Evolution, Perfection, and Theories of Language

In this article it is argued that evolutionary plausibility must be made an important constraining factor when building theories of language. Recent suggestions that presume that language is necessarily a perfect or optimal system are at odds with this position, evolutionary theory showing us that evolution is a meliorizing agent often producing imperfect solutions. Perfection of the linguistic system is something that must be demonstrated, rather than presumed. Empirically, examples of imperfection are found not only in nature and in human cognition, but also in language — in the form of ambiguity, redundancy, irregularity, movement, locality conditions, and extra-grammatical idioms. Here it is argued that language is neither perfect nor optimal, and shown how theories of language which place these proper-ties at their core run into both conceptual and empirical problems

Top-down influence in young children's linguistic ambiguity resolution.

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children’s linguistic ambiguity resolution by evaluating whether children rely largely or completely on lexical associations to resolve lexical ambiguities (e.g., the word swing primes the baseball meaning of bat) or additionally integrate top-down global plausibility. Using a picture choice task, we compared 4-year-olds ’ ability to resolve polysemes and homophones with a Bayesian algorithm reliant purely on lexical associations and found that the algorithm’s power to predict children’s choices was limited. A 2nd experiment confirmed that children override associations and integrate top-down plausibility. We discuss this with regard to models of psycholinguistic development

Mineral Resources of the Marble Canyon Wilderness Study Area, White Pine County, Nevada, and Millard County, Utah

The 19,150-acre Marble Canyon Wilderness Study Area (NV-040-086) was evaluated for mineral resources (known) and mineral resource potential (undiscovered), and field work was conducted in 1987. The acreage includes 6,435 acres that is now designated as part of the Mount Moriah Wilderness under the Nevada Wilderness Protection Act of 1989 (S. 974), most but not all of which is included in 8,300 acres fro which the U.S. Bureau of Land Management requested a mineral survey. In this report, the wilderness study area, or simply the study area refers to the entire 19,150-acre tract. The area in underlain by quartzite shale and carbonate rocks. The norther Snake Range decollement is a detachment surface within the study area that separates rocks of similar age but different metamorphic grade. Large inferred subeconomic limestone and marble resources i the study area have no special or unique properties. The mineral resource potential for limestone and marble is high in two canyons and is moderate in the rest of the wilderness study area. Parts of the study area above and along the northern Snake Range decollement have low potential for undiscovered deposits of gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, tungsten, molybdenum, beryllium, and flourite. A zone around barite-bearing rock penetrated by adits inside the southeast boundary of the study area has moderate potential for barite, and the surrounding area has low potential for barite; both areas also have low potential for silver, copper, lead, zinc, and tungsten. The entire study area has moderate potential for oil and gas and low potential for geothermal energy resources

Stepwise acquisition of vocal combinatorial capacity in songbirds and human infants

Human language, as well as birdsong, relies on the ability to arrange vocal elements in novel sequences. However, little is known about the ontogenetic origin of this capacity. We tracked the development of vocal combinatorial capacity in three species of vocal learners, combining an experimental approach in zebra finches with an analysis of natural development of vocal transitions in Bengalese finches and pre-lingual human infants and found a common, stepwise pattern of acquiring vocal transitions across species. In our first study, juvenile zebra finches were trained to perform one song and then the training target was altered, prompting the birds to swap syllable order, or insert a new syllable into a string. All birds solved these permutation tasks in a series of steps, gradually approximating the target sequence by acquiring novel pair-wise syllable transitions, sometimes too slowly to fully accomplish the task. Similarly, in the more complex songs of Bengalese finches, branching points and bidirectional transitions in song-syntax were acquired in a stepwise manner, starting from a more restrictive set of vocal transitions. The babbling of pre-lingual human infants revealed a similar developmental pattern: instead of a single developmental shift from reduplicated to variegated babbling (i.e., from repetitive to diverse sequences), we observed multiple shifts, where each novel syllable type slowly acquired a diversity of pair-wise transitions, asynchronously over development. Collectively, these results point to a common generative process that is conserved across species, suggesting that the long-noted gap between perceptual versus motor combinatorial capabilities in human infants1 may arise from the challenges in constructing new pair-wise transitions

Infant Rule Learning: Advantage Language, or Advantage Speech?

<div><p>Infants appear to learn abstract rule-like regularities (e.g., <em>la la da</em> follows an AAB pattern) more easily from speech than from a variety of other auditory and visual stimuli (Marcus et al., 2007). We test if that facilitation reflects a specialization to learn from speech alone, or from modality-independent communicative stimuli more generally, by measuring 7.5-month-old infants’ ability to learn abstract rules from sign language-like gestures. Whereas infants appear to easily learn many different rules from speech, we found that with sign-like stimuli, and under circumstances comparable to those of Marcus et al. (1999), hearing infants were able to learn an ABB rule, but not an AAB rule. This is consistent with results of studies that demonstrate lower levels of infant rule learning from a variety of other non-speech stimuli, and we discuss implications for accounts of speech-facilitation.</p> </div

Chip-to-chip quantum teleportation and multi-photon entanglement in silicon

Exploiting semiconductor fabrication techniques, natural carriers of quantum information such as atoms, electrons, and photons can be embedded in scalable integrated devices. Integrated optics provides a versatile platform for large-scale quantum information processing and transceiving with photons. Scaling up the integrated devices for quantum applications requires highperformance single-photon generation and photonic qubit-qubit entangling operations. However, previous demonstrations report major challenges in producing multiple bright, pure and identical single-photons, and entangling multiple photonic qubits with high fidelity. Another notable challenge is to noiselessly interface multiphoton sources and multiqubit operators in a single device. Here we demonstrate on-chip genuine multipartite entanglement and quantum teleportation in silicon, by coherently controlling an integrated network of microresonator nonlinear single-photon sources and linear-optic multiqubit entangling circuits. The microresonators are engineered to locally enhance the nonlinearity, producing multiple frequencyuncorrelated and indistinguishable single-photons, without requiring any spectral filtering. The multiqubit states are processed in a programmable linear circuit facilitating Bell-projection and fusion operation in a measurement-based manner. We benchmark key functionalities, such as intra-/inter-chip teleportation of quantum states, and generation of four-photon Greenberger-HorneZeilinger entangled states. The production, control, and transceiving of states are all achieved in micrometer-scale silicon chips, fabricated by complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor processes. Our work lays the groundwork for scalable on-chip multiphoton technologies for quantum computing and communication