Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the (...) universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of “universal,” we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. (shrink)

Is calculation possible without language? Or is the human ability for arithmetic dependent on the language faculty? To clarify the relation between language and arithmetic, we studied numerical cognition in speakers of Mundurukú, an Amazonian language with a very small lexicon of number words. Although the Mundurukú lack words for numbers beyond 5, they are able to compare and add large approximate numbers that are far beyond their naming range. However, they fail in exact arithmetic with numbers larger than 4 (...) or 5. Our results imply a distinction between a nonverbal system of number approximation and a language-based counting system for exact number and arithmetic. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The career of Benjamin Lee Whorf might, on the one hand, be described as that of a businessman of specialized talents— one of those individuals ...

As we move around in our environment, and interact with it, many of the most important problems we face involve the processing of spatial information. We have to be able to navigate by perceiving and remembering the locations and orientations of the objects around us relative to ourself; we have to sense and act upon these objects; and we need to move through space to position ourselves in favourable locations or to avoid dangerous ones. While this appears so simple that (...) we don't even think about it, the difficulty of solving these problems has been shown in the repeated failure of artificial systems to perform these kinds of tasks efficiently. In contrast, humans and other animals routinely overcome these problems every single day. This book examines some of the neural substrates and mechanisms that support these remarkable abilities. The hippocampus and the parietal cortex have been implicated in various core spatial behaviours, such as the ability to localise an object and navigate to it. Damage to these areas in humans and animals leads to impairment of these spatial functions. This collection of papers, written by internationally recognized experts in the field, reviews the evidence that each area is involved in spatial cognition, examines the mechanisms underlying the generation of spatial behaviours, and considers the relative roles of the parietal and hippocampal areas, including how each interacts with the other. The papers integrate a wide range of theoretical and experimental approaches, and touch on broader issues relating to memory and imagery. As such, this book represents the state of the art of current research into the neural basis of spatial cognition. It should be of interest to anyone - researchers or graduate students - working in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and cognition generally. (shrink)