Playing with fire by Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater in New Scientist 26 March 2022
Strange how we still cannot agree on the origins of language. The authors have just brought out a...
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Category: LANGUAGE
Chimpanzees seem to speak in sentences of three or more calls by Michael Marshall in New Scientist 20 February 2021
We are learning more and more about animal communications. Recent research with chimpanzees shows...
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Talk to the animals by Edd Gent in New Scientist 19 December 2020
AI is well suited to interpreting animal communications. It is surprising that nobody thought of...
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Concepts in a Probabilistic Language of Thought by Noah D. Goodman et al, 14 June 2014
An elegant explanation of language and thought and how they relate to each other. This is the sort...
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Concepts in a probabilistic language of thought by Noah Goodman et al in CBMM 14 June 2014
An elegant explanation of language and thought and how they relate to each other. This is the sort...
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Putting old tools to novel uses: The role of form accessibility in semantic extension by Z Harmon & V Kapatsinski in Cognitive Psychology 19 August 2017
The growth of language is a shared endeavour. It almost goes without saying that the evolution of...
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Who invented the ABCs? by Colin Barras in NewScientist 8 February 2020
It’s an accident that we use the alphabet. John Darnell et al published a landmark paper in 2006....
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Animal languages by Eva Meijer 2016
Dr Doolittle lives again. This is a truly wide-ranging canter through the ways in which many types...
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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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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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