Biolinguistics (E-Journal)
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Language: From Sensory Mapping to Cognitive Construct
No full textThis paper places embodiment in an evolutionary perspective and endeavors to show that as incipient speakers began forging a linguistic system, they molded their grammatical distinctions and syntactic functions on their perception of the outside world, but that in the course of evolution, these perceptually-tinkered features were gradually replaced with mental constructs, specifically conceived to serve linguistic purposes and serve them with increased potentiality and greater efficiency. The shift from perceptual to conceptual implements is perhaps most conspicuously visible in writing, where open-ended figurative hieroglyphs were replaced with a small set of abstract letters, but the process is pervasive. In syntax, the phenomenal notion of agency, so deeply anchored in our activities, and the entire grammatical system built thereupon were replaced with a model where agency is irrelevant and syntax is structured on the purely mental constructs of subject and object. The paper continues with further cases of disembodiment
Digitized Fossil Brains: Neocorticalization
No full textThis report is based on 3D digital scans of endocasts of 110 species of fossil mammals and 35 species of living mammals. It presents direct evidence of the last 60 million years of brain evolution. Endocasts are casts of the cranial cavity. They are brainlike in size and shape, and their surface features can be named as if they were brain structures. Although endocast data are restricted to outer surfaces of brains, a few inferences about inner structure are possible. Neocortex in the forebrain, for example, is identifiable and measurable as cerebral forebrain on the endocast dorsal to the rhinal fissure. An important result in this report is that surface area of neocortex as identified on endocasts appears to have reached a maximum of about 80% of the total endocast surface area in anthropoid primates including humans. This may be a fundamental limitation in brain size. The average neocorticalization percentage for mammals as a whole rose from about 20% to about 50% of the surface area during the 60 million years covered by this analysis. Neocorticalization is associated with the evolution of higher mental processes, including the evolution of language as a hominin specialization. The limitation of the increase in relative amount of neocortex is similar in all anthropoids. Neocortex is greater in absolute area in living humans because the total size of the hominin brain is so much larger than in other primates
Gestures Enhance Foreign Language Learning
No full textLanguage and gesture are highly interdependent systems that reciprocally influence each other. For example, performing a gesture when learning a word or a phrase enhances its retrieval compared to pure verbal learning. Although the enhancing effects of co-speech gestures on memory are known to be robust, the underlying neural mechanisms are still unclear. Here, we summarize the results of behavioral and neuroscientific studies. They indicate that the neural representation of words consists of complex multimodal networks connecting perception and motor acts that occur during learning. In this context, gestures can reinforce the sensorimotor representation of a word or a phrase, making it resistant to decay. Also, gestures can favor embodiment of abstract words by creating it from scratch. Thus, we propose the use of gesture as a facilitating educational tool that integrates body and mind
The Human-Fostered Gorilla Koko Shows Breath Control in Play with Wind Instruments
No full textBreath control is critical to the production of spoken language and commonly postulated as a unique human adaptation specifically for this function. In contrast, non-human primates are often assumed to lack volitional control over their vocalizations, and implicitly, their breath. This paper takes an embodied perspective on the development of breath control in a human-fostered gorilla, examining her sound play with musical wind instruments. The subject Koko was video recorded in her play with plastic recorders, harmonicas and whistles. The results show that Koko exercises volitional control over her breath during instrument play. More generally, the findings suggest that all great apes share the potential to develop breath control, and that the original adaptive value of breath control was its flexible development for the service of behaviors that happened to be useful within particular sociocultural and physical environments
Embodied Social Cognition and Embedded Theory of Mind
No full textEmbodiment and embeddedness define an attractive framework to the study of cognition. I discuss whether theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute mental states to others to predict and explain their behaviour, fits these two principles. In agreement with available evidence, embodied cognitive processes may underlie the earliest manifestations of social cognitive abilities such as infants’ selective behaviour in spontaneous-response false belief tasks. Instead, late theory-of-mind abilities, such as the capacity to pass the (elicited-response) false belief test at age four, depend on children’s ability to explain people’s reasons to act in conversation with adults. Accordingly, rather than embodied, late theory-of-mind abilities are embedded in an external linguistic practice
An Uncouth Approach to Language Recursivity
No full textA simple-minded view is presented here on the problem of the origin of language, which dismisses any relation with hitherto unobserved specific language microcircuits in the cortex as well as with gross connectional hierarchies which are seen also in other mammals. In this view, language arises out of a capacity for spontaneous latching dynamics, which emerges when the connectivity of an extensive cortical network, which need not be hierarchical, crosses a critical phase-transition threshold
Implicit Artificial Syntax Processing: Genes, Preference, and Bounded Recursion
No full textThe first objective of this study was to compare the brain network engaged by preference classification and the standard grammaticality classification after implicit artificial syntax acquisition by re-analyzing previously reported event-related fMRI data. The results show that preference and grammaticality classification engage virtually identical brain networks, including Broca’s region, consistent with previous behavioral findings. Moreover, the results showed that the effects related to artificial syntax in Broca’s region were essentially the same when masked with variability related to natural syntax processing in the same participants. The second objective was to explore CNTNAP2-related effects in implicit artificial syntax learning by analyzing behavioral and event-related fMRI data from a subsample. The CNTNAP2 gene has been linked to specific language impairment and is con-trolled by the FOXP2 transcription factor. CNTNAP2 is expressed in language related brain networks in the developing human brain and the FOXP2–CNTNAP2 pathway provides a mechanistic link between clinically distinct syndromes involving disrupted language. Finally, we discuss the implication of taking natural language to be a neurobiological system in terms of bounded recursion and suggest that the left inferior frontal region is a generic on-line sequence processor that unifies information from various sources in an incremental and recursive manner
