Written by experts in a range of disciplines, this book explores the topic at many scales, from the function of neurons in learning, forming and transmitting language to the long-term evolution of language itself and the birth and death of ancient tongues.

This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.

Exciting interdisciplinary topic Of interest to wide audience of academics and other educated readers Sheds new light on the evolution of language Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext
Philippe Binder is a Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and a Faculty Fellow at the New England Complex Systems Institute. His areas of interest are chaos and complex systems, including multiscale analysis. He received his advanced training at Yale and Oxford. Like millions of people worldwide, he is trilingual.Kenny Smith is a Lecturer in the Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, with interests in the evolution of communication, human language and the human capacity for language. He uses a mix of modeling and experimental techniques to address these questions.

Inhalt

Introduction.-Neurobiology: Language by, in, through and across the brain.- Dialogue.- Learning: Statistical mechanisms in language acquisition.- Evolution: Language use and the evolution of languages.- Transitions: The evolution of linguistic replicators.- Genes: Interactions with language on three levels.- Language in Nature: On the evolutionary roots of a cultural phenomenon.- Self-Organization: Complex dynamical systems in the evolution of speech.- Environment: Language ecology and language death.- Conclusions.