Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Isabelle Dautriche (CLE, University of Edinburgh)

Title: Some constraints on the lexicons of human languages have cognitive roots present in baboons

Abstract: There are constraints on what a lexical element may denote: there is no word for ‘cat or parrot’, intuitively because this would lump together two “separate” classes of objects. I will present you experiments that show that, even in non-linguistic settings, human and non-human animals tend to group objects into classes following a “connectedness constraint”. This result suggests that the cognitive roots responsible for (at least some) regularities across the lexicons of human languages are present in a similar form in other species.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

Andres Karjus

Centre for Language Evolution