Wednesday 13 December 2008 | 16:00u - 17:00uLocation: Doelenzaal, Singel 425, Amsterdam
prof. dr. Nick Chater
Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, Department of Psychology, UCL, UK
The Biological and Cultural Origins of Language
What explains the apparently close mesh between natural language and the language learners that underpins the very existence of text and discourse. One idea is that learners have a genetically determined language module, language instinct or language organ, which is has domain-specific knowledge of linguistic structure. This viewpoint aims to explain both language acquisition and universal properties of the world's languages. This talk, based on joint work with Morten Christiansen, argues that such a biologically specialized module can be ruled out on evolutionary grounds. Instead, language has emerged through many generations of cultural evolution, to fit biological, cognitive and communicative constraints. In particular, forces of pragmatic interpretation and discourse structure may become “fossilized” into syntactic structure. More generally, language is shaped by the brain, rather than the reverse.