Culture, its evolution and anything inbetween
The Largest Whorfian Study Ever. The Lousy Linguist looks at the paper Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events. As you can probably guess, the paper deals with the methodological issues surrounding linguistic relativity. It’s all interesting stuff, bringing to light important questions about how the brain handles language. I’m fairly … Continue reading “Some Links #17: The Return of Whorf”
It’s long since been established that demography drives evolutionary processes (see Hawks, 2008 for a good overview). Similar attempts are also being made to describe cultural (Shennan, 2000; Henrich, 2004; Richerson & Boyd, 2009) and linguistic (Nettle, 1999a; Wichmann & Homan, 2009; Vogt, 2009) processes by considering the effects of population size and other demographic … Continue reading “Phoneme Inventory Size and Demography”
Continuing my series on the Evolution of Colour terms, this post reviews studies of cultural constraints on colour naming. For the full dissertation and for references, go here.
Continuing my series on the Evolution of Colour terms, this post reviews how learning constrains colour naming. For the full dissertation and for references, go here.
Searching Research Blogging for “bilingualism”, two blogs dominate the recent posts: mine and Language on the Move – a blog started by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Since starting last year, they have been joined by a host of international collaborators. It’s a really well organised blog – they even … Continue reading “Metroculturalism”
Continuing my series on the Evolution of Colour terms, this post reviews the evidence for genetic constrains on colour perception. For the full dissertation and for references, go here.
How is it, then, that we can talk about talking? If you are willing to assume the existence of basic perceptual and cognitive capacities, a relatively simple answer follows immediately. The sounds of talk are, after all, sounds like any other sounds. We can perceive them in the same way we perceive the sound of … Continue reading “Language About Language”
Hello, people of the Blogosphere! Why not take some time out from your dedicated reading to do a little language evolution experiment! And all you have to do is play Tetris! … and learn an alien language. It takes no more than 10 minutes. The instructions and game are here: http://blake.ppls.ed.ac.uk/~s0451342/tetris/Tetris_Experiment.htm Due to me being … Continue reading “Language Evolution and Tetris!”
When talking about language evolution there’s always a resistance from people exclaiming; ‘but how do we know?’, ‘surely all of this is conjecture!’ and, because of this, ‘what’s the point?’ Thomas Scott-Phillips and Simon Kirby have written a new article (in press) in ‘Trends in Cognitive Science’ which addresses some of the techniques currently used … Continue reading “Language evolution in the laboratory”
What Makes Humans Unique (IV): Shared Intentionality – The Foundation of Human Uniqueness? Shared or collective intentionality is the ability and motivation to engage with others in collaborative, co-operative activities with joint goals and intentions. (Tomasello et al. 2005). The term also implies that the collaborators’ psychological processes are jointly directed at something and take … Continue reading “What Makes Humans Unique ?(IV): Shared Intentionality – The Foundation of Human Uniqueness?”