PSY274H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Stephen Jay Gould, Vocal Tract, Homo Erectus
Document Summary
Innateness: this refers to the blueprint for understanding how language works is in our genetics. The ability to refer to abstractions: related to semanticity and displacement. Specifies some of the kinds of things we can denote with symbols. Provide criteria to evaluate naturally-occurring animal communication systems* Notes: make sure you understand design features: are used to evaluate communication systems, not animals, are not about attempts to teach animals language . Take home point: there seems to be a big gap between our linguistic abilities and the communicative abilities of other species. The problem: what are the data: there are no fossils that can give us nature to human communication. Maybe the ban was justified at the time . Bow-wow theory: refers to the idea that human language evolved from us imitating environmental sounds, these sounds somehow evolved into language, evidence = onomatopoeic words (ie. swish, problem: not very many words were onomatopoeia.
