语言如何进化

人类语言具有复杂多变的递归结构,漫长的物种进化过程中唯独人类精通语言。语言的进化始于大约两百万年前的“更新世时期”,语言在当时作为一种认知适应对于人类应对自然界带给人类的挑战（如动物掠食与森林毁坏）有很大帮助。人类进化过程中学习与文化因素形成一种选择压力促使人际交流语法化,人际交流语法化引发大脑容量增加,然而,最初的语言进化与基因无关。学习与文化压力也使交流的媒介依次变为手语模式、表情模式与语言模式。交流媒介的逐渐变化最终导致了FOXP2基因突变,FOXP2基因突变让智人具有了自主的言语能力。与地球上其它的人科动物相比,人类的语言能力使人类在进化中具有明显的优势     

读心的比较研究：非人灵长类与人类在心理理论上的异同点及其解释

利用非人灵长类开展比较研究是探索心理理论本质、起源和进化动因的重要途经。大量实证研究显示非人灵长类可以表现出一些基础心理理论成分, 包括联合注意、意图理解和一级观点采择, 这表明心理理论在灵长类动物的进化谱系中具有进化连续性。然而, 非人灵长类无法像人类一样达成二级观点采择和错误信念理解, 潜心智化假说、替代表征假说、最小限度心理理论假说和意识关系假说试图对此差异进行解释。尽管视角与具体内容不同, 但这些假说都强调, 非人灵长类无法对其他个体关于外部世界的心理信念形成表征, 信念表征是非人灵长类与人类读心能力的重要分界点。未来研究需要重点澄清共享意图、语言机制以及社会生态环境因素与心理理论产生的相互影响作用。     

“动手不动口”：手部动作与语言进化的关系

语言进化是进化心理学研究领域的重要问题。镜像系统假说、工具制造假说与传授假说从不同角度对手部动作与语言进化间的关系进行了解释, 三种假说都认为人类语言起源于手部动作经验。相关实证研究发现：手语与口语具有一致性特征、语言与手部动作具有共同的神经基础、手势发展可以预测语言发展水平以及手势可以提高工具制造知识的传播效率, 这些研究为三种假说的具体观点提供了实证支持。未来该领域的研究需要关注手势语与口语在进化中的发展关系, 以及人类语言进化与其他认知特征的进化关系。     

动物和人类的利他本性:共情的进化

共情指个体感知或想象其他个体的情感,并部分体验到其他个体感受的心理过程.利他指以增加其他个体的福利为最终目标的动机.共情起源于动物的亲代养育行为,其神经基础来源于古老的情感系统.共情从动物低水平的情绪感染逐渐进化到同情关注以及观点采择共情.另外,共情具有良好的环境适应性.未来可以进一步研究动物与人类的共情和利他行为的异同,加大研究动物的高级共情能力和利他行为以及深入研究共情受社会因素的调节机制.     

人类基本数学能力的进化证据

数学能力是人类重要的高级认知能力。人类的基本数学能力从进化上而言是一种适应性的表现,对个体的生存和繁衍有重要的意义。近年来比较心理学研究发现,成年人、婴儿的基本数学能力的行为表现和脑神经机制与其它物种相似,分子遗传学研究表明基本数学能力具有一定的遗传性。这些发现有助于人们更深刻地理解基本数学能力的本质及发生发展机制。     

同性恋的进化心理学理论模型述评

关于同性恋的成因, 进化心理学家有不同的解释, 主要包括杂合优势、女性多产、超突变、亲族选择、群体选择、同盟形成以及父母操纵七种理论假说。在系统地介绍这些理论假说的基础上比较了各理论之间的优缺点, 并将其与其他流派的观点做对比, 以期发现更具说服力的模型。未来的研究应该注意同性恋的性别差异、影响性取向基因的确切位置等。     

进化认识论

1 “进化认识论”是指从进化的立场出发研究人类认识之起源、性质、界限等的一门科学。在古希腊哲学家阿那克西曼德和阿里斯塔克(Aristarch)那里,就可以找到有关认识进化的天才直觉。而真正的关于人类认识能力之进化的假说,只有在19世纪发展的思想孕育出进化论之后,才能富有意义地提出来。本世纪六十年代之前,只有少数人(大多是生物学家)深入到“进化”与认识论的问题之中。认识能力之进化的思想直到六十年代末才实际上被采纳。这里,需要特别强调西德的福尔迈的进化认识论思想。当他的《进化认识论》一书在七十年代初问世时,马上引起哲学、科学界的重视,并多次再版(目前英译本正在筹划中)。西德专业报刊评价道: “福尔迈的书给予进化论、天文学、生物学、心理学等自然科学一个可靠的描述。它尤其阐述了遗传与环境影响的问题,语言问题也在其视野之内。仅仅凭借对现代认识的清楚细致的描述,该书就很值得一读了。”(《物理学报》)     

进化视角下的审美规律

在上一期我们解释了艺术之所以能存在的心理基础,然而除此之外,我们的审美规律是否与进化有关?我们需要再次强调:并不是人类心智的所有机制都具有进化适应性,但它们确实是进化过程的结果。艺术审美对生存繁衍可能并不具备重要的功能,但它却可以反映我们心智的进化特征。挪威心理学家罗尔夫·雷伯同两位美国心理学家诺伯特·施瓦茨及彼得·温克尔曼提出:我们越是能流畅地在心理上对一个事物进行加工,就越容易产生正向的美学感受。对于我们的祖先来说,太过新异的刺激带有潜在风险性,面对新异且难以理解的事物时,人们会产生心理负担。     

投资决策进化心理学的研究：预期的私人资金分配和父母对子女的差异性精力投入

投资决策的进化心理学研究着眼于辨认人类获得进化适应的特定环境中经常出现的典型性风险,探寻为了应对这些风险而进化出的信息处理机制,并验证现时的社会因素和个体因素对这些心理机制的激活或抑制作用。在研究一中,被试预测了与自己同龄的男人或女人如何分配一笔中彩的奖金给自己和其他可能的受益人。研究发现：（1）钱数的分配大体由亲缘关系的疏密程度决定;（2）两性被试都假想男性比女性更慷慨,但实际上男性表现得更自利;（3）女性被试预测男性中奖人的金钱分配比男性被试预测女性中奖人的金钱分配更为准确;（4）女性被试的受益人更多,分享的社会范围更广。研究二探讨了父母对子女投入精力的不同取决于家庭的相对财富而非绝对财富的进化心理学假说。用哺乳与否和生育间隔期为测量指标,研究结果显示：（1）家庭实际收入影响父母对子女的总投入;（2）与邻里家庭相比,父母对于自己家庭相对收入的认知影响了对子女有别的差异性精力投入。基于男性普遍在财富和生育数量上比女性有更大的变异度,投资儿子比投资女儿更具博弈性。两项研究表明,人类的理性决策既受限于社会关系又适应于相对的财富状况     

人类会继续进化吗

从猿到人的进化经历了漫长的过程,但是今天的人类是青少年,还是已迈入老年？未来的命运将怎样？至今仍无答案。一个关于人类生命历程的假说回答了上述问题,并探讨发展进程中人类的生物学变化。结论：目前的人类正处在成熟（青少年）期,可能经较长的时间发展后进入稳定期,最终逐渐衰老     

Language Use and Coalition Formation in Multiparty Negotiations

The alignment of bargaining positions is crucial to a successful negotiation. Prior research has shown that similarity in language use is indicative of the conceptual alignment of interlocutors. We use latent semantic analysis to explore how the similarity of language use between negotiating parties develops over the course of a three‐party negotiation. Results show that parties that reach an agreement show a gradual increase in language similarity over the course of the negotiation. Furthermore, reaching the most financially efficient outcome is dependent on similarity in language use between the parties that have the most to gain from such an outcome.     

A Voice and So Much More: The Neglect and Representation of Language in Social Psychology

Linguistic diversity is an irreducible characteristic of the world we live in today, yet the study of language remains relatively neglected in mainstream and critical social psychologies alike. In order to argue for a renewed confrontation between language and critical social psychology, this study presents an overview of both the absence of language from mainstream, experimental social psychology and of the emergence, since the 1970s, of the social psychology of language as a distinctive subfield in the discipline. It is argued that although the social psychology of language made the subject perceptible as a speaking and above all accented subject, foregrounding language as an index of class, ethnicity and race, it achieved this perceptibility without challenging the basic ideological coordinates according to which experimental social psychology conceptualises the world and subjects in relation to language. For this reason, the social psychology of language, despite its important contributions, reproduces an essentially national and monolingual imagination of language related phenomena and linguistic subjectivities. The task for a critical social psychology of language, it is argued, is to 'demythologise' and 'disinvent' language and language ideologies in the discipline.     

Structure in language. Creating form in talk

In psycholinguistics, the systematic study of language production has begun to take a place beside the study of language comprehension as a means to the end of understanding human language use. Because a major and very visible component of speaking a language is knowing how to create forms to carry messages, efforts to explain language production must confront long-standing questions about the relationship between structure and function in psychological explanation. One traditionally appealing view of that relationship in the realm of language is that sentence structures are associated with or reducible to the general forces of cognition that drive interpretation and communication. This article surveys some of the challenges to this view that emerge from the study of speech errors, and sketches the progress that has been made in developing an alternative view, renewing the argument that syntactic structures are necessary elements in an explanation of language use.     

Is speech learning ‘gated’ by the social brain?

I advance the hypothesis that the earliest phases of language acquisition -- the developmental transition from an initial universal state of language processing to one that is language-specific -- requires social interaction. Relating human language learning to a broader set of neurobiological cases of communicative development, I argue that the social brain 'gates' the computational mechanisms involved in human language learning.     

Relative clause structure, relative clause perception, and the change from SOV to SVO.

This study presents a view of diachronic change in language, according to which one of the fundamental factors motivating syntactic change is to be found in the conflicting interaction of principles determining the language organization. Specifically, it will be argued that principles of structural nature and principles of perceptual nature are in conflict in languages of the SOV type, because of the relative clause construction. The way in which a relative clause is structured in an SOV language is an obstacle to its effective perceptual processing. It will be argued that this conflict is one of the major factors determining the diachronic change of a language from an OV to a VO typology.     

A Large‐Scale Analysis of Variance in Written Language

The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language (e.g., Griffiths, Steyvers, & Tenenbaum, 2007 ; Jones & Mewhort, 2007 ; Landauer & Dumais, 1997 ; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013 ). The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written language in fiction books varies appreciably between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing.     

On the Epistemology of Language

Epistemology of language, a branch of both epistemology and the philosophy of language, asks what knowledge of language consists in. In this paper, I argue that such an inquiry is a pointless enterprise due to its being based upon the incorrect assumption that linguistic competence requires knowledge of language. However, I do not think the phenomenon of knowledge of language is trivial. I propose a virtue‐theoretic account of linguistic competence, and then explain the phenomenon from a virtue‐semantic point of view.     

The two-word stage: Motivated by linguistic or cognitive constraints?

Child development researchers often discuss a "two-word" stage during language acquisition. However, there is still debate over whether the existence of this stage reflects primarily cognitive or linguistic constraints. Analyses of longitudinal data from two Deaf children, Mei and Cal, not exposed to an accessible first language (American Sign Language - ASL) until the age of 6 years, suggest that a linguistic constraint is observed when cognition is relatively spared. These older children acquiring a first language after delayed exposure exhibit aspects of a two-word stage of language development. Results from intelligence assessments, achievement tests, drawing tasks, and qualitative cognitive analyses show that Mei and Cal are at least of average intelligence and ability. However, results from language analyses clearly show differences from both age peers and younger native signers in the early two-word stage, providing new insights into the nature of this phase of language development.     

Towards a Functional Approach to Modular Ontologies Using Institutions

We propose a functional view of ontologies that emphasises their role in determining answers to queries, irrespective of the formalism in which they are written. A notion of framework is introduced that captures the situation of a global language into which both an ontology language and a query language can be translated, in an abstract way. We then generalise existing notions of robustness from the literature, and relate these to interpolation properties that support modularisation of ontologies.