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The aim of this paper is to explore whether Maria Kronfeldner’s analysis of human nature could be applied to the concept of cognitive systems and related capabilities, such as the human language faculty. Firstly, I will address the nature-nurture debate, that is, explanatory claims of nature as having a role in causing the language ability, and explanatory claims of culture as responsible for the development of human language capabilities. The nature-nurture divide generates a problem since it overlooks the interaction of nature and culture during the development of language capabilities, the problem called the developmentalist challenge. I will demonstrate different standpoints that try to answer this challenge, most famously the constructivist theory of Jean Piaget and the theory of universal grammar of Noam Chomsky. Following the insights of Kronfeldner, if we opt for an explanatory (and not classificatory or descriptive) account of the human language, we will search for the explanatory epistemic roles and their fulfilments. As Kronfeldner states, different sciences search for different differences regarding explanandum, and I hope to show that the integrative interdisciplinary framework dealing with cognitive systems is needed. The conclusion is that biolinguistics is an interdisciplinary field with a necessary unifying potential regarding explanatory account of the human language faculty.

This study examines the possible common characteristics between human and non-human consciousness. It mainly addresses animal consciousness and, to a certain extent, intelligent AI. It provides an overview of the main theories regarding consciousness, more specifically those of neuroscience and cognitive science, and also their materialistic base at a neuroanatomical and neurophysiological level, emphasizing the role the prefrontal cortex plays, both in humans and animals. Then, it considers particular aspects of consciousness, such as emotion, and presents the three broad traditions considering human emotions, which are emotions as feelings, evaluations, and judgments, as well as studies on animal emotions. Then, it continues with the proposed models of metacognition and memory to deepen the analysis regarding common characteristics of human and non-human consciousness. It also touches on the platform theory, which may bridge human, animal, and AI consciousness, although this theory is under consideration. It ends with references to animals’ social behavior, their interactions with humans, their possible ontogenic proximity as expressed in biolinguistics, and the findings of computational ethology, which help to establish models of mental human disorders. The study concludes that findings support proximities between humans and animals, consciousness at the level of neurophysiology, and emotion and metacognition. Contrary to animals and AI, human consciousness is more complicated and far from cybernetic and computational models since it is linked with various kinds of malleability, reconsolidation, neural plasticity, different conceptions of emotions, and certain mental pathologies.

For decades, interdisciplinary research efforts have accumulated insights that diminish the significance of the classic nature versus nurture dichotomy, instead calling for a nuanced, multifactorial approach to ontogeny. Similarly, the role of genes in both phylogeny and ontogeny, once seen as rather deterministic, is now conceptualized as highly dependent on environmental factors, including behavior. Linguistic theories have, in principle, made an effort to incorporate these changing views. However, the central claim of the given paper is that this apparent compliance with biological insights remains superficial. As such, considerable disconnects between linguistic theory and what is known about the biological underpinnings of complex traits persist, negatively impacting pertinent views on language acquisition, language universals and the evolution of language. Given the breadth of these fields of study, the aim of this paper is to tackle the root of the problem: It begins by sketching out linguistic nativism as conceptualized within generativism, pointing to aspects within this position that stand in conflict with the interdisciplinary literature. It will then review select areas of research in a succinct manner in order to substantiate the criticism and characterize the counterposition as found within the biological sciences. The paper will culminate in addressing these disconnects on conceptual grounds, i.e. invoking the term emergence as employed in neuroscience as a possible means to reconcile those biological insights with linguistic nativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peirce's sign model is introduced as incompatible with structural semiology in the majority of semiotics textbooks. In this paper, I would like to argue against this general polarization of the semiotic discipline. I focus on compatibilities between Lucien Tesnière's syntactic theory (verbal valency) and Peirce's logic of relatives. My main argument is that structural linguistics is not necessarily dyadic, and that Peirce's sign doctrine is perfectly structural. To define the structural approach in Peirce, I analyze the notions of form (structure) and substance in Hjelmslev and Peirce. The aim of my argument is to contribute to attempts to introduce Peirce's theory to the field of linguistics in the hope that such an integration will be beneficiary for general linguistics. To extend and support my argument, I provide some examples from biology where Peirce's theory has been applied. I demonstrate an analogy between the biological structures of proteins and the structure of a sentence with Peirce's own writings. I consequently introduce Peirce as the first structural semiologist and as the first biolinguist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the acoustic characteristics of the human speech signal (used for communication purposes), proposing that they can derive from an adaptive evolution of the cetaceans' echolocation signals. Nevertheless, the modern human speech signal is far more complex than that of animal echolocation. Indeed, this evolution began before Homo sapiens, probably at the time of the H. erectus. The comparison between the whale and Homo sapiens can allow us to describe the acoustic features of human speech as the result of a co-evolution of the system of acoustic localization of objects in the common space inherited from mammals and specialized only by humans in order to allow them more sophisticated uses of their sensory apparatus. Although it is impossible to adduce material proofs, there is inferential evidence arising from comparing archaeological, paleontological, biological, acoustic, and linguistic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their recent book, Ladyman and Wiesner (What is a complex system?, Yale University Press, 2020) delineate the bounds of the exciting interdisciplinary field of complexity science. In this work, they provide examples of generally accepted complex systems and common features which these possess to varying degrees. In this paper, I plan to extend their list to include the formal study of natural language, i.e. linguistics. In fact, I will argue that language exhibits many of the hallmarks of a complex system, specifically a complex biological system. Thus, my aim is to advocate contra the the ‘Minimalist Program’ (Chomsky, The minimalist program, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995), which motivates simple underlying mechanisms (i.e. Merge) in their idealisations, that biolinguistics should embrace a ‘Maximalist Program’ in which multiple subfields contribute component explanations to an emerging whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this contribution is to highlight the role and relevance of neurolinguistics accounts for second and third language syntactic acquisition/processing. This chapter begins with a brief historical overview of the field of experimental psychology and the birth of the EEG methodology. We then provide a general introduction of the ERP methodology and the language-related ERP components, explaining what they show and how they are to be interpreted. A special focus is given on the clear distinction between behavioral measurements in contrast to real-time measures and the leading role of ERPs is elaborated on. We then provide a selective narrative review of existing L2 and L3 syntax acquisition studies with the EEG methodology within the domain of syntax that we consider relevant for deriving implications for language instructed settings. We discuss results from EEG studies on second and third language syntactic acquisition/processing and finally, highlight several conclusions important for the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translating experimental tasks that were designed to investigate differences between conditions at the group-level into valid and reliable instruments to measure individual differences in cognitive skills is challenging (Hedge et al., 2018; Rouder et al., 2019; Rouder & Haaf, 2019). For psycholinguists, the additional complexities associated with selecting or constructing language stimuli, and the need for appropriate well-matched baseline conditions make this endeavour particularly complex. In a typical experiment, a process-of-interest (e.g. ambiguity resolution) is targeted by contrasting performance in an experimental condition with performance in a wellmatched control condition. In many cases, careful between-condition matching precludes the same participant from encountering all stimulus items. Unfortunately, solutions that work for group-level research (e.g. constructing counterbalanced experiment versions) are inappropriate for individual-differences designs. As a case study, we report an ambiguity resolution experiment that illustrates the steps that researchers can take to address this issue and assess whether their measurement instrument is both valid and reliable. On the basis of our findings, we caution against the widespread approach of using datasets from group-level studies to also answer important questions about individual differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La presente aportación propone una presentación del desarrollo y los objetivos de la Biolingüística y una reflexión sobre su estatus como disciplina científica. Mostramos, en general, que la consideración del lenguaje como una propiedad biológica de nuestra especie, y no solo como un logro cultural de la misma, ha tenido un efecto notable en el desarrollo de la teoría lingüística, y en su conexión con otros ámbitos de la ciencia cognitiva, notablemente con la psicolingüística. Se concluye que, aunque aún queda mucho por comprender sobre cómo el cerebro procesa y almacena el lenguaje, sobre cómo surgió evolutivamente esta facultad en nuestra especie y sobre cómo se desarrolla en cada persona, gracias a la integración de la lingüística teórica y la neurociencia cognitiva, cada vez somos más capaces de convertir esos misterios en problemas abordables empíricamente.

There are numerous children and adolescents throughout the world who are either diagnosed with speech and language disorders or manifest any of them as a result of another disorder. Meanwhile, since the emergence of language as an innate capability, the question of whether it constitutes a behaviour or an innate ability has been debated for decades. There have been several theories developed that support and demonstrate the biological foundations of human language. Molecular evidence of the biological basis of language came from the FOXP2 gene, also known as the language gene. Taking a closer look at both human language and biology, biolinguistics is at the core of these inquiries—attempting to understand the aetiologies of the genetics of speech and language disorders in children and adolescents. This paper presents empirical evidence based on both scientometrics and bibliometrics. We collected data between 1935 and 2022 from Scopus, WOS, and Lens. A total of 1570 documents were analysed from Scopus, 1440 from the WOS, and 5275 from Lens. Bibliometric analysis was performed using Excel based on generated reports from these three databases. CiteSpace 5.8.R3 and VOSviewer 1.6.18 were used to conduct the scientometric analysis. Eight bibliometric and eight scientometric indicators were used to measure the development of the field of biolinguistics, including but not limited to the production size of knowledge, the most examined topics, and the most frequent concepts and variables. A major finding of our study is identifying the most examined topics in the genetics of speech and language disorders. These included: gestural communication, structural design, cultural evolution, neural network, language tools, human language faculty, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and theoretical perspective on language evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chomsky and his followers routinely introduce linguistic minimalism as a «program», in the sense that it merely provides some guidelines for the elaboration of grammatical theories proper. According to this orthodox interpretation, these theories can be attributed factual content, that is, content open to empirical refutation, but the program as such is immune to this type of rebuttal. This article discusses this vision of the minimalist «program» and proposes a reconceptualization of both minimalism and generativism in its different phases of development. According to this proposal, the minimalist thesis has factual content and minimalism, although it can be trivially described as programmatic, has an inescapably theoretical character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manifesto "Poetics is in the Genes" reveals the commonality between poetics and genetics for the first time. Outside of cellular biology attempts have been made in both (text)linguistics and semiotics to describe the genome and its interactions as similar to language. However, the approach of this interpretation relies particularly on the poetic function of language and its underlying self-referentiality as the starting point. Poetic relevance reveals itself explicitly in its relationship to the cutting-edge concept of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), which thematises abundant metric and figurative phenomena and terms on several levels: accumulation, regularity, interval, different repetitions, rhythm, iamb/trochee, stressed/unstressed units, longitude, orchestration; equivalency, substitution, connotation, contrast, analogy; synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, irony, symbol, paradox, implicature, epithet, simile; palindrome, chiasmus, ellipsis, zeugma, calembour, polysyndeton; poem, verse, stanza, chapter, refrain, (identical) rhyme, collage/bricolage, plot, composition, text, hypertext, architext, palimpsest; graphic imagery, symmetry/asymmetry; homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, archaisms, neologisms; words, phrases, sentences, syntax, definition, quote; cacophony/noise, harmony; spatial and time deixis; self-reflexivity of the utterance and utterer. From this perspective, life stems from primordial poetics as the first level. It is a convincing enough association to apply poetic analysis to the free interpretation process of genomes. A universal law of nature is that symmetry dictates design (including asymmetry): poetics is everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining language is a scientific problem. There is no one definition of language that convinces all scientists. Various linguistic theories have tried to define and describe language over the past two centuries. However, although these theories provide some important progress, they are not sufficient to fully define language and describe its features. It is also one of the important claims that language is a biological phenomenon or an organ. In this article, these views are discussed through the judgment "Language is a living thing". The fact that language is a biological phenomenon has been expressed since August Schleicher. Human biology has differences that create language. Language is like a center where human abstraction capacities intersect. For this reason, the judgment that language is a living thing is not sufficient for us. To fully grasp the human language, a synthesis of information from these different branches of science is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical linguistics embraces the analytic micro-system of representation as the core of language ability, and thus deals primarily with the computations of phonology, morphology, and syntax for structural processes. Looking into recent progress in human biology, however, there have been continuous indications that the internalized language is organized for creating structural sequences larger than phrases and sentences. Research on the right cerebrum of the brain, for example, shows its neurological tasks for composing a coherent story while the studies of individuals with deficits in underpinning genotypes reveal disruptions in constructing narratives. Moreover, investigations of human evolution are compelled to acknowledge a mysterious gap in psychological capacities of Homo sapiens and their later descendant, Homo sapiens sapiens, implicating a distinct stage of the language origin beyond syntax. What all these pieces of neurobiological evidence suggest is that humans have been bestowed an inherent linguistic capability for computing the synthetic macro-system of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on an epistemological analysis, Bachelardian and Saussurean, of the problematics of biosemiotics. This discipline is first characterized in its general features, and in contrast with biolinguistics -- a characterization that allows us to see its foundation on the traditional definition of the sign. Then, the Saussurean break with this traditional definition is explained, and with it the theorization which is constitutive of the Saussurean concept of language (la langue), explaining the given: the idioms. Biosemiotics appears in this "recurrent light" as a scientific ideology in the sense of Georges Canguilhem. It is a counterpart of structuralism, another scientific ideology, which emphasized the notion of structure, whereas this time it is the sound/sense relationship that is at the heart of the elaboration. Its commonality of problematics with and its singularity in relation to biolinguistics appear at the same time: if biolinguistics and biosemiotics both ignore the heterogeneity and the discontinuity constitutive of language, the reductionism of biosemiotics takes the form of a dissolution instead of the organicism underlying biolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Whether non-human animals have an ability to learn and process center embedding, a core property of human language syntax, is still debated. Artificial-grammar learning (AGL) has been used to compare humans and animals in the learning of center embedding. However, up until now, human participants have only included adults, and data on children, who are the key players of natural language acquisition, are lacking. We created a novel game-like experimental paradigm combining the go/no-go procedure often used in animal research with the stepwise learning methods found effective in human adults’ center-embedding learning. Here we report that some children succeeded in learning a semantics-free artificial grammar with center embedding (A2B2 grammar) in the auditory modality. Although their success rate was lower than adults’, the successful children looked as efficient learners as adults. Where children struggled, their memory capacity seemed to have limited their AGL performance.

Biolinguistics realizes a scientific approach to study language both as a biological object (the language faculty) and an internal, intensional and individual language system (I-language), spurring a cross-disciplinary exploration of the biological nature of human language. The poverty of stimulus (POS) in language acquisition, together with the roles played by neurobiological factors in linguistic aphasia, specific language impairment and mirror deficits, confirms the biological nature of the language faculty and I-language. Based on the property, the classic molecular genetic study reveals how human genetic endowments canalize the development of human language, and they interact with specific linguistic experience during the maturation of human language. Further, the rapid development of biological research promotes an increasing emphasis on a more nuanced molecular network system, along with the existing interest in one-gene-one-behavioral phenotype. Thus, a synthetic perspective on the study of the biological part of language will function as a new departure for the incoming biolinguistic inquiry.

There are numerous children and adolescents throughout the world who are either diagnosed with speech and language disorders or manifest any of them as a result of another disorder. Meanwhile, since the emergence of language as an innate capability, the question of whether it constitutes a behaviour or an innate ability has been debated for decades. There have been several theories developed that support and demonstrate the biological foundations of human language. Molecular evidence of the biological basis of language came from the FOXP2 gene, also known as the language gene. Taking a closer look at both human language and biology, biolinguistics is at the core of these inquiries—attempting to understand the aetiologies of the genetics of speech and language disorders in children and adolescents. This paper presents empirical evidence based on both scientometrics and bibliometrics. We collected data between 1935 and 2022 from Scopus, WOS, and Lens. A total of 1570 documents were analysed from Scopus, 1440 from the WOS, and 5275 from Lens. Bibliometric analysis was performed using Excel based on generated reports from these three databases. CiteSpace 5.8.R3 and VOSviewer 1.6.18 were used to conduct the scientometric analysis. Eight bibliometric and eight scientometric indicators were used to measure the development of the field of biolinguistics, including but not limited to the production size of knowledge, the most examined topics, and the most frequent concepts and variables. A major finding of our study is identifying the most examined topics in the genetics of speech and language disorders. These included: gestural communication, structural design, cultural evolution, neural network, language tools, human language faculty, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and theoretical perspective on language evolution.

This contribution proposes an introduction to the development and objectives of biolinguistics, as well as a reflection on its status as a scientific discipline. We show that, in general, the consideration of language as a biological property of our species, and not only as a cultural achievement of it, has had a remarkable effect on the development of linguistic theory, and on its connection with other fields of cognitive science, notably with psycholinguistics. We conclude that, although there is still much to be understood about how the brain processes and stores languages, about how this faculty evolved in our species, and how it develops in each person, the integration of theoretical linguistics and cognitive neuroscience is making us increasingly able to turn those mysteries into empirically tractable problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that, contrary to long-standing assumptions, syntactic traits, modeled here within the generative biolinguistic framework, provide insights into deep-time language history. To support this claim, we have encoded the diversity of nominal structures using 94 universally definable binary parameters, set in 69 languages spanning across up to 13 traditionally irreducible Eurasian families. We found a phylogenetic signal that distinguishes all such families and matches the family-internal tree topologies that are safely established through classical etymological methods and datasets. We have retrieved “near-perfect” phylogenies, which are essentially immune to homoplastic disruption and only moderately influenced by horizontal convergence, two factors that instead severely affect more externalized linguistic features, like sound inventories. This result allows us to draw some preliminary inferences about plausible/implausible cross-family classifications; it also provides a new source of evidence for testing the representation of diversity in syntactic theories.

The article reveals the commonality between poetics and genetics for the first time. Thus far, outside of cellular biology, attempts have been made from both (text)linguistics and semiotics to describe the genome and its interactions similarly to language. However, the approach in this manifesto relies particularly on the poetic function of language and its underlying self-referentiality as its starting point. Poetic relevance reveals itself explicitly in its relation to the cutting-edge concept of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), which thematizes abundant metrical and figurative phenomena and terms on several levels: accumulation, regularity, interval, different repetitions, rhythm; equivalency, substitution, connotation; synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, irony, implicature, paradox; palindrome, chiasmus, ellipsis, zeugma, calembour, polysyndeton; verses, stanzas, chapters, refrains, (identical) rhymes, collage, plot, poem, composition, text, hypertext, architext, orchestration; graphic imagery, symmetry - asymmetry; homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, archaisms, neologisms; words, phrases, sentences, syntax, definitions, quotes, palimpsest; cacophony, noise, harmony; self-reflexivity of the utterance and utterer. From this perspective, life stems from primordial poetics as the latter's first level. It is a convincing enough association to apply poetic analysis to the free interpretation process of genomes by cells. A universal law of nature is that symmetry dictates design (including asymmetry): poetics is everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that, contrary to long-standing assumptions, syntactic traits, modeled here within the generative biolinguistic framework, provide insights into deep-time language history. To support this claim, we have encoded the diversity of nominal structures using 94 universally definable binary parameters, set in 69 languages spanning across up to 13 traditionally irreducible Eurasian families. We found a phylogenetic signal that distinguishes all such families and matches the family-internal tree topologies that are safely established through classical etymological methods and datasets. We have retrieved "near-perfect" phylogenies, which are essentially immune to homoplastic disruption and only moderately influenced by horizontal convergence, two factors that instead severely affect more externalized linguistic features, like sound inventories. This result allows us to draw some preliminary inferences about plausible/implausible cross-family classifications; it also provides a new source of evidence for testing the representation of diversity in syntactic theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]