirty-year career, exploring his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. It includes thirteen of Pinker's classic articles, ranging over topics such as language development in children, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the computational architecture of the mind, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature-nurture debate, and the logic of innuendo and euphemism. Each outlines a major theory or takes up an argument with another prominent scholar, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this collection reflects essential contributions to cognitive science by one of our leading thinkers and public intellectuals.
Download or read book The Nature of Language written by Dieter Hillert and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nature of Language addresses one of the most fundamental questions of mankind: how did language evolve, and what are the neurobiological and cognitive foundations of language processing? These questions are explored from different perspectives to discuss the building blocks of language evolution and how they developed in the way they can be found in modern humans. Primarily, neural mapping methods of cognition presented in this research provide extremely valuable data about the neural circuitries that are involved in language processing. Thus, the book explores and illustrates cortical mapping in typical language patterns, but also cortical mapping in atypical populations that fail to process particular language aspects. A neurobiological stance is used to inquire about how language abilities of our species evolved to communicate for the purposes of conveying information such as ideas, emotions, goals, and humor. The evolutionary language model presented builds on the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, and it allows readers to draw a variety of expansive conclusions from that, including the idea that human language as an interface system provides the basis for consciousness.
Download or read book The Evolution of Language written by Angelo Cangelosi and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2006 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts from the 6th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG6). The biennial EVOLANG conference focuses on the origins and evolution of human language, and brings together researchers from many disciplines including anthropology, archaeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, computer science, ethology, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, palaeontology, primatology, and psychology. The collection presents the latest theoretical, experimental and modeling research on language evolution, and includes contributions from the leading scientists in the field, including T Fitch, V Gallese, S Mithen, D Parisi, A Piazza & L Cavali Sforza, R Seyfarth & D Cheney, L Steels, L Talmy and M Tomasello. Contents: The Mirror System Hypothesis: From a Macaque-Like Mirror System to Imitation (M A Arbib et al.); Language Learning, Power Laws, and Sexual Selection (T Briscoe); On the Emergence of Compositionality (J de Beule & B K Bergen); Simulation Model for the Evolution of Language with Spatial Topology (C Di Chio & P Di Chio); A Comparison of the Articulatory Parameters Involved in the Production of Sound of Bonobos and Modern Humans (D Demolin & V Delvaux); Innateness and Culture in the Evolution of Language (M Dowman et al.); Proto-Propositions (J R Hurford); Language Co-Evolved with the Rule of Law (C Knight); and other papers. Readership: Graduate students and researchers with an interest in language and its evolution, as well as by members of the public who are interested in evolution, the origins of language, and popular science.
Download or read book Evolution Of Language The Proceedings Of The 10th International Conference Evolang X written by Erica A Cartmill and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises refereed papers and abstracts of the 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANGX), held in Vienna on 14-17th April 2014. As the leading international conference in the field, the biennial EVOLANG meeting is characterised 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.For this 10th conference, the proceedings will include a special perspectives section featuring prominent researchers reflecting on the history of the conference and its impact on the field of language evolution since the inaugural EVOLANG conference in 1996.
Download or read book A Complete Chapter wise Verbal Ability Book For CAT Other MBA Entrance Exam Practice Tests For Your Self Evaluation written by EduGorilla Prep Experts and published by EduGorilla. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A best-selling chapter-wise book on Verbal Ability with objective-type questions as per the latest syllabus for CAT and other MBA entrance exams. Increase your chances of selection by 16X. In addition to the well-structured content, each chapter contains a series of practice tests for your self-evaluation. Using expert-researched content, you will be able to pass your exam with stellar grades
Download or read book Language Change Variation and Universals written by Peter W. Culicover and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how human languages become what they are, why they differ from one another in certain ways but not in others, and why they change in the ways that they do. Given that language is a universal creation of the human mind, the puzzle is why there are different languages at all: why do we not all speak the same language? Moreover, while there is considerable variation, in some ways grammars do show consistent patterns: why are languages similar in those respects, and why are those particular patterns preferred? Peter Culicover proposes that the solution to these puzzles is a constructional one. Grammars consist of constructions that carry out the function of expressing universal conceptual structure. While there are in principle many different ways of accomplishing this task, languages are under press to reduce constructional complexity. The result is that there is constructional change in the direction of less complexity, and grammatical patterns emerge that more efficiently reflect conceptual universals. The volume is divided into three parts: the first establishes the theoretical foundations; the second explores variation in argument structure, grammatical functions, and A-bar constructions, drawing on data from a variety of languages including English and Plains Cree; and the third examines constructional change, focusing primarily on Germanic. The study ends with observations and speculations on parameter theory, analogy, the origins of typological patterns, and Greenbergian 'universals'.
Download or read book Parametric Variation written by Theresa Biberauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-10 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. Although still widely assumed, the parametric theory of variation has in recent years been subject to re-evaluation and critique. The Null Subject Parameter, which determines among other things whether or not a language allows the suppression of subject pronouns, is one of the best-known and most widely discussed examples of a parameter. Nevertheless its status in current syntactic theory is highly controversial. This book is a defence of the parametric approach to linguistic variation, set within the framework of the Minimalist Program. It discusses syntactic variation in the light of recent developments in linguistic theory, focusing on issues such as the formal nature of minimalist parameters, the typology of null-subject language systems and the way in which parametric choices can be seen to underlie the synchronic and diachronic patterns observed in natural languages.
