Jeffrey Watumull's research while affiliated with University of Cambridge and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (10)
(in press) Journal of Neurolinguistics, Special Issue " Language evolution: on the origin of the lexical and syntactic structures " Many have argued that the expressive power of human thought comes from language. Language plays this role, so the argument goes, because its generative computations construct hierarchically structured, abstract represe...
Andics et al (1) use fMRI data to claim that dogs perform lexical and prosodic computations, concluding that these capacities evolved in the absence of language. The evidence does not support these conclusions.
The volume is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially...
Several theoretical proposals for the evolution of language have sparked a renewed search for comparative data on human and non-human animal computational capacities. However, conceptual confusions still hinder the field, leading to experimental evidence that fails to test for comparable human competences. Here we focus on two conceptual and method...
The importance of game theoretic models to evolutionary theory has been in formulating elegant equations that specify the strategies to be played and the conditions to be satisfied for particular traits to evolve. These models, in conjunction with experimental tests of their predictions, have successfully described and explained the costs and benef...
It is a truism that conceptual understanding of a hypothesis is required for its empirical investigation. However, the concept of recursion as articulated in the context of linguistic analysis has been perennially confused. Nowhere has this been more evident than in attempts to critique and extend Hauseretal's. (2002) articulation. These authors pu...
It has been argued that language is a Platonic object, and therefore that a biolinguistic ontology is incoherent. In particular, the notion of language as a system of discrete infinity has been argued to be inconsistent with the assumption of a physical (finite) basis for language. These arguments are flawed. Here I demonstrate that biolinguistics...
Human language, and grammatical competence in particular, relies on a set of computational operations that, in its entirety, is not observed in other animals. Such uniqueness leaves open the possibility that components of our linguistic competence are shared with other animals, having evolved for non-linguistic functions. Here, we explore this prob...
Citations
... As summarized by Dehaene and colleagues (2015), Fitch (2014), and ten Cate (2016), there is evidence that species within each of these animal groups show abilities to extract statistical-probabilistic patterns and algebraic rules, with extremely limited evidence within the space of generative algorithms, mostly restricted to the lowest level of the Chomsky Hierarchy -that is, regular languages (Rogers & Hauser, 2010). Of the studies showing successful recognition-learning of patterned sequences, however, the majority entail artificially created patterns within one modality, based on extensive training procedures -and in some cases it is arguable whether the animals did in fact perform the claimed computations (discussed in Watumull et al., 2014a); a far smaller set of studies have created patterned material from the species-specific repertoire (Comins and Gentner, 2013), explored visual stimuli , or used non-training spontaneous methods (Abe and Watanabe, 2011). No study has looked at pattern recognition across multiple domains, and to our knowledge, only one study has explored and showed successful transfer across modalities (visual to auditory; (Murphy et al., 2008)). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/272544305512448-1441991034139_Q64/Marc-Hauser.jpg)
... The most significant advantage of game-theoretic methods relies on the possibility to reuse the rich body of results established by game theorists. The main shortcoming of these methods is their problematic use due to conceptual confusion and empirical deficiencies, as emerged from Watumull and Hauser [28]. ...
... Supondo que a linguagem seja uma característica do cérebro, não pode ser literalmente infinita. Mas o cérebro pode codificar um procedimento recursivo que, em princípio, geraria infinitamente muitas frases (WATUMULL, 2013). ...
... Karlsson, 2010). Watumull et al. (2014) criticize the concept of recursion as articulated in linguistic analysis; they point out that "syntactic embedding is a sufficient, though not necessary, diagnostic of recursion" (p. 1). In the interpretation of our data we will extend the concept of recursion beyond linguistic syntax to the recursive logic of theory-of-mind (ToM) reasoning. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/278958215057429-1443520229507_Q64/Ian-Roberts-19.jpg)
... For all we know about the brain, the evolution of language remains a mystery (Hauser et al., 2014), and the computer metaphor may foreclose any new insights by enforcing the need for fixity of local meaning and arbitrary symbols. Stored-program computers have no apparent natural heritage except wholesale innate installation and wiring. ...
... Similar views are not new at all. Hauser and Watumull (2017) propose the "Universal Generative Faculty (UGF)" as the domain-general generative engine shared by, e.g., language, mathematics, music and morality. Marcus (2006) already argued that "descent-with-modification modularity," as opposed to "sui generis modularity," is the right kind of modularity to understand the domain-specific nature of cognitive modules. ...
... In this review of animal communication through a usage-based, constructionist lens, we have followed this line of reasoning, arguing that a usage-based constructionist perspective offers new theoretical avenues for comparisons between human language and animal communication which are directly relevant for theories of language evolution. We have fleshed out this idea by discussing how concepts from Construction Grammar can potentially be applied to animal communication systems, especially to monkey alarm calls, which have been subject to considerable debate regarding the amount of combinatoriality and compositionality they exhibit, to the extent that their structure has been viewed as a precursor to linguistic morphology (Endress et al., 2009). We have argued that a constructionist approach can contribute to our understanding of commonalities and differences between different (linguistic and non-linguistic) communication systems. ...
... Turing-complete? Several answers have been proposed in the literature, from the claim that natural language stringsets are regular (e.g., Kornai, 1985) to proposals requiring Turing completeness (see e.g., Watumull, 2012; also, the claim that LFG and HPSG are unrestricted is common, but it is unclear that they really use that excessive power in grammatical description: in that case, 'unrestricted' is a 'worst-case scenario'; see Müller, 2020: 549, ff. for discussion) and almost everything in between (e.g., Gazdar, 1981Gazdar, , 1982 for a strictly CF model; Joshi, 1985;Shieber, 1985 for arguments in favour of mild-CS; see Stabler, 2013 for an overview, also Manaster Ramer & Zadrozny, 1990, who present in a very clear way a set of criteria to determine the expressive power of a formalism). However, the computational argument leaves some empirical issues left to solve. ...
