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Casillas, M., Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2019). How much speech do Tseltal Mayan children hear? Daylong averages and interactional bursts. Talk presented at the 4th Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD 2019). Potsdam, Germany. 2019-06-13 - 2019-06-15.
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Levinson, S. C., & Casillas, M. (2019). Ruminations on the functions and cognitive prerequisites of kinship. Talk presented at the workshop Revisiting the Evolution of Kinship Terms. Canberra, Australia. 2019-02-27 - 2019-03-01.
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Majid, A., Haun, D. B. M., Rapold, C. J., Call, J., Janzen, G., & Levinson, S. C. (2008). Cognitive Inheritance and Cultural Override in Human Spatial Cognition. Talk presented at the 2008 AAAS Annual Meeting. 90-Minute Symposium. “Thinking with and without language”. Boston, MA. 2008-02-15.
Abstract
Human languages differ in which spatial frame they habitually use. We survey these differences and present a study investigating whether this linguistic difference influences spatial cognition. We compared humans whose languages differ in their spatial relational frames with apes - Pongo, Gorilla, and Pan - on a nonlinguistic spatial task. The same spatial frame was used by all three great ape genera, as well as 4-year-olds in both languages. Older children and adults diverged, using the frame consistent with their language. This suggests that young humans share with apes an inherited primate basis for spatial frames, but that this preference can be overridden by language and culture in humans.
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