Author: Anne Vilain
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287317
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
After a long period where it has been conceived as iconoclastic and almost forbidden, the question of language origins is now at the centre of a rich debate, confronting acute proposals and original theories. Most importantly, the debate is nourished by a large set of experimental data from disciplines surrounding language. The editors of the present book have gathered researchers from various fields, with the common objective of taking as seriously as possible the search for continuities from non-human primate vocal and gestural communication systems to human speech and language, in a multidisciplinary perspective combining ethology, neuroscience, developmental psychology and linguistics, as well as computer science and robotics. New data and theoretical elaborations on the emergence of referential communication and language are debated here by some of the most creative scientists in the world.
Author: Katja Liebal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521195047
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Multimodal approach to primate communication with focus on its cognitive foundations and how this relates to theories of language evolution.
Author: Rolf M. Quam
Publisher: Humana Press
ISBN: 3319594788
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Presents a comprehensive review of nonhuman primate audition and vocal communication. These are obviously intimately related topics, but are often addressed separately. The hearing abilities of primates have been tested experimentally in a large number of species across the primate order, and these studies have revealed both consistent patterns as well as interesting variation within and between taxonomic groups. Recent studies have shed light on how variation in anatomical structures along the auditory pathway relates to variation in auditory sensitivity. At the same time, ongoing studies of vocal communication in wild primate populations continue to reveal new insights into the social and environmental contexts of many primate calls, and the range of known primate vocalizations has increased dramatically with the development of more sophisticated and accessible auditory equipment and software that enables the recording and analysis of higher-fidelity and broader-band recordings, including documenting very high frequency (i.e. ultrasound) vocalizations. Historically the relative importance of primate calls has been evaluated qualitatively by the perception of the researcher, but new methods and approaches now enable a greater appreciation for how signals are used and perceived by the primates in question. The integration of anatomical and behavioral data on acoustic communication and the environmental correlates thereof has significant potential for reconstructing behavior in the fossil record. This confluence of factors and accumulating evidence for the sophistication and complexity in both the signal and its interpretation indicate that a book synthesizing this information across primates is warranted and represents an important contribution to the literature.
Author: Katja Liebal
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027222404
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
The aim of this volume is to bring together the research in gestural communication in both nonhuman and human primates and to explore the potential of a comparative approach and its contribution to the question of an evolutionary scenario in which gestures play a signuificant role.
Author: Bennett L. Schwartz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108962459
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 920
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Book Description
Researchers have studied non-human primate cognition along different paths, including social cognition, planning and causal knowledge, spatial cognition and memory, and gestural communication, as well as comparative studies with humans. This volume describes how primate cognition is studied in labs, zoos, sanctuaries, and in the field, bringing together researchers examining similar issues in all of these settings and showing how each benefits from the others. Readers will discover how lab-based concepts play out in the real world of free primates. This book tackles pressing issues such as replicability, research ethics, and open science. With contributors from a broad range of comparative, cognitive, neuroscience, developmental, ecological, and ethological perspectives, the volume provides a state-of-the-art review pointing to new avenues for integrative research.
Author: Charles T. Snowdon
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521246903
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262515202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.
Author: Dawn Prince-Hughes
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816521500
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
Chronicles the days of a gorilla family, offering insight into their diet, communication, behavior, and recreation, provoking human introspection.
Author: Herbert S. Terrace
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550014
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
In the 1970s, the behavioral psychologist Herbert S. Terrace led a remarkable experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught to use language. A young ape, named “Nim Chimpsky” in a nod to the linguist whose theories Terrace challenged, was raised by a family in New York and instructed in American Sign Language. Initially, Terrace thought that Nim could create sentences but later discovered that Nim’s teachers inadvertently cued his signing. Terrace concluded that Project Nim failed—not because Nim couldn’t create sentences but because he couldn’t even learn words. Language is a uniquely human quality, and attempting to find it in animals is wishful thinking at best. The failure of Project Nim meant we were no closer to understanding where language comes from. In this book, Terrace revisits Project Nim to offer a novel view of the origins of human language. In contrast to both Noam Chomsky and his critics, Terrace contends that words, as much as grammar, are the cornerstones of language. Retracing human evolution and developmental psychology, he shows that nonverbal interaction is the foundation of infant language acquisition, leading up to a child’s first words. By placing words and conversation before grammar, we can, for the first time, account for the evolutionary basis of language. Terrace argues that this theory explains Nim’s inability to acquire words and, more broadly, the differences between human and animal communication. Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can is a masterful statement of the nature of language and what it means to be human.
Author: Dario Maestripieri
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040422
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 632
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Book Description
In more ways than we may sometimes care to acknowledge, the human being is just another primate--it is certainly only very rarely that researchers into cognition, emotion, personality, and behavior in our species and in other primates come together to compare notes and share insights. This book, one of the few comprehensive attempts at integrating behavioral research into human and nonhuman primates, does precisely that--and in doing so, offers a clear, in-depth look at the mutually enlightening work being done in psychology and primatology. Relying on theories of behavior derived from psychology rather than ecology or biological anthropology, the authors, internationally known experts in primatology and psychology, focus primarily on social processes in areas including aggression, conflict resolution, sexuality, attachment, parenting, social development and affiliation, cognitive development, social cognition, personality, emotions, vocal and nonvocal communication, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology. They show nonhuman primates to be far more complex, cognitively and emotionally, than was once supposed, with provocative implications for our understanding of supposedly unique human characteristics. Arguing that both human and nonhuman primates are distinctive for their wide range of context-sensitive behaviors, their work makes a powerful case for the future integration of human and primate behavioral research.
