Review of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences 2010: The Origins of Language
During the last two weeks of June, the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) organized the Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences 2010 (UQÀM 2010, 21–30 June 2010). This year’s topic was “the hardest problem in science” (Christiansen & Kirby 20...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2010
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| Online Access: | https://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/view/156 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/86388 |
| Summary: | During the last two weeks of June, the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities
at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) organized the Summer Institute
in Cognitive Sciences 2010 (UQÀM 2010, 21–30 June 2010). This year’s topic was
“the hardest problem in science” (Christiansen & Kirby 2003a) — the origins of
language. Language origin refers to the phylogenetic process whereby Homo
sapiens made the transition from a pre-linguistic communication system to a
communication system with languages of the sort we use today (Wang 1978,
Gong 2009). Questions concerning when, where, and how human language
(henceforth, simply ‘language’) originated and evolved belong to the realm of
evolutionary linguistics (Ke & Holland 2006, Hauser et al. 2007). This field has
now become resurgent as a scientific and collaborative beacon for research (Oudeyer
2006), as shown by many anthologies and reviews; see, among others, Harnad
et al. (1976), Wang (1991), Hurford et al. (1998), Briscoe (2002), Wray (2002b),
Christiansen & Kirby (2003a, 2003b), Cangelosi et al. (2006), Smith et al. (2008),
Bickerton & Szathmáry (2009), Larson et al. (2009), and Smith et al. (2010). |
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