Simon Kirby: interesting ideas about language and communication

[gusl]

My last Friday in Amsterdam, right before I went to Edinburgh, there was an interesting talk by Simon Kirby (from Edinburgh) on the evolution of languages, and computational modeling of this process. I also met some interesting people who do research on co-evolution.

Here are some bits I learned by talking to him:

* Regions in Africa with longer growing seasons a have higher language density. Explanation: they have less need for trade.

* While bee communication is compositional, it's not recursive. No animal languages are known to be recursive.

* Alison Wray argues that literate societies use more recursive language. I totally believe this, as in my experience, illiterate people don't use coordination. Some people claim to have found a human language without recursion.

* Deaf people use spatial anaphoras. (I try to do this myself too). We also tried to speculate about the future of communication when machines overcome constraints on human cognition and communication... what will happen once the information-theoretic bottleneck is overcome? I promised myself I would read more Jaron Lanier... later.

* When giving birth, women's brains receive amnesia-inducing hormones. Why? So that they don't mind going through it again. Thanks, evolution!

Comments

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

About the last point: Men have a lower pain-threshold than women for a similar reason. It means they are less likely to get killed when hunting and/or fighting.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

I've been fascinated by spatial anaphora in sign languages for a long time now, yet I've never found the time to learn, like, ASL or something. There was a student-run course here at CMU last semester, but it was very poorly organized.