psychology – Replicated Typo

Evolang Previews: Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition

Evolang is busy this year – 4 parallel sessions and over 50 posters. We’ll be posting a series of previews to help you decide what to go and see. If you’d like to post a preview of your work, get in touch and we’ll give you a guest slot.

Michael Pleyer Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition Poster Session 1, 17:20-19:20, “Hall” (2F), 14th March

Perspective-taking and -setting in language, cognition and interaction is crucial to the creation of meaning and to how people share knowledge and experiences. As I’ve already written about on this blog (e.g. here, here, here), it probably also played an important part in the story of how human language and cognition came to be. In my poster presentation I argue that a particular school of linguistic thought, Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Croft & Cruse 2004; Evans & Green 2006; Geeraerts & Cuyckens 2007; Ungerer & Schmid 2006), has quite a lot to say about the structure and cognitive foundations of perspective-taking and -setting in language.

Therefore an interdisciplinary dialogue between Cognitive Linguistics and research on the evolution of language might prove highly profitable. To illustrate this point, I offer an example of one potential candidate for such an interdisciplinary dialogue, so-called Blending Theory (e.g. Fauconnier & Turner 2002), which, I argue, can serve as a useful model for the kind of representational apparatus that needed to evolve in the human lineage to support linguistic interaction. In this post I will not say much about Blending Theory (go see my poster for that 😉 or browse here ), but I want to elaborate a bit on Cognitive Linguistics and why it is a promising school of thought for language evolution research, something which I also elaborate on in my proceedings paper.

So what is Cognitive Linguistics?

Evans & Green (2006: 50), define Cognitive Linguistics as

“the study of language in a way that is compatible with what is known about the human mind, treating language as reflecting and revealing the mind.”

Cognitive Linguistics sees language as tightly integrated with human cognition. What is more, a core assumption of Cognitive Linguistics is that principles inherent in language can be seen as instantiations of more general principles of human cognition. This means that language is seen as drawing on mechanisms and principles that are not language-specific but general to cognition, like conceptualisation, categorization, entrenchment, routinization, and so forth.

From the point of view of the speaker, the most important function of language is that it expresses conceptualizations, i.e. mental representations. From the point of view of the hearer, linguistic utterances then serve as prompts for the dynamic construction of a mental representation. Crucially, this process of constructing a mental representation is fundamentally tied to human cognition and our knowledge of the world around us. Continue reading “Evolang Previews: Cognitive Construal, Mental Spaces, and the Evolution of Language and Cognition”

Digital Humanities Sandbox Goes to the Congo

Or, Speculations in Computational Evolutionary Psychology

Note: This version of the post has been revised from an earlier version in which I suggested that the distribution in the first chart followed a power law. Cosma Shalizi checked it for me and it’s not a power law distribution. It’s an exponential distribution.

So, I’ve been exploring Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the last two posts I’ve examined one paragraph in the text, the so-called nexus. It’s the longest paragraph in the text, it’s structurally central, and it covers a lot of semantic territory.

OK, but what about the other paragraphs.

What about them?

Aren’t you going to look at them?

Well, yeah, but I sure don’t have time to troll through them like I did the nexus. I mean, that post stretched from here to Sunday.

I get your point. Why don’t you do the Moretti thing?

Moretti thing?

You know, distant reading.

Distant reading? You mean count something? Count what?

How about paragraph length?

What’ll that get me?

I don’t know. Just do it. I mean, you already know that the nexus is the longest paragraph in the text. There must be something going on with that. Mess around and see if something turns up.

* * * * *I did and it did.

I used the MSWord word-count tool to count the words in every paragraph in the text. All 198 of them. One at a time. Real tedious stuff. Then I loaded the results into a spreadsheet and created a bar chart showing paragraph length from longest to shortest:

Continue reading “Digital Humanities Sandbox Goes to the Congo”

Intelligence: Darwin vs. Wallace

It’s Charles Darwin’s birthday today! He’s 202. So in celebration I’ve written a post on the still ongoing controversy which the theory of evolution by natural selection caused and is causing, specifically with regards to the emergence of human intelligence.

Alfred Russel Wallace is widely seen as the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. While Darwin had been formulating his theory from as early as the late 1830s, he kept quite about it for more than twenty years while he amassed evidence to support it. In 1858 Alfred Russell Wallace, a naturalist of the same time, sent Darwin a letter outlining for him a theory of evolution which very closely mirrored Darwin’s own. The pair co-presented their theory to the Linnaean Society in 1858 but due to Darwin’s long time amassing evidence and refining his ideas, it was his book, On The Origin of Species, which was published in 1859 and set Darwin’s name firmly in the history books as the discoverer of natural selection.

While Wallace’s part in the discovery of natural selection is far from undocumented or unknown, it is largely for presenting ‘the same ideas’ as Darwin for which he is known and what is rarely discussed in the differences in their ideas. In this post I will briefly discuss a new(ish) paper by Steven Pinker on the evolution of human intelligence and some the differences between the thinking of Darwin and Wallace on the subject.

Darwin, unsurprisingly, asserted that the abstract nature of human intelligence can be fully explained by natural selection. In opposition to this Wallace claimed that it was of no use to ancestral humans and therefore could only be explained by intelligent design:

“Natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain a few degrees superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of a philosopher.”(Wallace, 1870:343)

Unsurprisingly most scientists these days do not agree with Wallace on either the point that the human brain could not be the result of natural selection or that as a result of this problem it must have been a product of design by a higher being. It would be both dismissive and dull to leave the discussion at that however, which is where Pinker comes in. Despite Wallace’s argument probably coming to the wrong conclusion he does bring up some very interesting questions which need answering, namely that of; “why do humans have the ability to pursue abstract intellectual feats such as science, mathematics, philosophy, and law, given that opportunities to exercise these talents did not exist in the foraging lifestyle in which humans evolved and would not have parlayed themselves into advantages in survival and reproduction even if they did?” (Pinker, 2010:8993)

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Are mirror neurons the basis of speech perception?

The discovery of Mirror Neurons in Macaque monkeys has lead to theories of the neurophysiological substrate of speech perception being grounded in mirror neurons. This is also relevant to the evolution of speech as if ability to perceive a rapid stream of phonemes is present in species such as macaques then this provides a foundation on which other linguistic abilities could have been built to form language.

A recent paper by Rogalsky et al. (2011) explores these theories by testing the hypothesis that damage to the human mirror system should cause severe deficits in speech perception. This is due to there being a number of recent studies which explore whether the areas of motor neurons are activated during speech perception but these do not address the prediction that patients with lesions in the motor regions (left posterior frontal lobe and/or inferior partiental lobule) should lack an ability to perceive speech.

Patients with Broca’s aphasia are well documented as having severe speech perception and Broca’s area is known to be an area of motor speech perception. This sets up a link between a lesions involving Broca’s area and a difficulty in speech perception. However, despite these problems in speech perception, it has been shown that Broca’s aphasics are quite capable of processing speech sounds. This creates a problem for motor theories of speech perception as it would predict the ability to percieve speech sounds when the lesion lies in Broca’s area. Rogalsky et al. (2011) states that this conclusion may not be so reliable as a lot of the group based studies which these conclusions have been drawn from do not present detailed lesion information but instead rely on clinical diagnosis of Broca’s aphasia to infer lesion location.

Rogalsky et al. (2011) present 5 cases of people with lesions which effect areas of mirror neurons.

Continue reading “Are mirror neurons the basis of speech perception?”