HOME   ::  Journal List   ::   Article

Nowak, M. A., Komarova, N. L., and Niyogi, P. (2002) Computational and evolutionary aspects of language. Nature, 417:611--617.
Bookmark:   ( bookmarked by 1 relevant users: garyfeng ).   tags: 2evolution 2language language_evolution modeling computation

Full-text
   || Go to publishers' web page for final fulltext/PDF. (see the Authoritative link as below)
   URL: http://www.ptb.ias.edu/nowak/pdf/Nature02a.pdf
   Cached: PDF-222K   
   SAVE AS an easy-to-recall long filename:
      Filename format: author--year--title   PDF-222K   
      Filename format: author--year--title--journal|proceedings|...--pages   PDF-222K   

Related links
   Authoritative: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature00771   (Publisher's PDF... likely be available here.)
   Source: http://www.ptb.ias.edu/nowak/publications.html
  Web search: Google Web Search   ::   Google Scholar
  Within this site: Cited by (31)    References (74)

Abstract

Language is our legacy. It is the main evolutionary contribution of humans, and perhaps the most interesting trait that has emerged in the past 500 million years. Understanding how darwinian evolution gives rise to human language requires the integration of formal language theory, learning theory and evolutionary dynamics. Formal language theory provides a mathematical description of language and grammar. Learning theory formalizes the task of language acquisition--it can be shown that no procedure can learn an unrestricted set of languages. Universal grammar specifies the restricted set of languages learnable by the human brain. Evolutionary dynamics can be formulated to describe the cultural evolution of language and the biological evolution of universal grammar.
BibTex
@article{nowak02computationalAnd,
  author={M. A. Nowak and N. L. Komarova and P. Niyogi},
  title={Computational and evolutionary aspects of language},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2002},
  month={June},
  day={6},
  volume={417},
  pages={611-617},
  doi={10.1038/nature00771},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/nowak02computationalAnd.html}
}


 HOME   ::  Journal List   ::   Article Comments to: junwang4 you-know-at gmail.com Last update: 2/2/08