No registration / No entrance fee required

PROGRAM-1 : Keynote lecture 1
August 1st Wed, 14:00-16:00

Lecture Theater, Komaba I campus, The University of Tokyo

Origins of Human Communication
Michael Tomasello (Int’l Advisory Board・Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology/DukeUniversity)
From a psychological point of view, the basic structure of human communication – how it works
pragmatically in terms of the intentions and inferences involved - is totally independent of language. The
most important data here are acts of human communication that do not employ conventions. In situations
in which language is for some reason not an option, people often produce spontaneous, nonconventionalized gestures, including most prominently pointing (deictic gestures) and pantomiming (iconicgestures). These gestures are universal among humans and unique to the species, and in human
evolution they almost certainly preceded conventional communication, either signed or vocal. For
prelinguistic infants to communicate effectively via pointing and pantomiming, they must already possess
species-unique and very powerful skills and motivations for shared intentionality as pragmatic
infrastructure. Conventional linguistic communication is then built on top of this infrastructure.

PROGRAM-2 : Origins and evolution of language in search of archaeological andanthropological perspectives [Invited symposium in JSLS 2018]
August 2nd Thu, 16:15-18:15

W310, West Bldg., Fujimino campus, Bunkyo Gakuin University

This symposium approaches the question of when and how language emerged in the course of humanevolution. Artifacts and fossils, together with ancient DNAs, of human ancestors are most direct records fromwhich we can infer the timing and underlying mechanisms of the emergence of the language faculty, or its
component sub-functions. Recent studies have begun to combine these data with the accumulatingknowledge of brain functions. The symposium aims to discuss recent developments in the field and theirimplications to the more focused study on two defining aspects of human language: hierarchical structure
and intention sharing.

Richer fossils
Cedric Boeckx (Int’l Advisory Board・A01 Research Collaborator・ICREA/Universitat de Barcelona)
It is hard to capture adequately the game-changing nature of research in paleogenomics. Having accessto the genomes of extinct relatives like Homo neanderthalensis enables us to ask questions about tissues
that were until recently thought to be gone from the fossil record forever. Of course, genes don’t
immediately lead to cognitive traits like language, but they provide us with the unprecedented opportunity
to frame testable hypotheses from the bottom-up: from genes to cells to circuits to cognition. Each level ofanalysis requires the articulation of detailed interdisciplinary links that have important consequences foreach field involved.
Building on joint work with Martin Kuhlwilm, I will review what we have come to learn about genetic
differences between humans and other hominins that plausibly contribute to the “human condition”, andthe modern human language faculty. I will place special emphasis on the implications these differences
have for the “Globularity hypothesis”, according to which the specific brain growth trajectory adopted byour species played an important role in making the human brain fully language-ready. I will seek to clarify,
and refine, the content of the Globularization hypothesis, and in so doing adduce additional evidence insupport of it.

Evolution of brain endocast and human language capacity
Osamu Kondo (B02 Co-project Leader・The University of Tokyo)
Reviewing the recent developments in two fields of fossil human brains and of modern human brains, wecan feel a hint for exploring evolution of human language capacity. Paleo-anthropological approachclarifies the morphological changes in fossil human brains through evolutionary time scale. Otherwise,
modern brain sciences provide anatomical connections between the neural complexity and the humanlanguage capacity. We here introduce preliminary attention to the cerebellum, the morphology of which
exhibits inter- and intra-specific changes among human fossil groups and intraspecific groups of Homosapiens, the neural connectivity of which may indicate a link of the cerebellar anatomy and the humanlanguage capacity.

Stone tools and language evolution: the technological pedagogy hypothesis
Dietrich Stout (B02 Research Collaborator・Emory University)
Comparative approaches to language evolution are essential but cannot by themselves resolve the timing
and context of evolutionary events since the last common ancestor with chimpanzees. Archaeology canhelp to fill this gap, but only if properly integrated with evolutionary theory and the ethnographic,ethological, and experimental analogies required to reconstruct the broader social, behavioral, andneurocognitive implications of ancient artifacts. The current contribution elaborates a technologicalpedagogy hypothesis of language origins by developing the concept of an evolving human technologicalniche and applying it to investigate two key evolutionary transitions: 1) from complex praxis to intentional
communication, and 2) from intentional communication to language.

Discussant: Harumi Kobayashi (B03 Project Leader・Tokyo Denki University)
Moderator: Yasuo Ihara (B02 Project Leader, The University of Tokyo)

PROGRAM-3 : On moral developmentAugust 2nd Thu, 14:00-16:00

N206, North Lecture Hall, Tokyo Gakugei University

Early development of social understanding and prosocial behavior
Margarita L. Svetlova （Duke University)
Humans are a highly cooperative species. Human children begin to behave prosocially (i.e. act withothers' wellbeing in mind) in the 2nd year of life, and the complexity of prosocial behaviors, based on
empathy, fairness and other considerations, grows over preschool years. To be an efficient helper, one
needs to be able to read others' verbal and non-verbal communicative cues, infer others' internal states
appropriately, and balance one's own and others' needs. This talk will present a series of studies exploring
young children's emerging prosociality with the focus on (a) children’s developing abilities to interpretcommunicative cues, and (b) their evaluation of recipients’ various needs in relation to their own.
Implications for theories of social and moral development will be discussed.

PROGRAM-4 : Keynote lecture 2August 3rd Fri, 15:00-17:00

K212, 21 KOMCEE East, Komaba I campus, The University of Tokyo

From the logical to the biological
Cedric Boeckx (Int’l Advisory Board・A01 Research Collaborator・ICREA/Universitat de Barcelona)
In this talk (the basis of which is a new book I am currently writing) I will revisit the powerful narrative inmodern linguistics that strongly points towards "biology" to account for our capacity to master grammaticalsystems whose properties go well beyond what the primary linguistic data seem to offer ("poverty ofstimulus"; "logical problem of language acquisition"). I will provide reasons why it is not a good idea tocombine "poverty of stimulus" considerations with "poverty of inheritance" considerations (of the sort foundin Berwick and Chomsky's book "why only us"). I will argue that it is "poverty of inheritance" considerations
that contribute to the distance between linguistics and biology, and show that linking hypotheses from thelogical to the biological can be articulated if we are willing to exploit the range of evidence that biology
makes available (and if we resist the temptation to appeal to vague 'third factor' considerations)

PROGRAM-5 : Intention Sharing and Language Evolution
August 4th Sat, 10:00-18:00

Lecture Hall, 21 KOMCEE West, Komaba I campus, The University of Tokyo

Reading Mind / Assuming Mind in Human Communication: A Developmental PerspectiveKazuhide Hashiya (B03 Research Collaborator・Kyushu University)“Mind” is an unobservable but useful concept that enables compressing huge information regarding social

interactive process among individuals in an integrative way, for the mind as a software composed throughevolution (whether chimps have such a concept, or theory, was the original question raised by Premack &Woodruff (1978) summarized as TOM). In the current talk, I would like to introduce our studies on
evolution and early development (6- to 7-MO) of human gaze as a communicative signal, in relation toevolution of mind. The second half of the talk will focus on the studies demonstrating that the pointing by
1.5-YO infants may reflect their spontaneous tendency to inform for others, and a level of understanding
about the partner’s epistemic states. On these bases, developmental pathways of the mind that assumes
mind, and the mind that reads mind, will be discussed.

Developmental plasticity of the sensitivity to communicative signals
Atsushi Senju (University of London)
Large numbers of studies have demonstrated that young infants preferentially orient to faces, especially tothe eyes. Such spontaneous allocation of attention would help infants to detect communicative signals
from adults conveyed through the visual channel. In this talk, I will summarise several lines of studies
demonstrating that early development of such social orienting is a plastic process and is affected by social
communicative experience. These studies suggest that young infants actively learn to adapt their visual
attention to optimise social communication to given communicative partners. The implication of thesefindings on our understanding of infants' social motivation will be discussed.

Use and comprehension of pointing as a means of intention sharing
Harumi Kobayashi (B03 Project Leader・Tokyo Denki University)
Pointing gesture is an important cue for specifying a referent in ostensive communication. Unlike eyegaze, pointing can convey more exact information about the referent, e.g., parts of objects that areembedded in whole objects. Because of this specifying function, pointing may be closely linked tolanguage both in ontogeny and phylogeny. Previous studies on pointing mostly focused on the functions oftypical index finger pointing, however, a variety of pointing gestures seem to be also used to help
ostensive communication. In this talk, I report young children spontaneously use and comprehend suchspecifying pointing for sharing referential intention.

Children's understanding of higher-order intentions in verbal communication
Tomoko Matsui (B03 Co-project Leader・Tokyo Gakugei University)
Most developmental studies on irony comprehension explain children’s comprehension of irony in terms of
their higher-order mental state understanding. Comprehension of irony and that of deliberate lies areanalogous in many ways and both processes are likely to involve mind-reading ability and ‘epistemic
vigilance’, the capacity to defend oneself against being accidentally or intentionally misinformed bycommunicators (Sperber et al. 2010). In this talk, I will first discuss how epistemic vigilance and mindreading ability may contribute to children’s understanding of tacitly conveyed speaker’s intentions andattitudes in irony. On the basis of existing developmental studies, I will then suggest that children’sinterpretation of irony as a deliberate lie may be best accounted for by the interaction among theprocesses to identify how the utterance achieves relevance, their already functioning epistemic vigilance,and mind-reading ability to infer the speaker’s intentions.

Shared intentionality and early language acquisition
Michael Tomasello (Int'l Advisory Board・Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology/DukeUniversity)
Children's early language acquisition is often portrayed as a process of association learning and/or innate
principles. Of course children are prepared for the language acquisition process, but that preparation isnot for specific linguistic structures, but rather for sharing intentions and attention with others moregenerally. Studies of children's early gestural communication and word learning suggests that the process
reflects humans species-unique forms of aligning psychological states with others. Constructing alanguage involves many, if not most, of humans most powerful cognitive and social processes.

PROGRAM-6 : Kyoto Conference on Evolinguistics 2018
August 6th Mon, 13:30-17:30

Clock Tower Centennial Hall, Kyoto University

A plea for evolutionary mosaicism: A gradual perspective on language evolution
Cedric Boeckx (Int’l Advisory Board・A01 Research Collaborator・ICREA/Universitat de Barcelona)
It is clear that language is not just one thing, and there is a growing consensus that different parts followed
different evolutionary trajectories. But in some influential corners of the language sciences there is stillsome reluctance to give up on the capstone scenario---the claim that there was just a single part thatprovided the spark and that is unique to us. I will argue that capstone scenarios, taken to extremes (singlemutation, single brain circuit rewiring, single operation), don't farewell with the existing evidence that canbe gathered from adjacent disciplines (neuroscience, archeology, genetics).

Tool-making and language: neuro-computational models of action syntax in humanevolution
Dietrich Stout (B02 Research Collaborator・Emory University)
Distinctive human behaviors from tool-making to language are thought to rely on a uniquely evolved
capacity for hierarchical action sequencing. Unfortunately, testing of this idea has been hampered by alack of objective, generalizable methods for measuring the structural complexity and associatedprocessing demands of real-world behaviors. Here I discuss ongoing efforts to address this challenge by
extracting action grammars and computing complexity metrics from tool-making behavior sequences using
basic ethograms. This approach allows direct comparison with neuro-computational models and data fromthe cognitive neuroscience of language. By applying this method to the evolutionarily-relevant andarchaeologically-visible behavior of stone tool-making, we can begin to test longstanding hypotheses
regarding the co-evolution of tool-making and language and provide some empirical constraint on thetiming and context of key events.

Communication before language
Michael Tomasello (Int’l Advisory Board・Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology/ DukeUniversity)
For obvious and very good reasons the study of human communication is dominated by the study oflanguage. But from a psychological point of view, the basic structure of human communication – how it
works pragmatically in terms of the intentions and inferences involved - is totally independent of language.
The most important data here are acts of human communication that do not employ conventions. In
situations in which language is for some reason not an option, people often produce spontaneous, nonconventionalized gestures, including most prominently pointing (deictic gestures) and pantomiming (iconicgestures). These gestures are universal among humans and unique to the species, and in human
evolution they almost certainly preceded conventional communication, either signed or vocal. For
prelinguistic infants to communicate effectively via pointing and pantomiming, they must already possess
species-unique and very powerful skills and motivations for shared intentionality as pragmatic
infrastructure. Conventional communication is then built on top of this infrastructure - or so I will argue.

PROGRAM-7 : Kyoto International Psychology Seminar [co-sponsored]August 9th Thu, 17:30-

Seminar Room 2, Sirankaikan Annex , Kyoto University

Human Collaboration
Michael Tomasello (Int'l Advisory Board・Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology / DukeUniversity)
Although great apes collaborate for some purposes, recent studies comparing chimpanzees and humanchildren suggest that human collaboration is unique both cognitively and motivationally. In particular
humans seem adapted for collaborative foraging, as even young children display numerous relevantmechanisms, from special ways of coordinating and communicating to special ways of sharing food tospecial forms of social evaluation. The Shared Intentionality hypothesis specifies the ontogeny of theseunderlying mechanisms and their consequences for both human cognition and human social life.

ORGANIZERS
Kazuo Okanoya (Head Investigator, The University of Tokyo)
Koji Fujita (A01 Project Leader, Kyoto University)
Yasuo Ihara (B02 Project Leader, The University of Tokyo)
Harumi Kobayashi (B03 Project Leader, Tokyo Denki University)
Reiko Mazuka (B03 Co-project Leader, RIKEN Brain Science Institute)
Tomoko Matsui (B03 Co-project Leader, Tokyo Gakugei University)
Shoji Itakura (Kyoto University)