Fourth International Conference on the Evolution of Language

Evolution of Language:
Fourth International Conference, 2002.

Harvard University

Wednesday March 27th --- Saturday March 30th



The conference will be held at the Harvard Science Center, just off Harvard Yard and a short walk from Harvard Square.

PROGRAMME of ALL TALKS and POSTERS

There will be eight plenary talks, 88 30-minute non-plenary talks, and 30 posters.

See also the Outline Timetable and Schedule of Talks and Posters

PLENARY TALKS



NON-PLENARY TALKS (alphabetically by surname of first author)


``Fodor and the Evolutionary Frame of Language''
Majid Amini and Niloufar Jafari

``Primitive Gestures: Some thoughts on Studdert-Kennedy and Goldstein's Account of the Origin of Phonological Structure''
Irene Appelbaum

``Beyond the Mirror: Sign Language and Minimal Subscenes''
Michael A. Arbib

``Deixis and the development of a proto-language in asynchronously communicating connectionist agents''
Jean Baillie and Chrystopher Nehaniv

``Costly signalling and human language''
Carl T. Bergstrom, Rustom Antia, Szabolcs Sz\'amad\'o, and Michael Lachmann

``Why Generativists have Problems with Evolution''
Derek Bickerton

``The size of the pharynx: An irrelevant parameter for speech emergence and acquisition''
Boe L.J., Heim L.J. and Abry C.

``The poverty of the stimulus imposes a pressure for compositional language under conditions of repeated observational learning''
Henry Brighton and Simon Kirby

``Coevolution of the language faculty and language(s) with decorrelated encodings''
Ted Briscoe

``Generalized X-bar theory and the evolution of grammar''
[Note: some figures remain to be implemented in the web version of this abstract.]
Jason Brown and Chris Golston

``The 50k Bloom: Did Syntax Flower, or Did All of Higher Intellectual Function?''
William H. Calvin

``The evolutionary origin of morphology''
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy

``When words rule: The evolution of language function''
A. Charles Catania

``The Importance of Hierarchical Learning: A Computational Study of Sequential Learning in Human and Non-Human Primates''
Morten H. Christiansen and Christopher M. Conway

``The evolution of grammatical structures and adaptive explanations''
Bernard Comrie and Tania Kuteva

``Executive Functions of the Frontal Lobes, Language, and the Evolutionary Ascendancy of Homo Sapiens''
Frederick L. Coolidge and Tom Wynn

``How gestures became vocal''
Michael C. Corballis

``Language at 70.000 BP: Evidence from sea-crossings''
Coupe, Christophe and Jean-Marie Hombert

``Functionally Referential Communication in Wild Chimpanzees?''
Catherine Crockford and Christophe Boesch

``ProtocadherinXY as the Language Gene-progress report''
TJ Crow, T Priddle and N Williams

``Multiple-cue integration and the evolution of languages''
Dale, Rick and Christiansen, Morten H.

``Is there any Point in Archaeologists being Interested in the Origins of Language?''
Iain Davidson

``Co-evolution of "motherese" and acquisition of speech''
Bart de Boer, Patricia K. Kuhl

``The Co-evolution of Language and Friendship''
Jean-Louis Dessalles and Laleh Ghadakpour

``Is Stimulus Equivalence (SE) a precursor or a product of language?''
David W. Dickins, Tom E. Dickins, and Richard P. Bentall

``Adaptive Design of Vowel Systems''
Randy L. Diehl, Bjvrn Lindblom, and Carl P. Creeger

``Requirements on Conceptual Representation for the Evolution of Language''
Peter Ford Dominey

``The Secret of Language: on the Evolution of Language as a Ciphering System''
Daniel Dor and Eva Jablonka

``Simulation of the Evolution of Turkic Vowel Harmony''
Mark Dras, K. David Harrison, Berk Kapicioglu

``Categorical perception and its ontogenetic development in nonhuman primates''
Julia Fischer

``Kin Communication and the Evolution of Language: The Mother Tongues Hypothesis''
W. Tecumseh Fitch

``Cognitive requirements for the expression of time''
Laleh Ghadakpour and Jean-Louis Dessalles

``To evolve language, first, you need to have prestige''
Francisco Gil-White

``An Evolutionary Typology of Compositionality''
David Gil

``Systematization, Sublimation, Ritualization: An Application of the Uniformitarian Hypothesis''
John Haiman

``Language as Dynamics -- A Computational Study of the Ontogenetic and Glossogenetic Loop''
Takashi Hashimoto

``Language polygenesis : What type of evidence?''
Hombert, Jean-Marie and Christophe Coupe

``Language beyond our grasp: what mirror neurons can, and cannot, do for language evolution''
James R Hurford

`` Language as an Autonomous Dynamical System''
Ichiro Igari and Takashi Ikegami

``What Dolphins Can Tell us About the Evolution of Language''
Raquel O. Jaakkola

``Language as it could be : How robots can create new linguistic phenomena''
Kaplan, Frederic

``The Rise and Fall of Homophones: a Window to Language Evolution''
Jinyun Ke, Feng Wang and Christophe Coupe

``What is Language Evolution? UG, Universals, and the Great Selection Myth''
Simon Kirby

``A Hard Question Confronting the Minimalist Program''
Hisatsugu Kitahara

``Costly signalling and some paradoxes of language evolution''
Chris Knight

``Deception in animal signals and human language''
Michael Lachmann, Carl T Bergstrom and Szabolcs Szamado

``Formation of a shared conceptual structure in a population of simulated autonomous agents''
Elise Langham and Seth Bullock

``Linguistic Diversity in an Expression/Induction Model''
Robert Liebscher

``The role of parental selection in the evolution of vocal capacity''
John L. Locke

``The Case of Cases and Word Order: The Role of Syntactic Cues in the Evolution and Acquisition of Language''
Gary Lupyan and Morten H. Christiansen

``Vocabulary errors as evidence of semantic knowledge in bonobos (Pan paniscus)''
Heidi Lyn

``Evolution of language structure: survival of the fittest in a statistical environment''
Caroline Lyon

``Origin of the Consonant-Vowel Frame for Speech:Innate Structuring or Input-Mediated Construction?''
Peter F. MacNeilage and Barbara L. Davis

``Investigating the emergence of linguistic signs''
Egidio Marsico, Francois Pellegrino and Christophe Coupe

``Raw material transportation as an indicator of hominid symbolic linguistic capacity during the Pleistocene''
Ben Marwick

``Proto-Language and dynamics of typological distributions''
Elena Maslova

``Cultural transmission, learning cost and the Baldwin effect in language evolution''
Steve Munroe and Angelo Cangelosi

``Honest signaling in a continuous world''
Jean-Pierre Nadal, Jean-Louis Dessalles and Gerard Weisbuch

``Prelinguistic Primitives and the Evolution of Argument Structure: Evidence from Specific Language Impairment''
Diane Nelson and Vesna Stojanovik

``Syntax as a handicap trait: evolution of birdsong, whale song and human language''
Kazuo Okanoya and Hiroko Yamada

``The Logical Problem of Language Evolution''
Luca Onnis and Nick Chater

``The origins of phonemic coding and syllable systems''
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

``A Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for linguistic phylogenies: an application to the Indo-European languages''
Mark Pagel, Andrew Meade and Russell Gray

``The Evolution of Communication from an Avian Perspective''
Irene M. Pepperberg

``Evolution in semantic language-games''
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

``Theory and Experimentation in the Modeling of Language Emergence''
Andrei Popescu-Belis

``Intersensory integration of voice and face expressions.Towards a motor theory of audiovisual perception?''
Pourtois, G and de Gelder, B

``A comparative study of the sensory innervation of the vocal tract in humans and primates: possible implications for the development of speech motor control.''
Gordon Ramsay and Didier Demolin

``Deception and Mate Selection: Some Implications for Relevance and the Evolution of Language''
Kate Rigby and Bradley Franks

``Human tongue, pharynx and vocal fold muscles contain slow tonic muscle, a distinct class of muscle that may have evolved for speech.''
Ira Sanders

``The relevance of brain size for understanding the evolution of semantic complexity''
P. Thomas Schoenemann

``Language, genes and the evolution of combinatorics''
Daniel Segre'

``Mirror neurons and articulations, and the origin of speech.''
John R. Skoyles

``Meaning Synchronisation through Cognitive Biases and Linguistic Input''
Andrew D.M. Smith

``Compositionality from culture: the role of environment structure and learning bias''
Kenny Smith

``Language Diversity: Evidence For Language Fitness''
Zach Solan, Shimon Edelman, David Horn and Eytan Ruppin

``Computer simulations of the origins of case grammar''
Luc Steels

``Functional Load and Language Evolution''
Surendran, Dinoj and Niyogi, Partha

``Challenging the syllabic model of'syntax-as-it-is'''
Maggie Tallerman

``Serial Expertise and Declarative Memory Of Monkeys: Non- Verbal Precursors Of Language''
Herbert S. Terrace

``Implicating working memory in the representation of constituent structure and the origins of word-order universals''
Huck Turner and Angelo Cangelosi

``Evolution of the Tongue Root as an Articulator''
D. H. Whalen

``Pragmatics, Mindreading and the Evolution of Language''
Tim Wharton

``The evolution of language processing systems in the neocortex: 'Why are babies born big?' revisited''
Steve Womble and Stefan Wermter

``Making models work for each other: common ground and compatibility in accounts of language emergence''
Alison Wray

``The evolution of the morphology-syntax distinction''
Dieter Wunderlich

``A syntactic rule in primate communication''
Klaus Zuberbuhler

``How the poverty of stimulus solves the poverty of stimulus''
Willem H. Zuidema



POSTERS (alphabetically by surname of first author)


``Demythologizing Protolanguage''
Michael A. Babcock

``Are colour categories innate or learned? Insights from computational modelling.''
Tony Belpaeme

``Cladistic reconstruction of linguistic trees through vocalic data''
M. Ben Hamed, P. Darlu and N. Vallee

``The interface of neurobiological and linguistic development''
James Benson, Chris Cleirigh, William Greaves and Jared Taglialatela

``Cooperation and communication in apes and humans''
Ingar Brinck and Peter Gardenfors

``Evidence for semantic complexity in large-brained mammals''
Christopher M. Conway

``Locality as a Stabilizing Factor for Evolving Language Systems''
Wenjing Dai and Les Gasser

``A critical analysis of the gestural proto-language theory''
Dale, Rick and Richardson, Daniel C.

``The Language of Individuals with Schizophrenia: Relation to its Genetics''
Lynn E DeLisi

``A comparative study of the sensory innervation of the vocal tract in humans and primates: possible implications for the development of speech motor control. Part II: The tongue and larynx.''
Didier Demolin and Gordon Ramsay

``The Language Organism: The Leiden theory of language evolution''
George van Driem

``Zipf's law, least effort and complexity''
Ramon Ferrer i Cancho and Ricard V. Soli

``Fundamental Properties of Phonological Organization: Consonant-Vowel Relations in Creole Languages''
Ashlynn L. Kinney and Peter F. MacNeilage

``On the Modal Logic Non-Intuitionistic Structure of Ontogensis and Phyletic Evolution of Language, Modelling Cognitive Grammars''
Franz R. Krueger, Claudia C. Krausse and Anatol Reibold

``Creolistics, biolinguistics, and the evolution of superstructure''
Hirokuni Masuda

``The Potential Role of Production in the Evolution of Syntax''
Dana McDaniel

``Detecting Borrowing Among Languages: a glottochronological approach''
James W. Minett and William S.-Y. Wang

``Sociolinguistic Approaches to the Prehistory of the Mashriqian (Semitic) Languages''
Albert F. H. Naccache

``Evolution of Word Order''
Mieko Ogura and William S-Y. Wang

``Baby cry as a pre-adaptation to language''
Kazuo Okanoya, Hiroko Ichii and Hiroshi Ushijima

``The Phylogeny of Vowels and Consonants''
Michael J. Owren

``Can the acoustic features of paleo-speech be extrapolated from motherese?''
Elizabeth H. Peters

``The biological substrate of vocal signs in animal communication: a neurosemiotic analysis of vervet monkey alarm-calls''
Joao Queiroz, Sidarta Ribeiro and Ivan Araujo

``The Evolution of Analogical and Metaphorical Reasoning''
Eric Schniter

``Music, Language, and Becoming Human''
Elizabeth Tolbert

``Studying Definiteness using a Computational Model''
Joris Van Looveren

``Carl Vogel and Justin Woods''
Simulation of Evolving Linguistic Communication among Fallible Communicators

``Sympathetic mouth movements accompanying the fine motor manipulation by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)with implications for the evolution of language''
Gabriel S. Waters and Roger S. Fouts

``On oral pleasure: Limbic input, pre-frontal cortex, and the self-selection of language function''
Chris Westbury, Richard Griffin and Trinity Wilson

``Evolution and Embodiment: Motor Priming of Figurative Speech''
Nicole L. Wilson and Greg Bryant