John Schumann
University of California at Los Angeles

The Interactional Instinct:
The Evolution and Acquisition of Language

Location: Korean Studies Auditorium
Time/Day: Monday, November 21, 11:30a.m.-12:30p.m.
 

This presentation will provide an evolutionary theory of language as a complex adaptive system that exists as a cultural artifact without any requirement for innate abstract grammatical representations. Language acquisition is seen as an emotionally driven process relying upon an innately specified " interactional instinct."  This genetically based tendency provides neural structures which entrain children acquiring their native language to the faces, voices, and body movements of conspecific caregivers.  It is essentially an innate attentional and motivational system which drives children to pay attention to the language interaction in their environment and to acquire that language by general learning mechanisms that subserve declarative and procedural knowledge.  This brain mechanism guarantees the ubiquity of language acquisition for all biologically normal children.  Second language acquisition by older adolescents and adults no longer has recourse to this mechanism, and therefore, success in second language learning is extremely variable. Occasionally, however, affiliative bonds between second language learners and target language speakers can be sufficiently strong to recapitulate the attentional and motivational power of first language acquisition. This paper will focus on the neural structures underlying the interactional instinct.

 Right-dislocated Utterances by Japanese-speaking Children: Commonalities and Differences

This hands-on workshop will cover programs that facilitate transcription of linguistic material with time-aligned audio and/or video files.  In addition, the workshop will cover the program Shoebox/Toolbox, which can be used for lexicon building (dictionary-making) and interlinearisation. Time permitting, the workshop may also cover general data management and regular expressions.

Shoebox is a database management system designed primarily for building, using and producing dictionaries.  It has been growing in use at UH with the main aim being that of printing out well-formatted hardcopy dictionaries.  But Shoebox is valuable for many other purposes.  And that value has not been tapped, at least not in the Linguistics department.  One use of Shoebox, that has been indispensable to me, is that of assisting with my linguistic analysis. This seminar will demonstrate how Shoebox helped me see what was going on in the Carolinian language, starting from the very basic and moving up as time allows.

This presentation will provide an overview of the issues confronted by the presenter in conducting fieldwork on the Oirat language in Xinjiang, China, and suggest some best practices for other field workers in linguistics.  The  presentation will include samples of audio and video material, an evaluation of the endangerment of the Oirat language in Xinjiang, and will address the differences between Oirat as spoken in Xinjiang, and the Kalmyk dialect spoken in Russia, illustrated by vowel harmony and past tense marker alternations between the two dialects. 

Two talks for the 34th "New Ways of Analyzing Variation" Conference

Ever wanted to make a webpage of your own?  This is a beginning workshop which assumes no background in webpage design.  The goal will be to create a simple yet professional-looking personal webpage.  There will be demonstrations, and then participants will have a chance to design their own pages.  Please bring materials you would like to include on your web page in electronic form. This may include a picture, your publications, CV, etc.  (USB flash drive or floppy disks are both fine.)

Copula absence in Hawai‘i Creole: Social and linguistic constraints of variation

Inalienable Possession Relation in Processing Korean Double Accusative Constructions

Prosodic Analysis of the Interactional Particle Ne in Women’s and Men’s Japanese

Recently discovered evidence suggests that there is a body
of loan-words preserved independently from each other in the oldest
Indian and Iranian texts that reflects the pre-Indo-Iranian
language(s) spoken in the areas bordering N. Iran and N. Afghanistan,
i.e. the Bactria-Margiana Complex.  These loans include words from
agriculture, village and town life, flora and fauna, ritual and
religion.  They were taken over and then exported to Iran and N. India
by the speakers of the various Old Iranian and Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic)
languages, as well as a western off-shoot, the Mitanni Indo-Aryan of
Syria/Iraq and the language of related tribes indicated by some
Indo-Iranian words in Kassite.  All these represent series of
Indo-Iranian intrusions into the world of the great Mesopotamian,
Bactro-Margiana and Indus civilizations.

While growing evidence suggests that sentence understanding engages perceptual and motor systems for the purpose of mentally imagining or simulating the content of utterances (Barsalou 1999) it is not known whether processing words alone does the same. We investigated whether making a decision about the form of a word would lead to activation of motor mechanisms, using a modified version of the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002). Fluent signers of American Sign Language (ASL) were shown pairs of ASL signs which were either identical or not. Critical signs involved hand motion forward or backward, relative to the body. Subjects indicated whether the two signs were the same or different with a manual response requiring their hand to move either forward or backward - thus in a direction either compatible or incompatible with the direction of motion denoted by the sign. Results demonstrated a compatibility effect - literal and metaphorical motion signs facilitated response motion in the same direction, suggesting that mere phonological processing of a lexical item with motion meaning engages the motor system. The same experiment, performed with non-signers yielded no such effect, demonstrating that the effect was not simply the result of perceptual processing of the form of the sign. These results support an embodied view of linguistic processing where the content of language about motor actions is simulated using parts of the cognitive system responsible for actually performing the described actions.

Full paper in PDF