Language development.

Recent research suggests that our ability to learn language is innate, but not necessarily domain-specific. That is, language development appears to be based on a relatively plastic mix of neural systems that also serve other cognitive and perceptual functions. Evidence in support of this conclusion includes neural network simulations of language learning, event-related brain potential studies of normal language development, and studies of language development in several clinical populations of subjects suffering focal brain injury, specific language impairment, and contrasting forms of mental retardation.     

Ideologies of Language: Some Reflections on Language and U.S. Law

I present two U.S. court cases in which I participated as a linguistic anthropological "expert" to show how language ideologies of the law both influence legal outcomes and conflict with "scientific" ideas about language. One case was the murder trial of a young Mixtec-speaking Indian from Oaxaca; the other was a civil suit brought by four Hispanic women dismissed from an elder-care center for speaking Spanish on the job. I identify in the linguistic ideologies of both cases a principle of "referential transparency" that takes the essential business of words, regardless of the linguistic code, to be communicating propositional information. In the second case, 1 describe a further notion of "linguistic paranoia" in which speaking a language other than English is taken as inherently insulting or threatening. I relate these implicit ideological threads to the legal outcomes, to the restricted notions of potential "language rights" that might emerge from such ideologies, and to the clash between theoretical and judicial perspectives on language. [Keywords: U.S. law, language rights, linguistic ideology, expert witnesses, linguistic anthropology]     

Lecture 13. Language and Consciousness

We have cursed "psychology" because we were living in a "characterless" era … That era has passed, and so we again have need of the entire soul, the whole of what is life, the whole man … Back to the soul, not just to man, but to the "whole man"—with a spirit, with body and soul, with all that is part of life—thrice over.     

Language beyond action.

The discovery of mirror neurons in macaques and of a similar system in humans has provided a new and fertile neurobiological ground for rooting a variety of cognitive faculties. Automatic sensorimotor resonance has been invoked as the key elementary process accounting for disparate (dys)functions, like imitation, ideomotor apraxia, autism, and schizophrenia. In this paper, we provide a critical appraisal of three of these claims that deal with the relationship between language and the motor system. Does language comprehension require the motor system? Was there an evolutionary switch from manual gestures to speech as the primary mode of language? Is human communication explained by automatic sensorimotor resonances? A positive answer to these questions would open the tantalizing possibility of bringing language and human communication within the fold of the motor system. We argue that the available empirical evidence does not appear to support these claims, and their theoretical scope fails to account for some crucial features of the phenomena they are supposed to explain. Without denying the enormous importance of the discovery of mirror neurons, we highlight the limits of their explanatory power for understanding language and communication.     

Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory.

Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Bambi B. Schieffelin. Kathryn A. Woolard. and Paul V. Kroskrity. eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 338 pp.     

Language discrimination by Java sparrows

Java sparrows (Padda oryzivora) were trained to discriminate English from Chinese spoken by a bilingual speaker. They could learn discrimination and showed generalization to new sentences spoken by the same speaker and those spoken by a new speaker. Thus, the birds distinguished between English and Chinese. Although auditory cues for the discrimination were not specified, this is the first evidence that non-mammalian species can discriminate human languages.     

The Biopolymer Markup Language.

SUMMARY: An XML derived from a data model designed to be a hierarchical representation of an organism has been specified and a browser to use this language has been developed. AVAILABILITY: The language definition is available in HTML form at http://www.proteometrics.com/BIOML/. The BioML browser is available on request from the author.