Publicado em: 18/12/2012

Prof. Robert Berwick do MIT-EUA palestra no INF

No dia 18 de dezembro, terça-feira, às 12h30min, o Instituto de Informática em conjunto com o Instituto de Física da UFRGS estará realizando um seminário com a presença do Prof. Robert Berwick, do MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Cambridge – EUA, que estará visitando os Institutos de 15 a 19 de dezembro.

Seminário Conjunto dos Institutos de Física e Informática

TERÇA-FEIRA, 18 de dezembro de 2012
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Horário: 12h30min
Duração: 1h
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Local: Auditório do Centro de Eventos do Instituto de Informática, Prédio 67
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Speaker: Prof. Robert Berwick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Estados Unidos

Title: Songs to Syntax: Cognition, Computation, and the Origin of Language

Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a resurgence of activity surrounding ‘biolinguistics’ along with a parallel, renewed interest in the connections between language and evolution. To be sure, from one standpoint it has often been said, quite correctly, that linguistic science just is biology: the study, however abstract, of a particular, apparently species-specific human ‘trait,’ knowledge of language. But beyond this immediate point, how might linguistics and biology, especially evolutionary biology, inform one another? How does one go about making a proper evolutionary argument? What can genomics and evolutionary biology tell us now about language, and what might be out of reach, now, or out of reach forever, and why? To answer such questions, this talk attempts to clear up some possible misunderstandings about evolutionary thinking that one might dub “vulgar Darwinism” – that is, the ‘popular’ versions of evolutionary theory that sometimes find their way into analyses about language and evolution. The bottom line is that proper evolutionary explanations are often much more difficult to execute than one might think, and that language is a particularly difficult, even uniquely difficult, case to crack. Like linguistics, there is a substantial body of knowledge and theory grounding modern evolutionary analysis, with subtleties that are often missed, even by biologists themselves.

For example, much excitement has followed from the full genome sequencing of our nearest living relative, the chimpanzee, with other primate genomes to come. However, the special problem of evolutionary inference given close but sparsely populated neighboring species suggests this may tell us very little about human cognitive faculties such as language. The well-known example of a putative ‘language gene,’ FOXP2, is a prime example: as we shall show, if we re-examine the data from Enard et al. (2002) more carefully, the differences between us and chimps, or for that matter, the more recent similarity between us and Neandertals (Krause et al., 2007) could be due to chance alone. Where then can we look for insight? The most recent research by Halle in language metrical systems combined with Chomsky’s most recent model of syntax may provide a possible and so far unexplored connection to birdsong.

Short Biography

Robert C. Berwick is Professor of Computer Science and Computational Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. at MIT in Computer Science in 1982, under the joint direction of Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, implementing the first modern computer program that could acquire language. A Professor at MIT now for over a quarter-century, Professor Berwick has written 10 books and more than 200 articles on the nature of human language and its computational properties, how language is learned, and how it changes over time. At MIT, he is a co-founder and co-director of its Center for Biological and Computational Learning, an interdisciplinary group dedicated to probing learning as the key to intelligence. Most recently, he has been investigating the biology of language from a comparative, evolutionary perspective. He has also written extensively on evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. He has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as MIT’s highest award given to faculty for exceptional research and teaching.