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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9780511980435
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511980435
Collection:
Cambridge Handbooks of Linguistics
Subjects:
Life Sciences, Evolutionary Biology, Evolution of Language, English Language and Linguistics: General Interest, Language and Linguistics
Series:
Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
Information

Book description

Biolinguistics involves the study of language from a broad perspective that embraces natural sciences, helping us better to understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language. This Handbook offers the most comprehensive state-of-the-field survey of the subject available. A team of prominent scholars working in a variety of disciplines is brought together to examine language development, language evolution and neuroscience, as well as providing overviews of the conceptual landscape of the field. The Handbook includes work at the forefront of contemporary research devoted to the evidence for a language instinct, the critical period hypothesis, grammatical maturation, bilingualism, the relation between mind and brain, and the role of natural selection in language evolution. It will be welcomed by graduate students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

Reviews

‘A thoughtfully constructed and didactically useful perspective on a vibrant, heterogeneous area. Many chapters succeed in illustrating the potential for future interdisciplinary progress in the alignment of linguistics and biology.’

David Poeppel - New York University

‘In this comprehensive introduction to biolinguistics, twenty-five chapters by esteemed researchers provide accessible introductions to the field, building bridges between linguistics and biology, evolution, development and neuroscience. A ‘must-have’ compendium.’

Tecumseh Fitch - University of Vienna

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 20 - Genetics of language: Roots of specific language deficits
    pp 375-412
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the role of experimental syntax in the construction of an integrated cognitive science of language. It presents a view of syntactic theory as a computational level description of a part of the human language faculty. The first major obstacle to the construction of an integrated theory of language, the black box problem, presents a framework for investigating the empirical contribution of experimental syntax, and second major obstacle presents a framework for understanding the historical and sociological context of recent investigations of experimental syntax. The chapter examines how can experimental syntax help establish confidence in the acceptability judgments reported in the syntactic literature. It reviews two ways in which experimental syntax has added to the understanding of the nature of syntactic theory: (i) testing reductionist claims about the correct locus of acceptability judgment effects, and (ii) examining the complex theoretical issues surrounding the interpretation of continuous acceptability judgments.
  • 21 - The cognitive capacities of non-human primates
    pp 415-430
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter identifies what the authors believe to be the core computational primitives that underlie phonological knowledge. It presents evidence from the domain of cognitive neuroscience that attempts to investigate the nature of the neural correlates of these primitives. Phonological grammars provide a framework for how speech sounds are represented and the nature of the various combinatorial operations they undergo in mapping between lexical representations and their surface-forms. Traditionally, generative phonology has asked two questions: (1) what representations subserve phonology (e.g., features, segments, syllables) and (2) what procedures map between surface forms and memory representations. The only language-specific circuits motivated by classic phonetic and phonological theory are those needed to represent language-specific phonetic and phonological primitives in long-term memory. The chapter focuses on the nature of phonological representations, the primitives that have been investigated to date in the cognitive neuroscience literature.
  • 22 - Birdsong for biolinguistics
    pp 431-459
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on linguistic operations, and discusses the possible candidates for primitives of syntactic computation and the state of the art with regard to their possible neurobiological correlates. From the perspective of functional neuroanatomy, empirical investigations into the processing of long-distance dependencies have, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused largely on the role of Broca's region. The chapter discusses the issue of sequencing (i.e. word order) more generally. The positive correlation between dependency distance and left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) activation is one of the best investigated phenomena in the cognitive neuroscience of language. Many of the existing neuroimaging findings on syntactic processing appear to be more parsimoniously explained in terms of more general cognitive mechanisms (specifically: cognitive control). The chapter discusses "Merge" as the most promising current candidate for a neurobiologically implemented primitive of syntactic computation, and describes approaches that can bridge the gap between grammar and processing.
  • 23 - Language, culture, and computation:
    pp 460-477
  • An adaptive systems approach to biolinguistics
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter offers a satisfactory account of morphological processing within the overall language system from a neurobiological perspective. It discusses the computational primitives in morphology and their possible brain correlates. The chapter reviews research on the two morphological distinctions that have attracted the most attention in the literature on the neural bases of morphological processing: regular versus irregular morphology and inflection versus derivation. It argues that neither of these two oppositions appears suited to explaining how morphology is organized in the brain. The chapter offers some more positive suggestions regarding the neural representation and processing of morphology. It also argues for the primarily relational role of morphology, which serves to distinguish it from the combinatory nature of syntax, and for the importance of distinguishing between purely formal and interpretively relevant relations in this regard.
  • 24 - Language and natural selection
    pp 478-488
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter outlines what the authors believe a theoretically grounded cognitive neuroscience of semantics should look like. It focuses on combinatory semantics, i.e. the composition operations that serve to build complex meanings from smaller parts. The chapter examines the formal syntax and semantics of the generative tradition (e.g., Heim and Kratzer 1998) as the cognitive model that guides this research and defines the operations whose neurobiology is to be investigated. It shows that linguistic theory offers a tremendous amount of detail, which may seem daunting to try to relate to neurobiological data. Theories of formal semantics have a crisp definition of semantic well-formedness: an expression is semantically well formed if the rules of composition yield a meaning for it. The chapter examines the anterior midline field (AMF) in a violation paradigm, to better connect the findings to event-related potentials (ERP) research which has been dominated by this type of design.
  • 25 - The fossils of language: What are they? Who has them? How did they evolve?
    pp 489-523
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter considers two competing views about what modularity might consist of, which the authors refer to as sui generis modularity and descent-with-modification modularity. Descent-with-modification helps make sense of the considerable phylogenetic continuity that has been documented in recent years, in terms of comparative psychology, comparative neuroanatomy, and comparative genomics. The chapter also considers language, the canonical putative module, and its relation to cognitive systems. Cognitive mechanisms for spatial and temporal representation seem to run deeply through the structure of the linguistic system. The notion of descent-with-modification, once recognized, has significant implications for how one can assesses debates about modularity. The descent-with-modification perspective suggests caution for inferring the absence of modularity from many studies of "normal" cognition. Descent-with-modification also suggests that one should expect the hallmarks of ancestry even in the very machinery that makes abstract linguistic representation possible.
  • Notes
    pp 524-538
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Broca's area has long been implicated in articulatory-related speech production and for good reason. Although there has been much discussion of the role of Broca's area in syntactic computation, especially during comprehension, there is little evidence supporting the claim for any linguistic-specific computation performed in Broca's region. It has been suggested that Broca's area supports some aspects of sentence processing via a more general role in cognitive control, which includes mechanisms involved in resolving conflicts between competing representations or conflicting information. The necessity for conflict resolution arises in a range of language processing situations where ambiguity exists including phonological, lexical, and sentential contexts. The discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque frontal cortex has sparked renewed interest in the role of the motor system in the perception of speech sounds, an idea that is clearly related to the motor theory of speech perception.
  • References
    pp 539-670
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes the various stages of lexical retrieval process, their biolinguistic bases and neural correlates, and the patterns of acquired and developmental anomias that result from selective deficits in each of the stages. It also describes various types of anomia. The chapter focuses on the characteristics of selective anomias, namely, what happens when an individual has a single deficit along the lexical retrieval process. Semantic errors occur both in a semantic lexicon impairment and in a phonological lexicon impairment. To demonstrate how children and adolescents with lexical retrieval impairments may be classified into the different anomia patterns, the chapter presents four case studies, whose loci of impairment are summarized. There are several methods to map the functional components of lexical retrieval onto specific brain locations. One group of methods assesses brain activations in the healthy brain; the other assesses brain areas in individuals with anomia.

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