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Babbling Birds
- frereubu 6y agoThis is an interesting article that reminds me of an offhand remark in this talk by an old prof of mine, Marty Sereno, that he thinks human language evolved from singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rconzwB422s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rconzwB422s From memory he thinks this because of the structure of the human voicebox, but I could be wrong and don't have time to track that little part down right now. It's a fascinating talk in general - Marty's a really smart and engaging speaker. I remember his PowerPoint-less and notes-less lectures with fondness - he just really knew his stuff back to front, having starting dissecting the visual cortext of monkeys and moved on to fMRI imaging, including writing his own analysis software from scratch.
- canjobear 6y agoThis article presents one side of a long-standing debate in linguistics about whether human languages are more shaped by pressures for efficient communication, or by innate computational constraints that are hardwired in the brain. The latter position is heavily associated with Chomsky’s school, which posits that language can only be understood in terms of complex, discrete data structures and a small set of computational operations acting on them. This article is a fairly standard articulation of that position. Which is to say, it’s not all there is to this debate. For a review of the arguments on the other side (that language is shaped by a pressure for efficient communication) here’s a nice read: http://colala.berkeley.edu/papers/gibson2019how.pdf http://colala.berkeley.edu/papers/gibson2019how.pdf