loader from loading.io

A new picture of language

Many Minds

Release Date: 06/26/2024

Universal emotions in fact and fiction show art Universal emotions in fact and fiction

Many Minds

Are human emotions universal? Or do they vary from one place to the next and from one time period to the next? It's a big question, an old question. And every discipline that's grappled with it brings is own take, its own framings and forms of evidence. Some researchers appeal to cross-cultural experiments; others turn to neuroimaging studies or conceptual analysis. Some even look to fiction. My guest today is , an Associate Professor of English Literature at Arizona State University. Brad is the author of a new book, ; in it he maps the landscape of debate around this long-contested topic....

info_outline
From the archive: Fermentation, fire, and our big brains show art From the archive: Fermentation, fire, and our big brains

Many Minds

Hi friends, We're taking care of some spring cleaning this week. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode. In the meantime, enjoy this favorite from our archives! - The Many Minds team ––––––––– [originally aired February 22, 2024] Brains are not cheap. It takes a lot of calories to run a brain, and the bigger your brain, the more calories it takes. So how is it that, over the last couple million years, the human brain tripled in size. How could we possibly have afforded that? Where did the extra calories come from? There's no shortage of suggestions out there. Some say...

info_outline
Howl, grunt, sing show art Howl, grunt, sing

Many Minds

The tree of life is a noisy place. From one branch come hoots and howls, from another come clicks and buzzes and whines. And coming from all over you hear the swell of song. But what is all this ruckus about? Why do so many animals communicate with sound? What kinds of meaning do these sounds convey? And—beyond the case of human speech—do any of these sounds merit the label of “language”? My guest today is , a zoologist at Cambridge University. Arik is an expert on vocal communication across the animal kingdom and the author of the recent book . Here, Arik and I talk about why the...

info_outline
The development of evolution show art The development of evolution

Many Minds

Evolution is not what it used to be. A lot has changed since Darwin's day. In the first half of the 20th century, evolutionary theory was integrated with an emerging understanding of genetics. Late in the 20th century, biologists started taking seriously the idea that organisms don't just adapt to their environments, they change them. Recently, researchers have started to acknowledge the role of culture in evolutionary processes. And so slowly our understanding of evolution has been reconsidered, updated, expanded. And more updates are underway. But it's not just our understanding of evolution...

info_outline
String theories show art String theories

Many Minds

Where would our species be without string? It's one of our most basic technologies—so basic that it's easy to overlook. But humans have used string—and its cousins rope, yarn, cordage, thread, etc.—for all kinds of purposes, stretching back tens of thousands of years. We've used it for knots and textiles and fishing nets and carrier bags and bow-strings and record-keeping devices. It's one of the most ubiquitous, flexible, and useful technologies we have. But we haven't only put string to practical purposes. We've also long used it to tickle our minds. My guest today is . Roope is a...

info_outline
The other half of the brain show art The other half of the brain

Many Minds

Neurons have long enjoyed a kind of rock star status. We think of them as the most fundamental units of the brain—the active cells at the heart of brain function and, ultimately, at the heart of behavior, learning, and more. But neurons are only part of the story—about half the story, it turns out. The other half of the brain is made up of cells called glia. Glia were long thought to be important structurally but not particularly exciting—basically stage-hands there to support the work of the neurons. But in recent decades, at least among neuroscientists, that view has faded. In our...

info_outline
A paradox of learning show art A paradox of learning

Many Minds

How do we learn? Usually from experience, of course. Maybe we visit some new place, or encounter a new tool or trick. Or perhaps we learn from someone else—from a teacher or friend or YouTube star who relays some shiny new fact or explanation. These are the kinds of experiences you probably first think of when you think of learning. But we can also learn in another way: simply by thinking. Sometimes we can just set our minds to work—just let the ideas already in our heads tumble around and spark off each other—and, as if by magic, come away with a new understanding of the world. But how...

info_outline
From the archive: The octopus and the android show art From the archive: The octopus and the android

Many Minds

Happy holidays, friends! We will be back with a new episode in January 2025. In the meantime, enjoy this favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired Jun 14, 2023] Have you heard of Octopolis? It’s a site off the coast of Australia where octopuses come together. It’s been described as a kind of underwater "settlement" or "city." Now, smart as octopuses are, they are not really known for being particularly sociable. But it seems that, given the right conditions, they can shift in that direction. So it's not a huge leap to wonder whether these kinds of cephalopod congregations could...

info_outline
Your brain on language show art Your brain on language

Many Minds

Using language is a complex business. Let's say you want to understand a sentence. You first need to parse a sequence of sounds—if the sentence is spoken—or images—if it's signed or written. You need to figure out the meanings of the individual words and then you need to put those meanings together to form a bigger whole. Of course, you also need to think about the larger context—the conversation, the person you're talking to, the kind of situation you're in. So how does the brain do all of this? Is there just one neural system that deals with language or several? Do different...

info_outline
Nestcraft show art Nestcraft

Many Minds

How do birds build their nests? By instinct, of course—at least that's what the conventional wisdom tells us. A swallow builds a swallow's nest; a robin builds a robin's nest. Every bird just follows the rigid template set down in its genes. But over the course of the last couple of decades, scientists have begun to take a closer look at nests—they've weighed and measured them, they've filmed the building process. And the conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up. These structures vary in all kinds of ways, even within a species. They're shaped by experience, by learning, by cultural...

info_outline
 
More Episodes

 If you've taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It's a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the relationship between the sounds and the meanings they convey is purely arbitrary. Human language consists, in other words, of abstract symbols. Now, of course, there are also sign languages, but these operate in the same way, just in a different medium. This, anyway, is the view of language that has dominated and defined linguistics for many decades. But some think it gets some pretty fundamental things pretty wrong. Some think we need a new picture of language altogether. 

My guest today is Dr. Neil Cohn. Neil is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication, in the Netherlands; he is also the director of the Visual Language Lab at Tilburg. For about two decades, Neil has been studying the rich properties of graphic systems—especially comics—and has built an argument that some constitute full-blown languages. His latest book, co-authored with, Joost Schilperoord, is titled A Multimodal Language Faculty. It challenges that longstanding, deeply held view of what language is. Instead, the book argues that the human language capacity combines three different modalities—the vocal modality (as in speech), the bodily modality (as in gesture), and the graphic modality (as in comics and other visual narratives). And each of these modalities is naturally able to support full-blown languages.

Here, Neil and I talk about the basic assumptions of modern linguistics and where those assumptions come from. We discuss the idea that there are three expressive modalities that come naturally to humans, with each modality optimized for certain kinds of meaning. We talk about Neil's career, not only as an academic, but as an illustrator. We discuss cross-cultural differences and similarities in comics, and how comics have changed over the last century. And, finally, we consider how Neil's framework challenges current theorizing about the evolution of language. Along the way, Neil and I touch on sign languages and homesign systems, visual style vs visual language, Peircean semiotics, animal tracks, cave art, emoji, upfixes, sand drawing, Manga, the refrain "I can't draw," and the idea that the graphic modality is the only one that's truly unique to our species. 

After this episode we'll be taking a bit of a summer break, but we'll be posting some old favorites to tide you over. Alright friends, hope you enjoy this one. On to my conversation with Neil Cohn. Enjoy!

 

 A transcript of this episode is available here

 

Notes and links

3:30 – An earlier paper by Dr. Cohn on the well-worn refrain “I can’t draw.” His more recent Twitter thread covering the topic. 

9:00 – An overview of research on homesign systems. For a broader discussion of differences between gesture, homesign systems, and established sign languages, see here

15:00 – A comic, ‘Chinese Room,’ commissioned by the philosopher Dan Dennett and drawn by Dr. Cohn.

19:30 – The webpage of Dr. Cohn’s graduate mentor, Ray Jackendoff.

25:00 – A brief overview paper by Dr. Cohn and Dr. Schilperoord on the need to “reimagine language.”

25:30 – The classic book, based on lecture notes, by Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Course in General Linguistics.' 

44:00 – For an overview of “bimodal bilingualism,” see here. 

50:00 – A study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on the processing of emoji substituted for words.

56:00 – A recent study by Dr. Cohn and colleagues on anaphora in visual narratives. 

58:30 – For our previous audio essay on animal (and human) tracks, see here

1:01:30 – For examples of scholarship on non-Western methods of visual storytelling, including Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see Dr. Cohn’s earlier edited volume here. For a deeper dive into sand drawing, see the monograph by Jenny Green here. 

1:03:00 – Dr. Cohn also recently published a book on cross-cultural aspects of comics, The Patterns of Comics. The book is the fruit of his lab’s TINTIN project

1:11:00 – For a video of Aboriginal Australian sand drawing, see here.

1:13:00 – See Dr. Cohn’s earlier book, Who Understands Comics?

1:15:00 – A study on “upfixes” by Dr. Cohn and a colleague.

1:22:00 – A popular article by Dr. Cohn on the linguistic status of emoji.

1:31:00 – For a deep dive into Peircean semiotics, see here.

1:36:00 – For my own general-audience treatment of “gesture first” theories of language evolution and the “modality transition” problem, see here.

1:37:00 – A paper by Dr. Jackendoff and Eva Wittenberg outlining their “complexity hierarchy.” 

­­­­1:50:00 – For the Getty museum exhibit associated with Dr. Cohn’s lecture, see here.

 

Recommendations

The Texture of the Lexicon, by Jenny Audring and Ray Jackendoff

Battle in the Mind Fields, by John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, hosted by James McElvenny

 

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. 

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.