|
Center for Cognitive Science The Puzzle of the Mind |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ray
Jackendoff, Ph.D., Brandeis University
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Distinguished
Speaker Series 2002
Thursday, March 14, 2002:
3:30pm
- 5:00pm, Slee Concert Hall,
North Campus
"Possible Stages in the Evolution
The
human ability to learn language is a human cognitive specialization,
encoded (in some unknown way) in our genes. The evident adaptivity
of linguistic communication suggests that this capacity arose through
natural selection. It is therefore a challenge for linguistics to
find a plausible route by which the features of language could have
evolved step by step. I will propose such a route, using evidence
from child and adult language acquisition, from aphasia, from pidgin
and creole languages, from "language"-trained apes, and
from "fossils" of earlier forms of the language capacity
still found in modern-day languages.
Ray Jackendoff is Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis University, where he has taught since 1971. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, President-Elect of the Linguistic Society of America, and past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He is author of Semantics and Cognition, Languages of the Mind, Consciousness and the Computational Mind, and (with Fred Lerdahl) A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. His most recent book, Foundations of Language, is being published by Oxford University Press this winter. Co-Sponsored
by: Open to the Public. Free Admission. Go to Spring 2002 calendar and printable versions
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You are
visitor
to this
site.
Last updated on August 22, 2003 by H. Jones
Contact:
hhjones@buffalo.edu
The Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, State University
of New York, 652 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645-2177 ext. 717, Fax: (716) 645-3825
© Copyright 2004, Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, All Rights Reserved.