neurodudes

Timothy Gentner at UCSD claims in a talk abstract that songbirds can learn CFGs.
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In this very interesting article, Martin Sereno argues that rather than evolving out of inflexible, hardwired emotion-linked calls, language may have evolved out of complex, flexible learned vocalization patterns which at first had no meaning attached to them (something like birdsong).

Sereno, M. I.(2005) Language origins without the semantic urge. Cognitive Science Online, 3, pp. 1-12.

Read on for the abstract.
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In what would seem to be a sudden, surprise counterattack by the Whorfian hypothesis, a tribe of otherwise smart people have been discovered whose language doesn’t have words for specific numbers, and where the people have major trouble with the idea of specific numbers of things (even when taught & when trying very hard). The children of the tribe can pick up numbers easily, but the adults don’t.

Constance Holden. Life Without Numbers in the Amazon. Science 2004; 305 (5687) : 1093a (in News of the Week)

More information is in this CNN article.

Looks like age-related deficits with reaction time stimuli are less in bilinguals. Click below to get a synopsis of the work (published in Psychology and Aging).
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Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, and Julia Fischer show that a border collie named Rico is able to learn words in a single trial, is able to recall the words months later, and has a vocabulary of about 200 words, similar to a three year old human.
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