The Evolution of Language

This volume presents approximately 100 refereed papers and abstracts from the conference held March 2012, in Kyoto, Japan. The EVOLANG conference is held biennially, bringing together researchers in anthropology, archaeology, biology, cognitive science, genetics, linguistics primatology, psychology, and other disciplines--truly a multidisciplinary event. A small sampling of topics: language acquisition by cognitive developmental robotics, semiotic investigations into early forms of symbolism and language, the revolution of human language and its origin from sound imitation, ambiguity resolution and evolution of word order, a search for metacognition in avians, and regularizations of linguistic variation in populations. Making navigation of the contents somewhat difficult, there is no thematic organization of this wide variety of topics, nor is there a subject index. The four editors are affiliated as follows: Thomas C. Scott-Phillips and Monica Tamariz (U. of Edinburgh, UK), and Erica A. Cartmill and James R. Hurford (U. of Chicago, US). Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)