Chimp signals a bit like human speech in NewScientist 23 February 2019
Maybe human language is not as distinctive as previously thought. Researchers have been looking at...
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Category: LANGUAGE
The kingdom of speech by Tom Wolfe 2016
Asks the right question. Not sure about the answer. Wolfe starts by nailing the key question. We...
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The Shallowness of Google Translate by Douglas Hofstadter in The Antlantic 30 January 2018
Understanding the point about understanding the point. We are all familiar with the point that...
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Synopsis of Language, consciousness, culture by Ray Jackendoff 2007
Brilliantly insightful on the connections between language and consciousness. The book comprises a...
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How language began by Daniel Everett 2017
Language begins with Homo erectus. There are two types of linguist: those who believe it’s all in...
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Language Re-Entrance and the ‘Inner Voice’ by Luc Steels 2003
The brain’s re-entrant connectivity turns lexical language into grammatical language. This paper...
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Give evolution enough time in Johnson in The Economist 7 October 2017
Everett and Chomsky bracket the debate around the beginnings of language. On the face of it, the...
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Spoken rules by FJ Brown and N Hooper in New Scientist 3 June 2017
This is an excellent and succinct article on the history of ideas in the realm of how humans...
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The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about it? by S Pinker and R Jackendoff 2005
In the Abstract to the paper, Pinker and Jackendoff state: ‘We examine the question of which...
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How language helps us think by Ray Jackendoff in Pragmatics and Cognition 1996
In his paper, Ray Jackendoff puts forward a compelling case as to why thought and language are not...
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AI’s Language Problem by Will Knight in MIT Technology Review 2016
The article spells out in some detail why we have found it so difficult to build algorithms capable of … language …
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A social spin on language analysis by Carolyn Penstein Rosé in Nature 11 May 2017
The article reports on work presented to a recent web conference on the subject of ‘personal attacks …
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A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning by Ray Jackendoff 2012
This is an extremely important book in that it consolidates Jackendoff’s hypothesis (the ‘Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis’) …
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