Language and social structure

The Adventures of Auck has a great post today about the way languages change as more people begin to speak them. The post discusses several papers on the subject: Last week saw the publication of Lupyan & Dale (2010) (also discussed here). It’s an analysis of languages from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS, [...]

Hanging from the language tree

A recent issue of the Columbia Magazine has an article on Columbia professor Herb Terrace and his work on communication and cognition in chimpanzees. Terrace is best known for his role in the Nim Chimpsky experiments, which sought to settle the question of whether chimps could acquire human language. From the article: Terrace, a young [...]