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This book explores the origin and evolution of speech. The human speech system is in a league of its own in the animal kingdom and its possession dwarfs most other evolutionary achievements. During every second of speech we unconsciously use about 225 distinct muscle actions. To investigate the evolutionary origins of this prodigious ability, Peter MacNeilage draws on work in linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and animal behavior. He puts forward a neo-Darwinian account of speech as a process of descent in which ancestral vocal capabilities became modified in response to natural selection pressures for more efficient communication. His proposals include the crucial observa...
The Handbook of Speech Production is the first reference work to provide an overview of this burgeoning area of study. Twenty-four chapters written by an international team of authors examine issues in speech planning, motor control, the physical aspects of speech production, and external factors that impact speech production. Contributions bring together behavioral, clinical, computational, developmental, and neuropsychological perspectives on speech production to create a rich and truly interdisciplinary resource Offers a novel and timely contribution to the literature and showcases a broad spectrum of research in speech production, methodological advances, and modeling Coverage of planning, motor control, articulatory coordination, the speech mechanism, and the effect of language on production processes
This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity - the 'evo-devo revolution' - which bring to light deep homologies betw...
Though we have other distinguishing characteristics (walking on two legs, for instance, and relative hairlessness), the brain and the behavior it produces are what truly set us apart from the other apes and primates. And how this three-pound organ composed of water, fat, and protein turned a mammal species into the dominant animal on earth today is the story John S. Allen seeks to tell. Adopting what he calls a “bottom-up” approach to the evolution of human behavior, Allen considers the brain as a biological organ; a collection of genes, cells, and tissues that grows, eats, and ages, and is subject to the direct effects of natural selection and the phylogenetic constraints of its ancestr...
This monograph arose from a conference on the Production of Speech held at the University of Texas at Austin on April 28-30, 1981. It was sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Science, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Linguistics and Psychology Departments. The conference was the second in a series of conferences on human experimental psychology: the first, held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Psychology Department, resulted in publication of the monograph Neural Mechanisms in Behavior, D. McFadden (Ed.), Springer-Verlag, 1980. The choice of the particular topic of the second conference was motivated by the belief that the state of knowledge of speech production had recently reached a critical mass, and that a good deal was to be gained from bringing together the foremost researchers in this field. The benefits were the opportunity for the participants to compare notes on their common problems, the publication of a monograph giving a comprehensive state-of-the-art picture of this research area, and the provision of enormous intellectual stimulus for local students of this topic.
Human Motor Control is a elementary introduction to the field of motor control, stressing psychological, physiological, and computational approaches. Human Motor Control cuts across all disciplines which are defined with respect to movement: physical education, dance, physical therapy, robotics, and so on. The book is organized around major activity areas. - A comprehensive presentation of the major problems and topics in human motor control - Incorporates applications of work that lie outside traditional sports or physical education teaching
As a testament to the scope of Peter MacNeilage’s scholarly work across his 40 year career, contributions to this tribute volume represent a broad spectrum of the seminal issues addressed by phonetic and evolutionary science over a number of years. Approaches to the problems raised by attempting to understand these fundamental topics are illustrated in the broad diversity of paradigms represented in the volume. This diversity in itself is a tribute to the breadth of scholarly questions pursued by MacNeilage across his career. Chapters are arranged around five thematic areas. Two themes, Evolutionary Perspectives on Speech Production and Acquisition of Speech, reflect the major thrust of Pe...
Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences provides an authoritative account of the key topics in both theoretical and applied areas of speech communication, written by an international team of leading scholars and practitioners. Combines new and influential research, along with articulate overviews of the key topics in theoretical and applied areas of speech communication Accessibly structured into five major sections covering: experimental phonetics; biological perspectives; modelling speech production and perception; linguistic phonetics; and speech technology Includes nine entirely new chapters on topics such as phonetic notation and sociophonetics, speech technology, biological perspectives, and prosody A streamlined and re-oriented structure brings all contributions up-to-date with the latest research, whilst maintaining the features that made the first edition so useful
This book updates the Dual Coding Theory of mind (DCT), a theory of modern human cognition consisting of separate but interconnected nonverbal and verbal systems. Allan Paivio, a leading scholar in cognitive psychology, presents this masterwork as new findings in psychological research on memory, thought, language, and other core areas have flourished, as have pioneering developments in the cognitive neurosciences. Mind and Its Evolution provides a thorough exploration into how these adaptive nonverbal and verbal systems might have evolved, as well as a careful comparison of DCT with contrasting "single-code" cognitive theories. Divided into four parts, this text begins with a general, syste...
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