Biolinguistics最新文献

{"title":"What Would Lenneberg Think? Biolinguistics in the Third Millennium","authors":"W. Fitch","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9109","url":null,"abstract":"Biolinguistics, construed broadly as the study of human language from multiple biological viewpoints, was first placed on a solid modern foundation by Eric Lenneberg’s impressive Biological Foundations of Language in 1967. Lenneberg conceived of our capacity to acquire language as a species-typical aspect of human cognition—a conception so widespread today that it is difficult to realize how radical it seemed to many at the time. Although Lenneberg argued that our language capacity has some species-typical genetic and neural components, he clearly recognized that it has a huge learned, culture-specific component as well. Lenneberg had thus already leap-frogged the unproductive “nature versus nurture” dichotomy that has bedevilled so many debates about language since that time. He also recognized that human language differs in important ways from animal communication, and raised the question of whether the roots of language are best sought in cognition or communication—another prominent preoccupation in modern debates. In short, although he apparently did not adopt the term “biolinguistics” himself, Eric Lenneberg can rightly be seen as an important founding father of contemporary biolinguistics. This makes a celebration in this journal, fifty years later, of his magnum opus highly appropriate. In this essay, I will first briefly discuss a few of Lenneberg’s many insights that I think bear repeating today. Then, I turn to a discussion of modern empirical developments in biolinguistics that I think Lenneberg would find welcome, and in many cases surprising, were he alive today. I will thus focus less on the aspects of Lenneberg’s thought that have stood the test of time well, and are still essentially correct today (which covers many of them) and more on aspects where modern data invite a reconsideration of some of his ideas. These come from three general areas: comparative investigations, modern neuroscience and especially molecular genetics. My goal is to provide a concise overview of those developments that I believe, were Lenneberg to appear for a conversation about biolinguistics today, he","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47341984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What’s in (a) Label? Neural Origins and Behavioral Manifestations of Identity Avoidance in Language and Cognition","authors":"Evelina Leivada","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9087","url":null,"abstract":"The present work defends the idea that grammatical categories are not in- trinsic to mergeable items, taking as a departure point Lenneberg’s (1967, 1975) claim that syntactic objects are definable only contextually. It is ar- gued that there are four different strands of inquiry that are of interest when one seeks to build an evolutionarily plausible theory of labels and operation Label: (i) linguistic constraints on adjacent elements of the same type such as Repetition/Identity Avoidance ([*XX]), (ii) data that flout these constraints ([XX]), (iii) disorders that raise questions as to whether the locus of impairment is a categorial feature per se, and (iv) operation Label as a candidate for human uniqueness. After discussing categorial identity through these perspectives, this work first traces the origins and manifesta-tions of Identity Avoidance in language and other domains of human cog-nition, with emphasis on attention orienting. Second, it pro- poses a new processing principle, the Novel Information Bias, that (i) cap- tures linguistic Identity Avoidance based on how the brain decodes types and tokens and (ii) explains the universal fact that generally the existence of adjacent occur-rences of syntactically and/or phonologically identical tokens is severely constrained.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48388768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can a Morphological Feature of Dendritic Structure be Linked to Language Acquisition?","authors":"H. Sussman","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9099","url":null,"abstract":"Eric Lennenberg (1967) popularized the notion of a critical period for language acquisition, an ideal developmental time window, from approximately age two to puberty, beyond which achieving native-speaker like competence is greatly diminished. The critical period hypothesis (CPH) has been and continues to be a much discussed and controversial topic, particularly in the context of second language acquisition (for a review see Birdsong, in press). My contribution to this discussion is very limited and focused on a specific issue—that is, can an enhanced, developmentally-based feature, empirically documented within a neuron’s dendritic arborization, play a role in language acquisition? A reasonable expectation is that in a normal postnatal environment, a functional enrichment of neuronal circuitry interconnecting brain regions engaged in speech and language processing should parallel and underlie the emergence of a natural language in a child. From initial vocalic-like cries and squeals, to canonical and variegated babbling, to first words, to two word utterances, and culminating in the production of sentences, one would expect a concomitant maturation of the complex neural infrastructure mediating this genetically and experientially driven, but poorly understood, cognitive achievement. What may be unreasonable, however, is an expectation of linking neuroanatomical features of micro-level structure to cognitive function. Fifty years ago, Lennenberg cautioned against making such claims:","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48751648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Neurobiology of Syntax as the Core of Human Language","authors":"A. Friederici","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9093","url":null,"abstract":"The human language capacity appears to be rooted in the ability to combine words into hierarchical structures making up phrases and sentences. There is substantial evidence that this ability is specific to humans. Other animals can use words or symbols to refer to objects and actions, and can even memorise sequences of syllables and symbols, but only humans create syntactic hierarchies to build up phrases and sentences. In humans syntactic rules and representations together with words constitute the basis of the language system which allows the construction of sentences that carry and convey meaning. The present article focuses on syntax as the hierarchy building component which is unique to humans and thought to be part of their neurobiological endowment (Friederici et al. 2017). This view was already formulated about 50 years ago by Erich Lenneberg (1967) in Biological Foundations of Language. He claimed that there must be an innate biological representation of the abstract structure of language in the human nervous system, and that language was characterised by “concatenations” which obey syntactic principles. Both claims have found supportive evidence in the past 50 years. While Lenneberg formulated his views mainly on the basis of behavioural language data from patients with brain lesions, today’s knowledge is based on data from functional brain imaging, measurements of the grey and white matter structures of the living brain as well the correlation of these with behavioural language measures.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41931912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Innate Mechanisms for Acquiring Syntactic Displacement","authors":"Misha Becker","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9101","url":null,"abstract":"The central arguments within Lenneberg’s thesis of a biological basis for language are the species-specific nature of the physiological and neurological structures that make language possible, the cross-species uniformity of language development (the fact of its acquisition as well as its developmental path, irrespective of culture, race, etc.; excepting cases of pathology), and the transformational nature of syntax. Transformational syntax forms an important piece of support for Lenneberg’s discontinuity theory of the evolution of language, meaning that human language has not descended directly from communication systems found in non-human animals (i.e., our shared ancestors). This is because transformational syntax is also species-specific, i.e. not found in the communication systems of other animals. Transformational syntax allows us to convey complex and abstract meanings, rather than being limited to the here-and-now (e.g. alarm calls) or to simple semantic relations, and it enables us to transform our expressions through syntactic displacement, or movement. In this short paper I will address some questions about how human children come to acquire the meanings of semantically abstract predicates, how they figure out which strings of words are generated by displacing operations, and the sense in which the tools that allow children to acquire both these things are innate. The inspiration for this research can be traced to some of the central themes in Lenneberg’s important work.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43986468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"50 Years Later: A Conversation about the Biological Study of Language with Noam Chomsky","authors":"Patrick C. Trettenbrein","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9115","url":null,"abstract":"Figure 1: Noam Chomsky portrayed by Jean-Baptiste Labrune (Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0). At first, the work of Chomsky and Lenneberg as well as their respective seminal books may seem only vaguely related—after all, Biological Foundations of Language surveyed the biological literature while Syntactic Structures provided a formal analysis of natural language syntax. However, nothing could be further from the truth: Lenneberg and Chomsky cofounded what today is known as biolinguistics during their time as graduate students at Harvard. Even a quick look at Biological Foundations of Language gives this away: Chomsky contributed an appendix on “The formal nature of language” to the book. A closer look reveals that Lenneberg himself heavily relied on formal analysis (of language) just like that provided by Chomsky in order to advance his argument (in this context, see Piattelli-Palmarini, this issue, Becker, this issue). Consequently, talking to Noam Chomsky as a co-founder of the field, contemporary, and friend of Eric Lenneberg was the obvious thing to do. Luckily, Professor Chomsky took the time to answer some questions about the early days of the field, his work and relation with Lenneberg, and a number of other questions and scientific issues that (still) captivate us 50 years later.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41937249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Eric Lenneberg and Motor Control","authors":"A. Cohen","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9113","url":null,"abstract":"I began my graduate career in 1970. I was somewhat familiar with Eric Lenneberg, having met him during an event for faculty in Psychology and Neuroscience—the fields in which I was interested at the time. He had just arrived at Cornell, as had I, and he didn’t have many other graduate students at that time. I chose him as my graduate faculty advisor. He directed me toward the study of the development of motor control, one of his fields of interest (cf. Lenneberg’s classic, Biological Foundations of Language, 1967). His other students were urged to study the development of language, in which he was most well known. These students went with Eric to New York to study patients with aphasia, while I stayed behind at Cornell in Ithaca, with my young children. That ended up suiting me well! When I began graduate school, I was unsure of the direction or level I wished to attain. This was the 1960s and women were not particularly accustomed to graduate school or aiming high, especially if already married with children, which I was. My husband was a faculty member in the Cornell Mathematics Department, and our children were quite young: one was six and one was four. Eric Lenneberg, who had just begun his time as a faculty member at Cornell University, had participated in a forum I organized for theoreticians of science, and was the only faculty member of neuroscience I knew at all well, since he had participated in the forum. My thesis, when finally completed also included results of a project done after Eric’s death with Professors Carl Gans, University of Michigan, and Farish Jenkins, Harvard University, on rat muscle activity during running. Both sets of results were integrated into my dissertation on rat locomotion, unfortunately, with Professor Gans as my advisor and without Eric on my committee. As a post-doctoral fellow, I remained at Cornell for a few years with funding from a National Institutes of Helath (NIH) grant, which fortunately, I was able to obtain independently. At that point I also became interested in mathematical modeling of the phenomena on which I was working, another area that Eric had urged me toward and about which he was enthusiastic. This resulted in my most cited publication: Cohen, Holmes & Rand (1982). It has been perhaps my most important publication and the fact that it was and still is being widely cited is a testament to its importance in establishing theoretical neuroscience. After this work, which was completed early with two mathematical colleagues, Philip Holmes and Richard Rand, both professors at Cornell at that time, I continued doing research in my own laboratory, also at Cornell. I chose the detailed study","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45508015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Linguistic and Nonverbal Abilities over Time in a Child Case of 22q11 Deletion Syndrome","authors":"M. Kambanaros, K. Grohmann","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9077","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this study is to profile the cognitive–linguistic performance of a male child (P.I.) with 22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS). Specifically, receptive and expressive language performance and nonverbal IQ (NVIQ) are described at two different time points—when P.I. was 6 and 10 years of age, respectively. Using case-based methodology, P.I.’s NVIQ and performance on global and structured language tasks are compared to typically developing children of the same chronological age and school-aged children with specific language impairment (SLI). The results show no improvement in NVIQ or vocabulary, but his morphosyntactic abilities did improve over time. The findings are discussed in relation to two hypotheses, either that the profile of language impairment in children with 22q11DS is distinctive to the syndrome or that there is co-morbidity with SLI. This is particularly important for speech–language therapists who have a primary role in diagnosing communication deficits and providing treatment.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47552924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Lenneberg Got Right: A Homological Program for the Study of Language Evolution","authors":"S. Balari, G. Lorenzo","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9083","url":null,"abstract":"By 1967, it was clear to Eric Lenneberg that reconstructing the phylogenetic history of language should require the adoption of a non-functional (or Owenian) homology concept for grounding relevant comparisons. Fifty years later, most biolinguistic approaches have betrayed this project, for they routinely derive their conclusions regarding the unique/shared status of language on merely folk grounds — as dramatically illustrated in Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch vs. Pinker & Jackendoff’s debate, or based on functional considerations — as in Chomsky’s recent conceptualization of language as a unique tool for thought. Here we claim that Lenneberg’s project needs to be resumed and we articulate some suggestions about how to conduct it, taking advantage of recent findings and new conceptual insights concerning two crucial levels of analysis actually pinpointed by him — namely, anatomical/molecular structure and physiological function.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41920663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Grammar as a Maturational Controlled Behavior: Minimality in Development and Impairment","authors":"M. Garraffa","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9097","url":null,"abstract":"In his seminal book on the Biological Foundations of Language, Eric Lenneberg proposed that a critical period similar to the one necessary for maturational controlled behaviors applies also to language acquisition (Lenneberg 1967). The notion of a critical period, a maturational stage during which the nervous system is sensitive to specific aspects of the environment, has been considered crucial for language acquisition theories based on the assumption of a biologically predetermined language faculty that needs to be activated by favourable internal and environmental circumstances. Chomsky wrote:","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2017-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44787754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}