Rudiments de langage chez les primates non-humains ? by Alban LEMASSON (Université de Rennes 1, Institut universitaire de France) La communication vocale des primates non-humains a longtemps été considérée comme déterminée uniquement génétiquement et émotionnellement, encourageant les théoriciens de l’origine du langage humain à en rechercher les précurseurs ailleurs, notamment dans les gestes des grands […]

Evelina FEDORENKO (MIT) What cognitive and neural mechanisms do we use to understand language? Since Broca's and Wernicke's seminal discoveries in the 19th century, a broad array of brain regions have been implicated in linguistic processing spanning frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, both hemispheres, and subcortical and cerebellar structures. However, characterizing the precise contribution of […]

The communicative basis of word order by Ted GIBSON (MIT) Some recent evidence suggests that subject-object-verb (SOV) may be the default word order for human language. For example, SOV is the preferred word order in a task where participants gesture event meanings (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Critically, SOV gesture production occurs not only for speakers […]

Sound change and its relationship to variation in production and categorization in perception by Jonathan Harrington (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany) In some models (Lindblom et al, 1995; Bybee, 2002), sound change is associated with the type of synchronic reduction that occurs in prosodically weak and semantically predictable contexts. […]