Academic events
«Investigating semantics above and beyond language: a clinical and cognitive neuroscience approach», Valentina Borghesani
«A skeptic’s perspective on primate vocal communication and the language origin debate», Julia Fischer
Many scientific fields are shaped by the to-and-fro between ‘seeders’ and ‘weeders’: some members in a given scientific community generate novel – and sometimes wild – ideas, others scrutinize these ideas and may at some point suggest that they are no longer useful. An example for the contributions of seeders and weeders is the case of animal ‘referential signaling’. Referential signaling is a core feature of human linguistic communication and entails our species’ ability to designate objects and events in the environment. A central question in the language origin debate is therefore whether other animals – notably nonhuman primates – also engage in referential signaling. I will provide an overview of the historic development of this research field and discuss the arguments for and against animal referential signaling. Results from our own studies on the vocal communication of members of the genus Chlorocebus (vervets and green monkeys) and other species support the view that nonhuman primate vocal communication is largely developmentally constrained. Nonhuman primates lack the cognitive architecture and the neural machinery to produce conventionalized signals. At the side of recipients, in contrast, learning and inferential reasoning compensate this lack of flexibility to some degree and render the communicative system as a whole relatively powerful. I contend that much of the disagreement on referential signaling can be traced back to a failure to distinguish between functional vs. proximate levels of analysis. I further argue that a key question for understanding human language evolution is not whether some signals are highly context-specific, but whether signals or signal systems are conventionalized, shifting the focus from the question of call specificity to that of the cognitive prerequisites for the production of symbols.
«How much metaphor is actually there in English?», Mila Feuerstein, Kim Kfeller
SIG Metaphors explores topics related to metaphor, concreteness, and colexifica- tion in the lexical distributions of languages from the perspectives of both language acquisition and language evolution. In this talk, we will share preliminary results from our study based on a state-of-art metaphor detection algorithm (MelBERT). We compare three different adult speech registers in terms of the distributions of metaphor-coded words in their corpora: child-directed speech, adult-directed speech, and the written modality. We also look at concreteness scores of lexical units across these genres. Our findings contribute to a more thorough understand- ing of how child-directed speech is optimized for early language acquisition.
«Cortico-subcortico-cortical circuitry and the timing of action, perception and cognition», Prof. Sonja Kotz
While the role of forward models that predict the sensory consequences of an action highlight the role of the cerebellum, less is known about its contributions to the perception of complex dynamic signals. Considering temporo-cerebellar-thalamo-cortical circuitry and its respective connectivity patterns, cerebellar contributions should be further explored across domains as they (i) simulate cortical information processing and (ii) compare expected and actual outcomes of stimulations, leading to adaptation in cortical target areas. I will discuss frameworks and present empirical evidence encompassing action, perception, and cognition in support of this idea.