Music, evolution and language

Darwin (1871) noted that the human musical faculty 'must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed'. Indeed, previous research with human infants and young children has revealed that we are born with variable musical capabilities. Here, the adaptive purpose served by these differing capabilities is discussed with reference to comparative findings regarding the acoustic behavior of nonhuman primates. The findings provide evidence supporting Darwin's hypothesis of an intermediate stage of human evolutionary history characterized by a communication system that resembles music more closely than language and possibly acting as a precursor for both current language and music.     

After Helsinki: unresolved issues in international research

Following a long process of revision, a new version of the Declaration of Helsinki was approved by the World Medical Association in 2000. Two provisions of the Declaration address ongoing international controversies regarding research sponsored by industrialized countries and conducted in developing countries. Despite the issuance of the final version of the Declaration, opponents remain locked in debate. Moreover, the Declaration remained silent on other prominent controversies concerning international research. An analysis of these current controversies reveals reasons why they are not likely to be readily resolved, despite apparent agreement by opponents on overarching ethical principles.     

Language,cognition, and second language grammaticality judgments

In first language research, there appear to be two predominant positions relating metalinguistic awareness to language development. One suggests that since metalinguistic awareness is related to primary language acquisition (comprehension and production), general cognitive processes perform a limited role in metalinguistic awareness. The other suggests that since metalinguistic awareness is more closely related to secondary language acquisition (reading and writing), a greater role is assumed by general cognitive processes. There have been some indirect attempts to study the role of language and cognition with respect to second language grammaticality judgments. There is growing evidence that metalinguistic awareness is a reliable indicator of developing second language competence. Furthermore, it has been shown that language aptitude is significantly related to metalinguistic awareness. The present study was designed to investigate the statistical relationship between second language grammaticality judgments and selected cognitive and linguistic variables. The variables studied were second language proficiency, second language classroom achievement, first language reading competence, language aptitude, nonverbal intelligence, field dependence-independence, and a written grammaticality judgment test tapping the ability to recognize, and correct, deviance. Subjects were college students in advanced English-as-a-second-language classes. Multivariate statistical techniques were used to determine the relative contribution of linguistic and cognitive variables to the individual variation demonstrated by the learners in their ability to detect deviance in English. The results showed that second language proficiency, second language achievement in the classroom, and language aptitude were significant predictors of the subjects' ability to make grammaticality judgments. First language reading competence was significantly related to subjects' ability to correct deviance. These observations are discussed in the light of: (1) the relationship among cognition, language, and metalinguistic awareness, and (2) the role of metalinguistic awareness in second language acquisition and second language learning.     

Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.     

Plasticity of human spatial cognition: spatial language and cognition covary across cultures

The present paper explores cross-cultural variation in spatial cognition by comparing spatial reconstruction tasks by Dutch and Namibian elementary school children. These two communities differ in the way they predominantly express spatial relations in language. Four experiments investigate cognitive strategy preferences across different levels of task-complexity and instruction. Data show a correlation between dominant linguistic spatial frames of reference and performance patterns in non-linguistic spatial memory tasks. This correlation is shown to be stable across an increase of complexity in the spatial array. When instructed to use their respective non-habitual cognitive strategy, participants were not easily able to switch between strategies and their attempts to do so impaired their performance. These results indicate a difference not only in preference but also in competence and suggest that spatial language and non-linguistic preferences and competences in spatial cognition are systematically aligned across human populations.     

Some unresolved issues in philosophy and psychology: their implications for therapy

This paper is divided into two interrelated sections: the first section examines the scientific status of mainstream Western psychology. It will also consider the major arguments concerning the relationship of mainstream Western psychology to philosophy—in particular to metaphysics and the philosophy of science. It will be argued that psychology has turned away from its past philosophical heritage and has thus, short-changed itself by avoiding the very issues, which form an integral part of one's subjective and existential world and of the therapeutic process. The second section argues that, to a large measure the contemporary approaches to counselling and psychotherapy have moved away from the scientific ideologies, which guide research within mainstream Western psychology. Over the last 30 years or more, counselling and psychotherapy as ‘disciplines’ have proliferated into several sub-disciplines. This has made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine their pedigree and parentage. Although a great deal of ingenuity has gone into the construction of such new therapies, very little effort has gone into testing their validity. Unless serious attempts are made to bring about a rapprochement, it is likely to lead to a state of ‘epistemological anarchy’, or, anything goes.     

Grammatical gender effects on cognition: implications for language learning and language use

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical-semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.     

Colour language and colour cognition: Brown and Lenneberg revisited

We report two experiments that revisit the question raised by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) concerning the degree to which colours that are easier to name are also easier to communicate and to remember. Much subsequent research has suggested that such effects depend on context and task demands. In the present experiments communication accuracy and recognition memory were compared, varying the distractor array for items that are either best examples (focal) of the eight basic chromatic categories named in English, or peripheral (nonfocal) examples of them. Focal targets were communicated faster, more accurately, and with fewer words than nonfocal targets, irrespective of array. However, they were not recognized more accurately under all conditions. With a randomized array of distractors, more akin to real scenes outside the lab, there was no recognition advantage for those colours that are easiest to code and communicate. We conclude that focal colours are not inherently more memorable.     

Neurological basis of language and sequential cognition: evidence from simulation,aphasia, and ERP studies

The current research addresses the hypothesis that certain aspects of sequential cognition have made substantial contributions to the human language processing capability, from a functional neurophysiology perspective. We first describe a cognitive sequence processing model that was developed based on the functional neuroanatomy of primate cortex and basal ganglia. We demonstrate how this model is capable of simulating the behavior of human infants in extracting serial, temporal and abstract structure from language-like sound sequences as revealed in recent psycholinguistic experiments. We then demonstrate how, through training, this model can perform adult level syntactic comprehension, based on dissociated processing streams for open vs. closed class words. The model subsequently predicts: (1) that impaired syntactic processing (as in agrammatic aphasia) will be associated with impairments in corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks, and (2) that neurophysiological processes (as revealed by ERPs) involved in syntactic processing should also be involved in the corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks. Data confirming these predictions are reviewed. We conclude that the study of sequential cognition will provide a new paradigm for the investigation of the neurophysiological bases of language.     

Sign language as cognition for deaf people: Pitfalls and prospects

With a tradition reliance on verbal paradigms cognitive psychology has repeatedly rediscovered the centrality of verbal processes in the cognitive representation of the world. Frequently it has been considered that non-speaking groups offer the proof of such psychological theories. Deaf people, because of their apparently poor memory, retardation in reading, relative lack of speech, yet cognitive viability, have offered an ideal test population for cognitive paradigs. Unfortunately deaf people turn out not to be a non linguistic control. We have now discovered sign language—a visual, spatial representation form used naturally by profoundly deaf people. This apparently offers the key the deaf people's cognition without speech. This paper describes some aspects of what we know of deaf people and their language, critically examines some of the evidence for sign representation in memory, and discusses the methodological problems to be faced by anyone searching for conclusive evidence on deaf people's working memory. Despite the attractiveness of ‘sings for words’ in cognition, this paper argues that the evidences is weak and signs may not be equated easily with words.     

Precursors to language: Social cognition and pragmatic inference in primates

Despite their differences, human language and the vocal communication of nonhuman primates share many features. Both constitute forms of coordinated activity, rely on many shared neural mechanisms, and involve discrete, combinatorial cognition that includes rich pragmatic inference. These common features suggest that during evolution the ancestors of all modern primates faced similar social problems and responded with similar systems of communication and cognition. When language later evolved from this common foundation, many of its distinctive features were already present.     

Primate social cognition and the origins of language

Are the cognitive mechanisms underlying language unique, or can similar mechanisms be found in other domains? Recent field experiments demonstrate that baboons' knowledge of their companions' social relationships is based on discrete-valued traits (identity, rank, kinship) that are combined to create a representation of social relations that is hierarchically structured, open-ended, rule-governed, and independent of sensory modality. The mechanisms underlying language might have evolved from the social knowledge of our pre-linguistic primate ancestors.     

The developmental pathways leading to pattern recognition, joint attention, language and cognition

According to the functional/emotional hypothesis, the core capacities necessary for cognitive and language development, such as pattern recognition, joint attention, and intention reading, are downstream effects of more basic processes having to do with early patterns of affect signalling. In this paper, we present preliminary research that tests the functional/emotional hypothesis. The data set consists of profiles of the emotional functioning of infants and young children at ages 0-3, 4-5, 6-9, 10-14, 15-18, 19-24, 25-30, and 31-42 months. Data were collected on a representative population of 1640 children across the US. Results of this preliminary research point to expected correlations between the development of affective signalling and pattern recognition, joint attention, and intention reading. However, we acknowledge that this is only the first step in providing supportive evidence for the functional/emotional hypothesis. Further research is needed to establish causal connections between affective signalling and the core capacities necessary for cognitive and language development.