Towards Protolanguage

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-111
Author(s):  
Dmitry V. Zaitsev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Language Evolution ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Language Of Thought ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
General Outline ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Verbal Language ◽  
Theories Of Emotions

In this paper, I attempt to offer a general outline of my views on the origin and evolution of language. I do not pretend in any way to a completely new conception of language evolution. It seems to me that all the most important and productive hypotheses about the origin of language have already been made before, and it is only a matter of putting the pieces of the puzzle together correctly. As far as I can see it, the evolution of language is directly related to the embedded and embodied emotional types, which served as the basis for the subsequent categorization of perceived objects, and thus laid the ground for the formation of first an internal language (of thought), and then an external verbal language. Consistent with this, the paper is organized as follows. In the Introduction I briefly describe the problem I am facing in this article and outline a plan for solving it. Next section comprises a survey of relevant empirical findings related primarily to the processing and understanding of abstract terms and concepts. In my view, it supports the idea of the close connection of abstract terms proceeding, and thus language comprehension, with emotional states. The third section provides relevant theoretical considerations of the relationship between emotions, cognition, and language. Consistently considering various theories of emotions and concepts of language formation, I pay attention to the connection between affective states and language as a sign system. In the fourth section, my views are presented directly. In so doing, I illustrate my approach with a telling example that shows how, in the course of evolution, embedded and embodied emotional responses and reactions could become the building blocks first for the internal language of thought, and then for the external natural language.

scholarly journals The role of self–other distinction in understanding others' mental and emotional states: neurocognitive mechanisms in children and adults

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1686) ◽  
pp. 20150074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaus Steinbeis
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Neural Circuitry ◽  
Developmental Changes ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Affective Domains

Social interactions come with the fundamental problem of trying to understand others' mental and affective states while under the overpowering influence of one's own concurrent thoughts and feelings. The ability to distinguish between simultaneous representations of others' current experiences as well as our own is crucial to navigate our complex social environments successfully. The developmental building blocks of this ability and how this is given rise to by functional and structural brain development remains poorly understood. In this review, I outline some of the key findings on the role of self–other distinction in understanding others' mental as well as emotional states in children and adults. I will begin by clarifying the crucial role for self–other distinction in avoiding egocentric attributions of one's own cognitive as well as affective states to others in adults and outline the underlying neural circuitry in overcoming such egocentricity. This will provide the basis for a discussion of the emergence of self–other distinction in early childhood as well as developmental changes therein throughout childhood and into adulthood. I will demonstrate that self–other distinction of cognitive and emotional states is already dissociable early in development. Concomitantly, I will show that processes of self–other distinction in cognitive and affective domains rely on adjacent but distinct neural circuitry each with unique connectivity profiles, presumably related to the nature of the distinction that needs to be made.

Evaluating Risk-Propensity Assessment Methods: Patterns in Repeated Exposure to Emotional Stimuli

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 283-287
Author(s):  
Sahinya Susindar ◽  
Harrison Wissel-Littmann ◽  
Terry Ho ◽  
Thomas K. Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Emotion Regulation ◽  
Assessment Method ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Risk Propensity ◽  
Emotional Stimuli ◽  
Comparison Results

In studying naturalistic human decision-making, it is important to understand how emotional states shape decision-making processes and outcomes. Emotion regulation techniques can improve the quality of decisions, but there are several challenges to evaluating these techniques in a controlled research context. Determining the effectiveness of emotion regulation techniques requires methodology that can: 1) reliably elicit desired emotions in decision-makers; 2) include decision tasks with response measures that are sensitive to emotional loading; and 3) support repeated exposures/trials with relatively-consistent emotional loading and response sensitivity. The current study investigates one common method, the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART), for its consistency and reliability in measuring the risk-propensity of decision-makers, and specifically how the method’s effectiveness might change over the course of repeated exposures. With the PANASX subjective assessment serving for comparison, results suggest the BART assessment method, when applied over repeated exposures, is reduced in its sensitivity to emotional stimuli and exhibits decision task-related learning effects which influence the observed trends in response data in complex ways. This work is valuable for researchers in decision-making and to guide design for humans with consideration for their affective states.

Effects of Compression on Language Evolution

2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy K. Teal ◽  
Charles E. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Minimum Description Length ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Problem Space ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Look Up Table ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract For many adaptive complex systems information about the environment is not simply recorded in a look-up table, but is rather encoded in a theory, schema, or model, which compresses information. The grammar of a language can be viewed as such a schema or theory. In a prior study [Teal et al., 1999] we proposed several conjectures about the learning and evolution of language that should follow from these observations: (C1) compression aids in generalization; (C2) compression occurs more easily in a “smooth”, as opposed to a “rugged”, problem space; and (C3) constraints from compression make it likely that natural languages evolve towards smooth string spaces. This previous work found general, if not complete support for these three conjectures. Here we build on that study to clarify the relationship between Minimum Description Length (MDL) and error in our model and examine evolution of certain languages in more detail. Our results suggest a fourth conjecture: that all else being equal, (C4) more complex languages change more rapidly during evolution.

scholarly journals The Social Evolution of Language, and the Language of Social Evolution

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 147470490700500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Scott-Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Reciprocal Altruism ◽  
Honest Signaling ◽  
Evolution Theory ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
Correct Application

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the evolution of the human capacity for language. Such a project is necessarily interdisciplinary. However, that interdisciplinarity brings with it a risk: terms with a technical meaning in their own field are used wrongly or too loosely by those from other backgrounds. Unfortunately, this risk has been realized in the case of language evolution, where many of the terms of social evolution theory (reciprocal altruism, honest signaling, etc.) are incorrectly used in a way that suggests that certain key fundamentals have been misunderstood. In particular the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations is often lost, with the result that several claims made by those interested in language evolution are epistemically incoherent. However, the correct application of social evolution theory provides simple, clear explanations of why language most likely evolved and how the signals used in language — words — remain cheap yet arbitrary.

scholarly journals The Origin and Evolution of Language and the Propagation of Organization

1970 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Logan
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
New Media ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Origin Of Language ◽  
Engineering Problems ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
The Impact

In this presentation we will study propagating organization. We begin by examining the evolution and origin of language by briefly reviewing the impact of the phonetic alphabet (Logan 2004a), the evolution of notated language (Logan 2004b), the origin of language and culture (Logan 2006, 2007), the role of collaboration in knowledge management (Logan and Stokes 2004), the impact of “new media” (Logan in preparation). We will then connect this work to the propagating organization of all living organisms (Kauffman et al. in press) where we will show that information in biotic systems are the constraints that instruct living organisms how to operate. We will demonstrate that instructional or biotic information is quite different than the classical notion of information Shannon developed for addressing engineering problems in telecommunications. We also will show that biosemiosis is in some sense equivalent to propagating organization (Kauffman et al. in press). We then conclude our presentation with the speculation that there exist at least seven levels of biosemiosis.

scholarly journals Introduction: Origin and Evolution of Language—An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Topoi ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Ferretti ◽  
Ines Adornetti ◽  
Alessandra Chiera ◽  
Erica Cosentino ◽  
Serena Nicchiarelli
Keyword(s):  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective

scholarly journals A Machine Learning Approach to EEG-based Prediction of Human Affective States Using Recursive Feature Elimination Method

2021 ◽  
Vol 335 ◽  
pp. 04001
Author(s):  
Didar Dadebayev ◽  
Goh Wei Wei ◽  
Tan Ee Xion
Keyword(s):  
Feature Selection ◽  
Fractal Dimension ◽  
Emotion Recognition ◽  
Affective Computing ◽  
Feature Selection Method ◽  
Recursive Feature Elimination ◽  
Support Vector ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Emotion Classification

Emotion recognition, as a branch of affective computing, has attracted great attention in the last decades as it can enable more natural brain-computer interface systems. Electroencephalography (EEG) has proven to be an effective modality for emotion recognition, with which user affective states can be tracked and recorded, especially for primitive emotional events such as arousal and valence. Although brain signals have been shown to correlate with emotional states, the effectiveness of proposed models is somewhat limited. The challenge is improving accuracy, while appropriate extraction of valuable features might be a key to success. This study proposes a framework based on incorporating fractal dimension features and recursive feature elimination approach to enhance the accuracy of EEG-based emotion recognition. The fractal dimension and spectrum-based features to be extracted and used for more accurate emotional state recognition. Recursive Feature Elimination will be used as a feature selection method, whereas the classification of emotions will be performed by the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. The proposed framework will be tested with a widely used public database, and results are expected to demonstrate higher accuracy and robustness compared to other studies. The contributions of this study are primarily about the improvement of the EEG-based emotion classification accuracy. There is a potential restriction of how generic the results can be as different EEG dataset might yield different results for the same framework. Therefore, experimenting with different EEG dataset and testing alternative feature selection schemes can be very interesting for future work.

Daily Reports of Aggressive Behaviors in Interpersonal Conflicts

2021 ◽  
pp. 088626052110630
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Mumford ◽  
Bruce G. Taylor ◽  
Mateusz Borowiecki ◽  
Poulami Maitra
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Aggressive Behavior ◽  
Childhood Maltreatment ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Interpersonal Conflicts ◽  
Daily Data ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Use Behavior

Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable, but the probability that conflicts involve aggressive behavior varies. Prior research that has tended to focus on victimization in intimate partnerships reported through retrospective designs. Addressing these limitations, the current study examines daily reports of behaving aggressively in any conflict across relationships in a sample of 512 young adults drawn from the nationally representative iCOR cohort. Respondent attitudes and affective measures were collected at the end of the daily data collection period. Regression methods were applied to examine the probability and frequency of aggression, investigating early and recent exposure to adversities, attitudes, self-control, affect and emotional states, and alcohol use behavior. Recent adversities and the propensity to endorse a defensive honor code attitude, consistent with theory and retrospective studies of aggression, predicted both prevalence and frequency of aggressive behavior. The associations of childhood maltreatment and self-control with the prevalence of behaving aggressively were as expected, but these constructs were significantly associated with the frequency of aggression with unexpected, inverse directionality. Moreover, respondents’ affect and other emotional states were only associated with the frequency, not the prevalence, of aggressive behavior. Overall, this daily data collection constructively distinguished risk and protective factors for behaving aggressively more often. Further research is needed to disentangle the extent to which affective states drive or is a consequence of frequent aggressive behavior.

Pantomime and imitation in great apes

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 200-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne E. Russon
Keyword(s):  
Data Mining ◽  
Language Evolution ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Great Ape ◽  
Evolution Of Language ◽  
Distinct Process ◽  
Action Imitation ◽  
Primitive Forms ◽  
Communicative Abilities

Abstract This paper assesses great apes’ abilities for pantomime and action imitation, two communicative abilities proposed as key contributors to language evolution. Modern great apes, the only surviving nonhuman hominids, are important living models of the communicative platform upon which language evolved. This assessment is based on 62 great ape pantomimes identified via data mining plus published reports of great ape action imitation. Most pantomimes were simple, imperative, and scaffolded by partners’ relationship and scripts; some resemble declaratives, some were sequences of several inter-related elements. Imitation research consistently shows great apes perform action imitation at low fidelity, but also that action imitation may not represent a distinct process or function. Discussion focuses on how findings may advance reconstruction of the evolution of language, including what great apes may contribute to understanding ‘primitive’ forms of pantomime and imitation and how to improve their study.

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