Monday, October 02, 2017
Quebec - Napoli - Paris - Search the world for the Origin of Language
Psychomechanics and the Origin of Language
Abstract:
Europe and the World are waking up to the crucial question of the origin of language: without a clear and scientific answer to this question there will be no Artificial Intelligence device able to speak like us.
We have to understand the phylogenic origin of language, how emerging Homo Sapiens some 250,000 years ago or more, on the basis of what he inherited from previous Hominins from which he was descending invented and developed articulated language around three successive phylogenic articulations that no one before him had mastered. Neanderthals and Denisovans had maybe or even probably been able to use the first articulation but all the rest in their communication was tonal and body language, including of course intonation.
In the same way we have to understand how our own children learn from the communicational situation in which they are plunged from even before birth how to capture the syntax of this communicational situation and invest it into the three articulations they learn mimetically.
The most important element in this perspective is the cognitive dimension of such a linguistic approach, and I insist it has to be seen as linguistic and not anthropological, archaeological or even socio-psychological. We will be able to produce a real translating machine when that machine is able to learn human languages the way humans invented them and the way humans learn them and develop them. Any big data approach, à la Google, will only be good enough for stereotyped languages (Language for Special Purposes) that does not vary from one person to another. But any creative use of language will evade such machines. . .
We have to understand the phylogenic origin of language, how emerging Homo Sapiens some 250,000 years ago or more, on the basis of what he inherited from previous Hominins from which he was descending invented and developed articulated language around three successive phylogenic articulations that no one before him had mastered. Neanderthals and Denisovans had maybe or even probably been able to use the first articulation but all the rest in their communication was tonal and body language, including of course intonation.
In the same way we have to understand how our own children learn from the communicational situation in which they are plunged from even before birth how to capture the syntax of this communicational situation and invest it into the three articulations they learn mimetically.
The most important element in this perspective is the cognitive dimension of such a linguistic approach, and I insist it has to be seen as linguistic and not anthropological, archaeological or even socio-psychological. We will be able to produce a real translating machine when that machine is able to learn human languages the way humans invented them and the way humans learn them and develop them. Any big data approach, à la Google, will only be good enough for stereotyped languages (Language for Special Purposes) that does not vary from one person to another. But any creative use of language will evade such machines. . .
Research Interests:
Cognitive Psychology, Languages and Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Linguistics, Origin of Language, and Phylogeny of Language
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:08 PM 
