As the Evolang deadline approaches, Bart de Boer and Tessa Verhoef have announced a workshop on the evolution of signals, speech and sign which will take place just before the main conference. The deadline for papers to the workshop is October 10th.
We are looking for contributions that address the evolution of modern humans’ abilities to produce, perceive and learn the extended range of (combinatorial) signals that form the physical basis of human language. Signals in our definition form the physically observable manifestation of language, and they can exist either in the articulatory-acoustic modality (speech) or in the gestural-visual modality (signs) and perhaps in other modalities.
The event is intended to be complementary to the main conference in the sense that we look for contributions that explicitly focus on future research. We therefore seek contributions that not only present research results, but that for example also explore possibilities of interaction between fields, that pose new research questions or that make an inventory of areas in which research may be lacking.