Some constraints on the lexicons of human languages have cognitive roots present in baboons
Isabelle Dautriche (CLE, University of Edinburgh)
Tuesday, May 7
11:00am-12:00pm
DSB, room 1.17
There are constraints on what a lexical element may denote: there is no word for ‘cat or parrot’, intuitively because this would lump together two “separate” classes of objects. I will present you experiments that show that, even in non-linguistic settings, human and non-human animals tend to group objects into classes following a “connectedness constraint”. This result suggests that the cognitive roots responsible for (at least some) regularities across the lexicons of human languages are present in a similar form in other species.