Christiansen & Chater/Language as Shaped by the Brain: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, ================================================================== *** CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. Please note that this is NOT a formal invitation. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Christianse… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than February 25, 2008 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ** Target Article Information ** ================================================================== To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an unedited, uncorrected target article is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. This unedited draft has been prepared only for potential commentators who wish to nominate themselves for formal commentary invitation. Please DO NOT write a commentary until you receive a formal invitation. If you are invited to submit a commentary, a copyedited, corrected version of this paper will be posted in the invitation letter. The commentary invitation list is compiled by the Editors so as to balance proposals, areas of expertise, and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. TITLE: Language as Shaped by the Brain AUTHORS: Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater ABSTRACT: It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a universal grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a "moving target" both over time and across different human populations, and hence cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG--the mesh between learners and languages--arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent "organism,"which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics. KEYWORDS: biological adaptation, cultural evolution, grammaticalization, language acquisition, language evolution, linguistic change, natural selection, universal grammar FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Christiansen-12292006/Referees/ ================================================================== *** CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. Please note that this is NOT a formal invitation. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Christianse… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than February 25, 2008 NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ================================================================== ================================================================== Paul Bloom - Editor Barbara Finlay - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------