Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T20:13:04.515Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prolonged plasticity: Necessary and sufficient for language-ready brains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Patricia J. Brooks  and
Sonia Ragir
Patricia J. Brooks
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of City University of New York, Staten Island, NY [email protected]://www.csi.cuny.edu/faculty/BROOKS_PATRICIA.html
Sonia Ragir
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, College of Staten Island, and The American Museum of Natural History, Staten Island, NY 10314. [email protected]://library.csi.cuny.edu/~ragir
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Languages emerge in response to the negotiation of shared meaning in social groups, where transparency of grammar is necessitated by demands of communication with relative strangers needing to consult on a wide range of topics (Ragir 2002). This communal exchange is automated and stabilized through activity-dependent fine-tuning of information-specific neural connections during postnatal growth and social development.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 5 , October 2008 , pp. 514 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, P. R. & Cox, K. J. A. (2002) Synaptic Darwinsim and neocortical function. Neurocomputing 42:197–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aiello, L. C. & Wheeler, P. (1995) The expensive-tissue hypothesis: The brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. Current Anthropology 36:199–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bak, P. (1996) How nature works: The science of self-organized criticality. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpendale, J. I. M. & Lewis, C. (2004) Constructing an understanding of mind: The development of children's social understanding within social interaction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27:79–151.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, H. H. (1996a) Communities, commonalities, and common ground. In: Whorf revisited, ed. Gumperz, J. & Levinson, S., pp. 324–55. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Conway, C. M. & Christiansen, M. H. (2005) Modality-constrained statistical learning of tactile, visual, and auditory sequences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 31:24–39.Google ScholarPubMed
Deacon, T. W. (1997) The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. W. W. Norton/Penguin.Google Scholar
Hilton, D. J. (1995) The social context of reasoning: Conversational inference and rational judgment. Psychological Bulletin 118:248–71.Google Scholar
Kegl, J., Senghas, A. & Coppola, M. (1999) Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. In: Language creation and language change: Creolization, diachrony, and development, ed. DeGraff, M., pp. 179–237. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kien, J. (1991) The need for data reduction may have paved the way for the evolution of language ability in hominids. Journal of Human Evolution 20:157–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirby, S. (1999) Function, selection and innateness: The emergence of language universals. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhl, P. K. (2000) Language, mind, and brain: Experience alters perception. In: The new cognitive neuroscience, 2nd edition, ed. Gazzaniga, M. S., pp. 99–115. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Milton, K. (1999a) A hypothesis to explain the role of meat-eating in human evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology 8:11–21.3.0.CO;2-M>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milton, K. (1999b) Commentary on cooking and the ecology of human origins. Current Anthropology 40:583–84.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. (2006) Young minds in social worlds: Experience, meaning, and memory. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Newport, E. L., Hauser, M. D., Spaepen, G. & Aslin, R. N. (2004) Learning at a distance II. Statistical learning of non-adjacent dependencies in a non-human primate. Cognitive Psychology 49:85–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ninio, A. (2006) Language and the learning curve: A new theory of syntactic development. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ragir, S. (2001) Toward an understanding of the relationship between bipedal walking, encephalization, and language origins. In: Language evolution: Biological, linguistic and philosophical perspectives, ed. Gyori, G., pp. 73–99. Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Senghas, A., Kita, S. & Özyürek, A. (2004) Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science 305(5691):1779–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taylor, T. J. (1997) Theorizing language. Pergamon.Google Scholar
Wray, A. & Grace, G. W. (2005) The consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of socio-cultural influences on linguistic form. Lingua 117:543–78.Google Scholar