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Imitation and Social Cognition in Humans and Chimpanzees (I): Imitation,...
Imitation is often seen as one of the crucial foundations of culture because it is the basis of social learning and social transmission. Only by imitating others and learning from them did human...
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Imitation and Social Cognition in Humans and Chimpanzees (II): Rational...
In my last post I wrote about two experiments on imitation in young children and chimpanzees by Lyons et al. (2005) and Horner & Whiten (2005). Their results suggested that young children tend to...
View ArticleThe Linguistic Genius of Babies
Via Shared Symbolic Storage: N.B. It’s probably best not to have pictures of babies popping up on your screen whilst in a public place, especially if the people nearby know that you don’t have any...
View ArticleEmergence of linguistic diversity in the lab
There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where linguistic diversity emerges and...
View ArticleThe emergence of stable bilingualism in the lab: An experiment proposal
There is a huge amount of linguistic diversity in the world. Isolation and drift due to cultural evolution can explain much of this, but there are many cases where interacting groups use several...
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Cultural inheritance in studies of artifical grammar learning
Recently, I’ve been attending an artificial language learning research group and have discovered an interesting case of cultural inheritance. Arthur Reber was one of the first researchers to look at...
View ArticleCognitivism and the Critic 2: Symbol Processing
It has long been obvious to me that the so-called cognitive revolution is what happened when computation – both the idea and the digital technology – hit the human sciences. But I’ve seen little...
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Compositionality and Bilingualism
Last week I put up a link to an online experiment. Here’s the results! You can still do the experiment first, if you like, here. Source code and raw results at the bottom. Languages evolve over time...
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Stephen Fry’s Planet Word
Stephen Fry has embarked on a series of documentaries about language, beginning with the evolution of language which he calls ‘the final frontier’ of human understanding. The typical documentary hype...
View ArticleNeural Language Networks at Birth
I haven’t had chance to read this paper, but it throws up some interesting discussion points relating to this blog. In particular, it relates to a hypothesis I put forward last year on Domain-General...
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