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Biolinguistics
Biolinguistics can be defined as the biological and evolutionary study of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it draws from various fields such as sociobiology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to elucidate the formation of language. It seeks to yield a framework by which one can understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language. This field was first introduced by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. It was first introduced in 1971, at an international meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Biolinguistics, also called the biolinguistic enterprise or the biolinguistic approach, is believed to have its origins in Noam Chomsky's and Eric Lenneberg's work on language acquisition that began in the 1950s as a reaction to the then-dominant behaviorist paradigm. Fundamentally, biolinguistics challenges the view of human language acquisition as a beh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Critical Period Hypothesis
The critical period hypothesis is a hypothesis within the field of linguistics and second language acquisition that claims a person can only achieve native-like fluency in a language before a certain age. It is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics. and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to developmental stages of the brain. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book ''Speech and Brain Mechanisms'', and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with ''Biological Foundations of Language.'' The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if presented with adequate stimuli, and that first-language acquisition relies on neuroplasticity of the brain. If language input does not occur until after this time, the individua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Yang (linguist)
Charles Yang (born 1973) is a linguist and cognitive scientist. He is currently Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on language acquisition, variation and change, and is carried out from a broadly Chomskyan perspective. Yang is a graduate of MIT's AI Lab. His first book, ''Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language'' (2002), proposes a model of syntactic acquisition couched within the Principles and Parameters framework. In this model, different grammatical options are associated with different probabilities, which change over time. The model is applied to a number of case studies in language acquisition and historical linguistics. His second book, ''The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World'' (2006), is written for a popular audience, and explores acquisition and knowledge of language. Yang's third book, ''The Price of Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martin Nowak
Martin Andreas Nowak (born April 7, 1965) is an Austrian-born professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. He is a researcher in evolutionary dynamics, and has made contributions to the fields of evolutionary theory and viral dynamics. He held faculty positions at Oxford University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, before being recruited by Harvard in 2003. During this time, Jeffrey Epstein funded a portion of Nowak's work, helping to set up a center for studying cooperation in evolution. He was the director of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) from 2003 until 2020. He was suspended from supervising undergraduate research for two years and his institute permanently closed due to Epstein’s continued use of a personal office in the PED building for over ten years after his conviction for sex crimes. Early life and education Nowak was born in Vienna, Austria, on April 7, 1965. He studied at Albertus Magnus Gymnasium and the Univ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anna Maria Di Sciullo
Anna Maria Di Sciullo (born 1951) is a professor in the Linguistics Department at the Université du Québec à Montréal and visiting scientist at the Department of Linguistics at New York University. Her research areas are Theoretical Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Biolinguistics. Field of research Dr. Di Sciullo's contributions to Theoretical Linguistics are centered on asymmetry as a cornerstone of the Language Faculty. Her research on the asymmetry of morphological relations provides a further understanding of the regularity of form and interpretation of word internal argument, aspect and operator structures. Her publications include two MIT Press books on the centrality of asymmetrical relations in morpho-syntax. Her work in Computational Linguistics led to the formulation of the Asymmetry Recovering Parser, generating deterministic parses for linguistic expressions. She also developed a search engine sensitive to asymmetric relations, as well as a semantic minin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transformational Grammar
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) was the earliest model of grammar proposed within the research tradition of generative grammar. Like current generative theories, it treated grammar as a system of formal rules that generate all and only grammatical sentences of a given language. What was distinctive about transformational grammar was that it posited transformation rules that mapped a sentence's deep structure to its pronounced form. For example, in many variants of transformational grammar, the English active voice sentence "Emma saw Daisy" and its passive counterpart "Daisy was seen by Emma" share a common deep structure generated by phrase structure rules, differing only in that the latter's structure is modified by a passivization transformation rule. Basic mechanisms Transformational grammar was a species of generative grammar and shared many of its goals and postulations, including the notion of linguistics as a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FOXP2
Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the ''FOXP2'' gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that Regulation of gene expression, regulate gene expression by DNA-binding protein, binding to DNA. It is expressed in the brain, heart, lungs and digestive system. ''FOXP2'' is found in many vertebrates, where it plays an important role in mimicry in birds (such as birdsong) and Animal echolocation, echolocation in bats. ''FOXP2'' is also required for the proper development of speech and language in humans. In humans, mutations in ''FOXP2'' cause the severe speech and language disorder developmental verbal dyspraxia. Studies of the gene in mice and songbirds indicate that it is necessary for vocal imitation and the related motor learning. Outside the brain, ''FOXP2'' has also been implicated in development of other tissues such as the lung and digestive system. Initially identified in 1998 as the geneti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
KE Family
The KE family is a medical name designated for a British family, about half of whom exhibit a severe speech disorder called developmental verbal dyspraxia. It is the first family with speech disorder to be investigated using genetic analyses, by which the speech impairment is discovered to be due to genetic mutation, and from which the gene ''FOXP2'', often dubbed the "language gene", was discovered. Their condition is also the first human speech and language disorder known to exhibit strict Mendelian inheritance. Brought to medical attention from their school children in the late 1980s, the case of KE family was taken up at the UCL Institute of Child Health in London in 1990. Initial report suggested that the family was affected by a genetic disorder. Canadian linguist Myrna Gopnik suggested that the disorder was characterized primarily by grammatical deficiency, supporting the controversial notion of a "grammar gene". Geneticists at the University of Oxford determined that the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geneticist
A geneticist is a biologist or physician who studies genetics, the science of genes, heredity, and variation of organisms. A geneticist can be employed as a scientist or a lecturer. Geneticists may perform general research on genetic processes or develop genetic technologies to aid in the pharmaceutical or and agriculture industries. Some geneticists perform experiments in model organisms such as '' Drosophila'', '' C. elegans'', zebrafish, rodents or humans and analyze data to interpret the inheritance of biological traits. A basic science geneticist is a scientist who usually has earned a PhD in genetics and undertakes research and/or lectures in the field. A medical geneticist is a physician who has been trained in medical genetics as a specialization and evaluates, diagnoses, and manages patients with hereditary conditions or congenital malformations; and provides genetic risk calculations and mutation analysis. Education Geneticists participate in courses from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evolutionary Biology
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes such as natural selection, common descent, and speciation that produced the diversity of life on Earth. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the Modern synthesis (20th century), modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology. The investigational range of current research has widened to encompass the genetic architecture of adaptation, molecular evolution, and the different forces that contribute to evolution, such as sexual selection, genetic drift, and biogeography. The newer field of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo") investigates how embryogenesis is controlled, thus yielding a wider synthesis that integrates developmental biology with the fields of study covered by the earlier evolutionary synthesis. Subfields ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hugo Schuchardt
Hugo Ernst Mario Schuchardt (; 4 February 1842, Gotha (Thuringia) – 21 April 1927, Graz (Styria)) was a German linguist, best known for his work in the Romance languages, the Basque language, and today especially as a pioneer in the study of mixed languages, including pidgins, creoles, and the Lingua franca of the Mediterranean. In Germany Schuchardt grew up in Gotha. From 1859–1864, he studied in Jena and Bonn with many important linguists of the time, notably August Schleicher and Kuno Fischer in Jena, as well as Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn in Bonn. In 1864, Schuchardt earned a doctorate with a dissertation entitled ''De sermonis Romani plebei vocalibus'' ('On the vowels of Vulgar Latin'). Based upon a perusal of "an incredible amount of texts never really considered before him", it was subsequently published 1866-1868 in a three-volume German language edition as ''Der Vokalismus des Vulgärlateins'' (The Vowels of Vulgar Latin). In 1870, Schuchardt was promoted to pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Société De Linguistique De Paris
The Société de Linguistique de Paris (established 1864) is the editing body of the ''BSL'' (''Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique'') journal. Members of the society have included such well-known French linguists as Bréal, Saussure, Meillet, and Benveniste. Its first president was Antoine d'Abbadie. In addition to its monthly meetings, the group holds a one-day conference each January dedicated to a particular topic. In 1997, it organised the '' Congrès International des Linguistes'' in Paris. References External links *http://www.slp-paris.com/ Linguistic societies Organizations based in Paris {{ling-org-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
