Evolution of combinatorial speech
16-12-2015 - 12:15
Seminar and meetings
When studying language from an evolutionary perspective, it is necessary to find points of comparison outside human language itself. In this talk I will argue that combinatorial speech is an ideal aspect of language to study from such an evolutionary perspective. Use of combinatorial structure (combining a limited number of discrete building blocks into an unlimited set of utterances) is unique to humans in comparison to other apes, and requires specific cognitive mechanisms that are necessary in other aspects of language, such as syntax. While only humans can use combinatorial speech, precursor behaviors can be found in other apes. In order to investigate how cognitive and anatomical adaptations to using speech may have evolved since the latest common ancestor, experiments (with human participants) can be done. Such experimenst use signals that are like speech, but that have been manipulated in different ways to control factors that we think may be of importance. In this presentation I will illustrate recent results and future challenges of the research into the evolution of speech with a number of experimental and computational examples from my lab.
Bart de Boer
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
http://crcn.ulb.ac.be/coming-soon-2/
Av F Roosevelt 50, Campus Solbosch
Room Bertelson (DB10.233), Buiding D, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Floor number :10th
Brussels