"Beyond mirror neurons to the evolution of whatever made
language possible"
Prof. dr. M. Arbib
Time: 15.45 hours
Location: Spinoza Building, Montessorilaan 3, Nijmegen
Lecture Hall 1
Abstract
What evolved in brain structure that allows humans to learn languages so
readily? Many accept Chomsky's answer of "Universal Grammar", a
parameterized master grammar which reduces the task of learning the syntax
(as distinct from the lexicon) of a language to a mere "setting of
parameters". I will review arguments for this view and then demolish [!?]
them and briefly review alternatives. After a brief excursion into
historical linguistics, I will present a view of "protolanguage" very
different from that put forward by Bickerton, arguing that the naming of
action-object frames preceded the discovery of "words" in the modern sense
of units for the compositional formation of utterances. The second half of
the lecture will argue that biological evolution equipped early Homo
sapiens with a brain that was "language ready" but did not itself "have"
language. I will then chart a possible path of evolution that led from the
mirror system for grasping (matching observation and execution) that we
share with monkeys via increasing sophistication in imitation and pantomime
to the ability for multi-modal communication supported by the
language-ready brain of early Homo sapiens.
[For those who know the paper Rizzolatti, G, and Arbib, M.A., 1998,
Language Within Our Grasp, Trends in Neurosciences, 21(5):188-194: The
present talk is a sequel to this paper, and I will only briefly
recapitulate its contents to make the talk self-contained.]