bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology
Authors: Laland Kevin N. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article argues that the niche-construction approach is particularly germane to students of human evolution and to researchers using evolutionary methods to interpret human behaviour and society. Reasoning on the basis of niche-construction theory repudiates the suggestion, voiced by some leading evolutionary psychologists, that humans experience an atypically large ‘adaptive lag’, the idea that modern humans experience a gross discordance in their selective environments compared to those to which they are adapted. The niche-construction perspective is consistent with the philosophy and methods of human behavioural ecology, and confirms the potential applicability of behavioural ecological methods to all human societies. The article sketches how the niche-construction perspective brings with it a suite of novel hypotheses and methods of utility to human scientists.
The neuroevolutionary and neuroaffective psychobiology of the prosocial brain
Authors: Panksepp Jaak 
Published: February 2013

AbstractMost of the complexities in cognition are probably not controlled by detailed genetics, but by the capacity of different species to see the world differently depending upon their perceptual strengths and learning abilities intermixing with the ancient genetic-instinctual tools for living. These cognition-emotion interactions notwithstanding, at their most basic level, core emotions are so ancient that it is scientifically wise to conceptualise them independently of cognition. In their raw form, they are innate tools for living. This article is concerned mainly with those core emotions that are the genetic endowments of the mammalian brain, homologous albeit not identical, in all mammals. It focuses on the core prosocial emotional systems of mammalian brains, at the expense of the higher cognitive functions with which they interact. Seven core emotional systems have been provisionally identified through empirically robust affective neuroscience strategies, such as evocation of coherent emotional responses by localised electrical stimulation of the brain.
The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism
Authors: Baron-Cohen Simon 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article discusses two cognitive processes, empathising and systemising, in terms of sex differences and the implications of these for evolutionary psychology. It also discusses the theory that assortative mating of two strong systemisers is a cause of autism, a neurodevelopmental condition involving empathy impairment alongside hypersystemising. Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. Empathy is a skill (or a set of skills). It defines mindreading as the ability to interpret one's own or another agent's actions as driven by mental states. The model in the article shows the ontogenesis of a theory of mind in the first four years of life, and justifies the existence of four components on the basis of developmental competence and neuropsychological dissociation.
The ontogenetic origins of human cooperation
Authors: Wyman Emily , Tomasello Michael 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article suggests that the ontogenesis of shared intentionality depends on the developmentally primitive phenomenon of ‘joint attention’. This is the ability of the infant to understand that they and other individuals can attend to the same object and each other's attention simultaneously and provides a shared, interpersonal frame in which young infants can share experience with others. This article compares the skills and motivations involved in shared intentionality between humans and chimpanzees. It also emphasises a marked difference in their joint attention abilities. It suggests that this may explain various differences in social-cognitive skills between the two species, and proposes that the phylogenesis of joint attention may account for the evolution of complex forms of cooperation and uniquely human cultural practices.
Sex differences in aggression
Authors: Campbell Anne 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe sex difference in physical and verbal aggression is one of the most robust, universal, and durable. In the United States, men constitute eighty six percent of all violent offenders. The proportionate involvement of men rises with the seriousness of the offence. Meta-analyses of psychological studies using experimental, observational, and self- or other-report methods also find that men are more verbally and physically aggressive than women and that this difference is greater for physical aggression. The ubiquity of this effect, its early developmental onset, and its consistency with other primate species suggest the utility of an explanation on evolution. This article suggests that the psychological instantiation of the reluctance to directly expose oneself to physical danger is fear. Fear also forms the developmental infrastructure for behavioural inhibition so that females are better able to control the behavioural expression of anger when provoked than are men.
Evolutionary perspectives in archaeology: from culture history to cultural evolution
Authors: Shennan Stephen 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article demonstrates the role of evolutionary approaches in archaeology by focusing on four different topics that have long been of interest to archaeologists of virtually all theoretical persuasions. It examines how evolutionary theory can be used by presenting specific concrete examples. The four topics concern different but interrelated histories: of foraging adaptations, human populations, social institutions, and patterns in culture. Addressing these topics on the basis of archaeological data from an evolutionary point of view involves making use of several different strands from the range of complementary and sometimes conflicting evolutionary approaches to understanding human behaviour. There is a major distinction within evolutionary approaches to human behaviour between human behavioural ecology and those viewpoints that attach a significant role to culture, in particular, dual-inheritance theory.
Representations and representational specificity in speech perception and spoken word recognition
Authors: Pisoni David B. , Levi Susannah V. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article examines how new approaches—coupled with previous insights—provide a new framework for questions that deal with the nature of phonological and lexical knowledge and representation, processing of stimulus variability, and perceptual learning and adaptation. First, it outlines the traditional view of speech perception and identifies some problems with assuming such a view, in which only abstract representations exist. The article then discusses some new approaches to speech perception that retain detailed information in the representations. It also considers a view which rejects abstraction altogether, but shows that such a view has difficulty dealing with a range of linguistic phenomena. After providing a brief discussion of some new directions in linguistics that encode both detailed information and abstraction, the article concludes by discussing the coupling of speech perception and spoken word recognition.
Statistical and connectionist models of speech perception and word recognition
Authors: Gaskell M. Gareth 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article reviews the current impact of connectionism in the area of speech perception and spoken word recognition. A major advance that connectionism provided was to highlight the value and power of statistical models of language processing. Therefore, some types of statistical model—particularly those stressing statistical learning—are reviewed alongside connectionist theories such as interactive activation and competition models, error-driven learning networks, and adaptive resonance theory. The article examines how connectionist models represent speech pre-lexically, and how such prelexical representations might develop and adapt to fit the requirements of the perceptual system. It also looks at the process of word segmentation, again addressing both acquisition issues and the degree to which connectionist models can explain performance in the adult system. Finally, the article considers the process of word recognition, as modeled in terms of lexical competition. Key issues here include whether distributed models can cope with the specific properties that are imposed by the speech medium, such as the drawn-out nature of the input and the consequent requirement to entertain multiple hypothesis (parallel activation) during recognition.
Speech and spelling interaction: the interdependence of visual and auditory word recognition
Authors: Frost Ram , Ziegler Johannes C. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractA critical feature of interactive networks is the bidirectional flow of activation. In an interactive model, cross-code consistency is crucial. The phonological coherence constraint puts a major emphasis on the correlations between orthographic and phonological subunits of the system. This framework makes a number of intriguing predictions with regard to spelling-to-phonology interactions. For example, it predicts that phonology should routinely be involved in visual word recognition, and that inconsistency in the mapping between orthography and phonology should hurt word recognition. Moreover, the framework predicts that inconsistency should matter not only between spelling and phonology but also between phonology and spelling (“feedback consistency”). This article summarizes the empirical evidence in favor of these predictions, reviews the behavioral data regarding speech and spelling interactions, and discusses the extent to which current computational models of word recognition are able to account for these effects. It also considers the influence of orthography on spoken language, and how print and speech interact online during word recognition.
Bilingual sentence processing
Authors: Hernández Arturo E. , Fernández Eva M. , Aznar-besé Noemí 
Published: February 2013

AbstractBilinguals live in two linguistic worlds. Given the different demands of each language, one might think that each system functions independently. However, bilinguals do not behave like two monolingual speaker/listeners housed in a single brain. Instead, the evidence to date suggests that the characteristics of bilingual language processing may appear to be “in between” the individual's two codes. Studies in bilingual sentence processing have focused on phenomena related to how semantic or syntactic representations are built. This article reviews data consistent with the view of interdependence between the two languages of the bilingual, using evidence from the literature on bilingual sentence processing. Studies of both semantic processing and syntactic processing show that bilinguals almost always use a unitary mechanism which accesses two separately represented grammars. The study of bilingual sentence processing can also offer insights into our understanding of human language processing in general, because bilinguals offer opportunities to examine sentence processing effects in within-participant designs, impossible to carry out with monolinguals. In addition to the above, this article explores parsing, the age of language acquisition, and language proficiency.
Event-related brain potential (ERP) studies of sentence processing
Authors: Kutas Marta , Federmeier Kara D. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe intact human brain is the only known system that can interpret and respond to various visual and acoustic patterns. Therefore, unlike researchers of other cognitive phenomena, (neuro)psycholinguists cannot avail themselves of invasive techniques in non-human animals to uncover the responsible mechanisms in the large parts of the (human) brain that have been implicated in language processing. Engagement of these different anatomical areas does, however, generate distinct patterns of biological activity (such as ion flow across neural membranes) that can be recorded inside and outside the heads of humans as they quickly, often seamlessly, and without much conscious reflection on the computations and linguistic regularities involved, understand spoken, written, or signed sentences. This article summarizes studies of event-related brain potentials and sentence processing. It discusses electrophysiology, language and the brain, processing language meaning, context effects in meaning processing, non-literal language processing, processing language form, parsing, slow potentials and the closure positive shift, and plasticity and learning.
Sentence-level deficits in aphasia
Authors: Martin Randi C. , Vuong Loan C. , Crowther Jason E. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractStudies in the 1970s and early 1980s demonstrated impaired sentence comprehension in conjunction with good single word comprehension in some aphasic patients. These findings generated a great deal of excitement among aphasiologists and psycholinguists because they seemed to provide support for linguistic theories that hypothesised a system of rules for specifying grammatical well-formedness which was independent of semantics. A number of findings quickly followed these initial findings which caused problems for interpreting the patient data in terms of a deficit to an independent syntactic processing module. The complications that surfaced have given rise to heated debates concerning the proper interpretation of sentence comprehension deficits—mirroring to some extent the debates in linguistics on generative vs. non-generative grammar and in psycholinguistics on syntax-first vs. constraint-based sentence processing theories. This article summarizes results from case studies on language deficits associated with aphasia. It also reviews the evidence regarding the complementary claim that syntactic comprehension deficits in patients without obvious syntactic difficulties in production could be attributed to a short-term memory deficit.
Speech Production
Authors: Fowler Carol A. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractA theory of speech production provides an account of the means by which a planned sequence of language forms is implemented as vocal tract activity that gives rise to an audible, intelligible acoustic speech signal. Such an account must address several issues. Two central issues are considered in this article. One issue concerns the nature of language forms that ostensibly compose plans for utterances. Because of their role in making linguistic messages public, a straightforward idea is that language forms are themselves the public behaviors in which members of a language community engage when talking. By most accounts, however, the relation of phonological segments to actions of the vocal tract is not one of identity. Rather, phonological segments are mental categories with featural attributes. Another issue concerns what, at various levels of description, the talker aims to achieve. This article focuses on speech production, and considers language forms and plans for speaking, along with speakers' goals as acoustic targets or vocal tract gestures, the DIVA theory of speech production, the task dynamic model, coarticulation, and prosody.
Statistical learning in infant language development
Authors: Gómez Rebecca 
Published: February 2013

AbstractChildren learn language over such a short span of time and with such seeming ease, that many have assumed they must master language by means of a language-specific device. Artificial languages provide a useful tool for controlling prior learning and for manipulating specific variables of interest. This approach has resulted in a wealth of findings regarding the learning capabilities of children. Infant artificial language learning has become synonymous with statistical learning because of the emphasis in much of the work on learning statistical regularities. However, not all cases of artificial language learning entail learning statistical structure. For instance, some learning requires generalisation of relational patterns. This article explores statistical learning in language development in infants, phonological learning (discrimination of speech sounds, learning phonotactic regularities, phonological generalization), word segmentation, rudiments of syntax, generalization of sequential word order, category-based abstraction, and bootstrapping from prior learning.
Developmental dyslexia
Authors: Snowling Margaret J. , Caravolas Markéta 
Published: February 2013

AbstractIn spite of the complexities of written language systems, the majority of children learn to read easily. However, a minority have difficulty acquiring literacy skills even though they master other tasks well. These children are sometimes described as dyslexic. This article presents current scientific understanding of dyslexia from a developmental perspective. First, it considers the definition of dyslexia in behavioural terms and, with the normal development of literacy as a framework, discusses how its manifestation differs according to the language in which the child is learning to read. The article then examines cognitive explanations of dyslexia and evidence concerning sensory, biological, and environmental factors in its aetiology; behavioural manifestations of dyslexia (dyslexia in English, dyslexia in consistent orthographies, dyslexia in Chinese); theories of dyslexia (cognitive theories, automatization deficit hypothesis, auditory processing impairments, visual processing deficits, speech perception); and reading intervention programs. It concludes by looking at how theoretical advances in the field of dyslexia provide the rationale for effective interventions.
Genetics of language disorders: clinical conditions, phenotypes, and genes
Authors: Rice Mabel L. , Smolík Filip 
Published: February 2013

AbstractPersons who do not acquire language in the expected ways show variation that can be linked or associated with genetic variations. Just as in ancient times, there is great interest in young children's language abilities as a window onto inherited mechanisms. In the case of language impairments, there are multiple dimensions of possible phenotypes that intertwine language symptoms with more general cognitive and sensory symptoms. This article summarises current investigations of the FOXP2 gene, as a case study of the steps involved in relating language disorders and genes, and progresses toward the molecular level. It also brings in recent investigations of the genetics of reading and speech impairments, and possible overlap with language impairments; describes the outcomes of twin studies, and the ways that phenotype definitions interact with genetic interpretations; and looks at “the first psycholinguistic experiment,” reported by Herodotus and updated to the modern scientific context.
The psycholinguistics of signed and spoken languages: how biology affects processing
Authors: Emmorey Karen 
Published: February 2013

AbstractBiology-based distinctions between sign and speech can be exploited to discover how the input–output systems of language impact online language processing and affect the neurocognitive underpinnings of language comprehension and production. This article explores which aspects of language processing appear to be universal to all human languages and which are affected by the particular characteristics of audition versus vision, or by the differing constraints on manual versus oral articulation. Neither sign language nor spoken language comes pre-segmented into words and sentences for the perceiver. In contrast to written language, sign and speech are both primary language systems, acquired during infancy and early childhood without formal instruction. This article discusses sign perception and visual processing, phonology in a language without sound, categorical perception in sign language, processing universals and modality effects in the mental lexicon, the time course of sign versus word recognition, tip-of-the-fingers, non-concatenative morphology, the unique role of space for signed languages, and speaking versus signing.
The evolution of language: a comparative perspective
Authors: Fitch W. Tecumseh 
Published: February 2013

AbstractUnderstanding how, why, and when language evolved has become the focus of a rapidly growing interdisciplinary research effort, sometimes termed “biolinguistics.” Language does not fossilize, and the fossil record relevant to language evolution is thus exceedingly sparse and provides few dependable indicators about when or why language evolved. Two promising lines of research are an increased understanding of the neural and genetic mechanisms underlying language, and rigorous application of the comparative method. Both approaches seem destined to play a central role in any future science of biolinguistics. A key component of biolinguistics is comparative biology, in particular the explicit use of a broad comparative method. This article explores the evolution of language from a comparative perspective, focusing on the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. It also considers hominin fossil data from Australopithecus to modern Homo, the evolution of speech, and the biology and evolution of language per se.
Introduction
Authors: Malchukov Andrej L. , Spencer Andrew 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThe notion of ‘case’ has played an important role in thinking about grammar since the days of Pāṇini and Aristotle. Nonetheless, the concept of case and its relation to grammatical relations, meaning, and morphological form remains elusive and controversial. This book brings together in synopsis form, recent work on the problems of case, focusing on as many relevant aspects as possible. It features contributions by scholars from a variety of different backgrounds and theoretical persuasions to summarise the way that the notion of case figures in current grammatical theory, and how it relates to other aspects of morphology, syntax, and semantics. The book also contains articles on the types of case systems that languages exhibit and the way that case paradigms are structured, the way case systems develop and decay over time, and the kinds of functions and meanings that are expressed by case systems. In addition, it offers the reader a variety of articles relating the notion of case to other grammatical phenomena such as transitivity, the alignment of grammatical relations, and so on.
Case in GB/Minimalism
Authors: Bobaljik Jonathan David , Wurmbrand Susi 
Published: February 2013

AbstractCase theory in government-binding/minimalism is about the distribution of noun phrases (NPs), rather than morphological form per se. In this theory, ‘abstract case’ plays a central role in being one of the driving forces of movement, uniting a variety of transformations (passive, raising, unaccusative, etc.), and in regulating alternations between overt and unpronounced subjects in non-finite clauses. In the original presentation of case theory in Chomsky (1980), abstract Case is related to the morphological property case via the hypothesis that the formal features that regulate the syntactic distribution of NPs are the same features that are overtly realised as case morphology in some languages. This article explores case theory in government-binding, case filter, the notion of government, the transition from government-binding to minimalism, and topics in case theory within government-binding/minimalism such as null case, ergativity, and case typology.