Linguistic Scientist

In this lecture, Albert Costa, expert on cognitive neuroscience, talks about the advantages and disadvantages about being bilingual or multilingual.

In one hand, the fact of being bilingual means spending more time on producing speech because the brain has more information to process. In the other hand, we can resume the advantages in five points:

• Bilinguals had acquired the method to learn and change into a third language.
• Bilinguals can ignore better than monolingual irrelevant information.
• Bilinguals can change faster the language they speak in.
• Bilingualism don’t affect  the orientation faculty.
• Bilingualism improve the procedural control.

Today I show you an interesting video obtained from the official Noam Chomsky website. It’s one of his lectures in “Hitchcock Lectures” (March 20, 2002): Language and Mind Revisited: The Biolinguistic Turn. You can download it and learn about its topic: which is the biolinguistic view from language? how can we understand a natural complex system, see language, with our tools, with our knowledge? and more accurate: which are our goals? what can we do as linguist? and so on. Furthermore, Noam Chomsky is one of my favorite language scientists and, in fact, I’m reading right now The Minimalist Program -hard and amazing work-, so it’s the best gift I can offer you for new year. Have a nice 2008!

BBC Radio 4: “Carles Lalueza-Fox at Barcelona University has recently published a paper about a specific gene, FOXP2, which has been identified in the Neanderthal genome. The presence of this gene suggests that Neanderthals might have been able to speak“. A mutation of FOXP2, for those of you who don’t know about it, is the change supposed to be the origin of language faculty. Still, the important think now is the demonstration that this hypothesis should be, at less, remade. Few weeks ago, researchers found the same mutation in Neanderthal bones, and then, linguist community turned a chaos. Could Neanderthals talk? FOXP2 is the real language gene? Were they modern humans? And what about their behavior? All those questions and more were explained by John Hawk in his weblog.

I’ve found it reading Language Evolution, another blog on anthropology and linguistics already linked here. Search and read it! It’s quite interesting!

 I’ve recommended several times this article to friends and partners. Carlos Muñoz (2007): “50 años del lenguaje como objeto de estudio natural” is an interesting approach to Generative Grammar and linguistic sciences from a biological perspective. It’s very short and basic, so it can help everybody with a minimum of interest. Take a look!

And this one is another important article for me: José Luis Mendívil (2005): “La lingüística como filosofía cognitiva“. This time, Mendívil shows us the importance of all the relations between linguistics and cognitive physiology. I think it’s a good introduction to how can we realize concepts like theoretical linguistics, neurology and mind. It can be a nice gift to your mind, read it!

Bye!

I’ve been reading this holidays a little book in .pdf: Estudios de lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante nº 15 where Erundina Garcerán has made an study about the concept of Phase. Actually, Strong Phase. I think it’s a very nice study with an important part of explanations and based on the Minimalist Program. Maybe now I’m ready to read a famous Chomsky’s article: On Phase. I’ll try it!

Since Chomsky (1998 & 1999) introduced the concept of Strong Phase and Weak Phase, it’s been an important theme of discussion. In resume, a Strong Phase has an [EPP] (Extended Principle of Projection) who assures the position of the syntactic subject and its requirement like an External Argument. The conclusions of E. Garcerán are: i) There is only a Strong Phase when a syntactic subject is the External Argument of a predicative verb; ii) Only ST-SV and SC-ST can be Strong Phases.