[via the "Scientific American":http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000C79B4-EA89-1069-AA8983414B7F0000]
From a UCLA press release:
bq. UCLA scientists report parallels between human speech and the song of a bird, findings that may contain clues to human speech disorders.
The research by a team led by Stephanie White, UCLA assistant professor of physiological science, supports the theory that two genes shared by humans and songbirds, FoxP1 and FoxP2, may play a critical role in human speech, and speech disorders.
The research on the FoxP1 and FoxP2 genes is reported in “a paper”:http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5589-03.2004 in the March 31, 2004 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, see also this “companion paper”:http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4369-03.2004 in the same issue.
Update: Mark Liberman blogs about this work over at “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000716.html. Among other things, he reports on some earlier work on FoxP2, in particular Enard et.al., who argue that FoxP2 has changed relatively recently among humans (hints of the emergence of the language faculty?):
bq. FoxP2 “has been the target of selection during recent human evolution”, and that the hominid innovations in this gene occured “during the last 200,000 years of human history, that is, concomitant with or subsequent to the emergence of anatomically modern humans”. A word of caution: according to their model, the most likely time since the innovation is 0 years; they indulge in a certain amount of hand-waving to re-interpret this as “during the last 200,000 years”.
By the way, that’s quite some hand-waving (to get from 0 years to during the last 200,000 years). This is what we in the semantic trade would call the Extended Now.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Saturday, April 3rd, 2004, at 3:53 pm.
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