CARTA Public Symposium – How Language Evolves

Join the live webcast! “How Language Evolves” is the topic of a free public symposium hosted by the UCSD/Salk Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) on Friday, February 20th (1:00 – 5:30 pm PST), co-chaired by Roger Levy (UC San Diego) and David Perlmutter (UC San Diego).

This symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence:

1) ways languages get new structure not present in the language of the previous generation(s) of speakers or signers;

2) what contrasts between new and mature languages reveal about how language evolves;

3) neuroscientific investigations of functional specialization for language in the human brain and its dependence on the linguistic input the language learner gets during cognitive development.