Charles Darwin and the Evolution of Human Grammatical Systems
Charles Darwin and the Evolution of Human Grammatical Systems
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DOI：
10.1080/09647040903506455
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发表时间：
2010-01-01
影响因子：
0.5
通讯作者：
Christman, Sarah S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Buckingham, Hugh W.;Christman, Sarah S.
查尔斯·达尔文关于动物交流的进化理论深深植根于一个有着几个世纪历史的联想心理学模型中，这个模型的起源通常可以追溯到亚里士多德的著作。他关于配对出现频率的概念已经流传了几个世纪，并且是联想连通性形成的主要本体论特征。他专注于因果关系、连续发生的连续性和项目之间的相似性。因果关系经常被简化为另一种类型的邻近关系，因此亚里士多德经常被称为通过相似性和邻近性建立联想联系的创始人，邻近性是最强大和最常见的联想手段。连续性最终成为感知和行动中心理事件序列排序的最重要机制。在联想心理学中，串联的概念采用了事件“列车”的形式，既有感觉的，也有运动的，这样一来，序列排序就被看作是一串局部连续事件的逐项串。自20世纪早期和中期以来，序列排序数学的现代发展在复杂性上取得了进步，新的计算方法使我们能够重新评估达尔文和联想主义者的序列连接理论。这些序列顺序的新模型允许对人类和非人类进行更密切的比较研究。本研究认为，达尔文的坚持“程度”的连续性之间的人类和非人类动物序列排序。我们将考虑对八哥鸟叫声的研究，以及这些叫声的序列排序是否提供了证据，证明它们具有一种句法，这种句法与人类语法结构的计算充其量只是程度上的不同，而不是种类上的不同。我们会争辩说，事实上，他们没有表现出这样的事情。
Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories of animal communication were deeply embedded in a centuries-old model of association psychology, whose prodromes have most often been traced to the writings of Aristotle. His notions of frequency of occurrence of pairings have been passed down through the centuries and were a major ontological feature in the formation of associative connectivity. He focused on the associations of cause and effect, contiguity of sequential occurrence, and similarity among items. Cause and effect were often reduced to another type of contiguity relation, so that Aristotle is most often evoked as the originator of the associative bondings through similarity and contiguity, contiguity being the most powerful and frequent means of association. Contiguity eventually became the overriding mechanism for serial ordering of mental events in both perception and action. The notions of concatenation throughout the association psychology took the form of "trains" of events, both sensory and motor, in such a way that serial ordering came to be viewed as an item-by-item string of locally contiguous events. Modern developments in the mathematics of serial ordering have advanced in sophistication since the early and middle twentieth century, and new computational methods have allowed us to reevaluate the serial concatenative theories of Darwin and the associationists. These new models of serial order permit a closer comparative scrutiny between human and nonhuman. The present study considers Darwin's insistence on a "degree" continuity between human and nonhuman animal serial ordering. We will consider a study of starling birdsongs and whether the serial ordering of those songs provides evidence that they have a syntax that at best differs only in degree and not in kind with the computations of human grammatical structures. We will argue that they, in fact, show no such thing.