The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

By Donald Favareau. 1998

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology, Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

What can the brain teach us about building artificial intelligence? (2016, background): “human modes of thought: Is it recursion, or some new kind of recursive structure building ability (Berwick & Chomsky, 2016; Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002)? Is it the ability to reuse symbols by name (Deacon, 1998)? Is it the ability to understand others intentionally and build shared intentionality”
THE DEVELOPMENT OF OBJECT CATEGORIZATION IN YOUNG CHILDREN: HIERARCHICAL INCLUSIVENESS, AGE, PERCEPTUAL ATTRIBUTE, AND GROUP VERSUS INDIVIDUAL ANALYSES (2010, background): “However, some have argued that children’s symbolic understanding in different domains develops in a progression from concrete to abstract (Deacon, 1997; Homer & Nelson, 2005; Peirce, 1955).”
Cybernetic Big Five Theory. (2015, background): “The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most expanded in human evolution (Deacon, 1997), is undoubtedly central to under-”
Life History and Reproductive Strategies of Khao Yai Hylobates lar: Implications for Social Evolution in Apes (2008, unknown): “2003; Ross 2004; Ross and Jones 1999; van Schaik and Deaner 2003), which further predicts that gibbon life histories are most similar to those of other apes, though brain size also correlates positively with body mass (Deacon 1997; Ward et al. 2004).”
Density and Dispersion: The Co-Development of Land Use and Rail in London (2007, background): “Deacon (1997) makes similar arguments about the relationship with human language and the brain.”
Elephant cognition in primate perspective (2009, background): “also often been suggested that superior primate intelligence derives from the technical sophistication that is allowed by prehensile hands, and the flexible motor control of the hands and fingers found especially in apes (Deacon, 1997; Napier, 1962).”
Strong Reciprocity and the Roots of Human Morality (2008, background): “For instance, the repositioning of the larynx to permit linguistic communication involves an interaction of genes and culture (Deacon, 1998).”
Toward physics of the mind: Concepts, emotions, consciousness, and symbols (2006, background): “According to [68], smartest apes after years of training, could possibly learn 2 levels of a hierarchy.”
Evolutionary Psychology, Meet Developmental Neurobiology: Against Promiscuous Modularity (2000, background): “Second, it is a mistake to seek adaptations among theproducts of brain development – that is, among the relatively special-purpose brain structures that emerge during the course of brain development.”
Minds: extended or scaffolded? (2010, background): “It is an immensely important resource for formulating and communicating thought; almost certainly, our language-using habits have transformed the internal processes of human minds both on evolutionary and developmental time scales (Deacon 1997).”
Symbolic Behaviour in Artificial Intelligence (2021, background): “Just as human symbolic fluency is built upon an ability to coordinate and communicate in social settings [21, 22], we propose subjecting learning-based machines to similar socio-cultural pressures, for example by learning from large datasets of human behaviours and by leveraging online interaction w”
Patterns in syntactic dependency networks. (2004, background): “Unfortunately, such a law seems to have nothing to do with syntax and symbolic reference, which researchers have identiﬁed as the crux of human language [ 6–9 ] .”
THE ROBUSTNESS OF CRITICAL PERIOD EFFECTS IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION (2000, background): “It may also be that (not neurologically determined) developmental differences in memory are involved, either quantitative (Deacon, 1997, ch. 4; Elman et al., 1996; Goldowsky & Newport, 1993; Newport, 1990; Kareev, Lieberman, & Lev, 1997) or qualitative in the sense of cognitive restructuring…”
The co-evolution of intersubjectivity and bodily mimesis (2008, background): “This qualifies them as being symbolic, though not in the sense of Deacon (1997) who insists above all on the property mentioned in (e), the presence of systematic semantic and grammatical relations between the symbols as a definitional criterion for “symbolic reference”.”
The Psychobiological Model: Towards a New Theory of Computer-Mediated Communication Based on Darwinian Evolution (2004, background): “…addressing human communication behavior (Beatty and Valencic 2000, Beatty et al. 1998, Bickerton 1990, Calvin and Bickerton 2000, Cappella 1996, Deacon 1998, Dunbar 1993, Ganger and Stromswold 1998, Kelly and Keaten 2000, Laitman 1993, Lieberman 1998, McCroskey and Beatty 2000, Pinker and…”
Evolution and ontogeny of stress response to social challenges in the human child (2006, background): “…moral reasoning (Alexander, 1987; Moll, Zahn, de Oliveira-Souza, Krueger, & Grafman, 2005), and other socio-cultural novelties (Baumeister, 2005; Deacon, 1997a, 1997b; Flinn, 1997; Flinn & Coe, 2006), and simply learning the personalities, social biases, and so forth of peers and adults in the…”