| This class will investigate the latest work in genetics, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology in order to understand how language scaffolds human cognition and is an activity through which certain cognitive and conceptual developments are induced. Our readings will range across, for instance, a 5-page study entitled “Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin” by Dan Dediu and D. Robert Ladd (PNAS 2007) to Stephen Levinson’s remarkable book-length Space in Language and Cognition. Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (2003). We will also engage with a good deal of primatology, e.g. work from Michael Tomasello’s team at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, in order to tease out the ways that human cognition both reflects and is different from general primate cognition and to understand the role that language plays in the distinctive nature of human cognition. |
