The 9th International Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics

The 9^th International Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics (CIEL-9) (Dijiu Jie Yanhua Yuyanxue Guoji Yantaohui 第九届演化語言學國際研討會)¹ took place in Yunnan Minzu University (Yunnan Minzu Daxue), August 25-27, 2017. The conference was organized by School of Ethnic Cultures of Yunnan Minzu University.² There were 187 experts and students in total, mainly from 64 universities and institutions in the region of China Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan; USA, Canada, Australia, Austria, Japan and Korea, attending the three-day conference. The 11 keynote speeches and 77 oral presentations included five major themes (suggested by the author of the report): 1) the development of language, cognition and the brain, 2) language contact and evolution, 3) the origins of Chinese, 4) diachronic and synchronic study of language, and 5) other language evolution related research (such as speech disorder and second language acquisition). Both Chinese and English were working languages of this conference.

1. THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND THE BRAIN

William S-Y. Wang (Wang Shiyuan 王士元）of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) as the honorary chairman of the conference, gave a keynote speech on "Language and Cognition across the Health-Span." The focus was a consideration of the significant association between the development of the brain and the development of child language, as well as the recession of language and cognition in the sunset of life. He started by reviewing the evolution of the human body: compared to chimpanzees, human infants develop much more complex cognitive processes, such as discriminating phonetic contrasts, likely as a result partly of their significantly larger brain volume. It is noteworthy that language acquisition happens when the infant's brain weight approaches that of adults. In contrast, there is a decline of brain function in the elderly, associated with structural changes such as the shrinkage of hippocampus. It has been hypothesized that older adults might recruit cognitive resources at lower loads to compensate for cognitive decline. It is important to pay more attention to the neuro-degeneration in the elderly and there is an urgent need for us to come up with better diagnoses and treatments for the senior population with neuropsychiatric disorder.

Peng Gang 彭剛 also from PolyU presented the keynote speech "Brain Plasticity Reflected by Using Linguistic Tones." He pointed out that the brain has amazing ability to reorganize itself by forming new connections between neurons throughout an individual's life course. It is necessary to note that different languages shape different brains and different brains produce different perceptions. What is more, different perceptions would produce different behaviors and different behaviors then characterize different languages, which form the triangle model discussed by William S-Y. Wang (2009).³

With respect to the correlation of brain evolution and conceptual complexity, Thomas Schoenemann of Indiana University shared his views on "Evolution of Brain and Language" in the keynote speech. He noted that concepts are based upon complex networks connecting different brain regions. Increasing brain size leads to increasing specialization of parts of the brain and the size of brain areas are proportional to the degree of elaboration of functions, which means that larger brain size would lead to richer conceptual understanding. The combination of these suggests an increasing need for grammar to allow efficient communication.

Similarly, combining the linguistic observations and neural-coding observations, Keith Johnson of University of California at Berkeley gave a keynote speech on "Exemplar Models of Phonology: An Intermediate Representation." He emphasized that the exemplar-based memory fills in details of formal linguistic theory with distribution and impact of instances and are compatible with principles of neural implementation.

The keynote speech of "The Evolution from Chimpanzee's Vocal Tract to Human's" presented by Kong Jiangping 孔江平 of Peking University focused on the evolution of the vocal tract, which is correlated closely with the emergence of speech. The most significant vocal tract difference between humans and chimpanzees lies in the number of the vocal tract chambers: the human vocal tract possesses a configuration featuring two chambers, while the chimpanzee's has only one chamber. The two-chamber configuration enables humans to produce much...