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AbstractPeter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa and Joseph LeDoux’s The Deep History of Ourselves present radically different big pictures regarding the nature, evolution and distribution of consciousness in animals. In this essay review, I discuss the motivations behind these big pictures and try to steer a course between them.

This paper explains the Islamic expansion in Greater Senegambia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from an Atlantic perspective. It discusses the spread of the Islamic faith in West Africa ...

In their recent paper on “Challenges in mathematical cognition”, Alcock and colleagues (Alcock et al. [2016]. Challenges in mathematical cognition: A collaboratively-derived research agenda. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 2, 20-41) defined a research agenda through 26 specific research questions. An important dimension of mathematical cognition almost completely absent from their discussion is the cultural constitution of mathematical cognition. Spanning work from a broad range of disciplines – including anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science, history of science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology – we argue that for any research agenda on mathematical cognition the cultural dimension is indispensable, and we propose a set of exemplary research questions related to it. publishedVersion

In this paper we offer a first systematic account of the noun class system of Ngwi, a West-Coastal Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. First, we describe the synchronic system of noun class prefixes and the agreement patterns they trigger on constituents of the noun phrase and the verb. Second, we provide a diachronic analysis of the innovations the synchronic Ngwi noun class system underwent with respect to the noun class system reconstructed for the most recent common ancestor of all Narrow Bantu languages. Finally, we compare the morphological innovations found in the Ngwi noun class system with those identified in the noun class systems of other West-Coastal Bantu varieties and assess whether some of these could be diagnostic for internal classification within this western Bantu branch.

Summary Can preverbal infants utilize logical reasoning such as disjunctive inference? This logical operation requires keeping two alternatives open (A or B), until one of them is eliminated (if not A), allowing the inference: B is true. We presented to 10-month-old infants an ambiguous situation in which a female voice was paired with two faces. Subsequently, one of the two faces was presented with the voice of a male. We measured infants' preference for the correct face when both faces and the initial voice were presented again. Infant pupillary response was measured and utilized as an indicator of cognitive load at the critical moment of disjunctive inference. We controlled for other possible explanations in three additional experiments. Our results show that 10-month-olds can correctly deploy disjunction and negation to disambiguate scenes, suggesting that disjunctive inference does not rely on linguistic constructs. Highlights • 10-month-old infants have no logical operators in their lexicon • Nevertheless, they can use logical deduction in case of an ambiguous situation • They correctly deduce which faces and voices are paired through disjunctive inference • Infants' performance in this task can be followed by measuring their pupil dilation Biological Science, Neuroscience, Cognitive neuroscience, Behavioral Neuroscience Graphical abstract

AbstractRadical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of how the direct perception of the organism-environment relation is possible. Central to his account was the notion of a medium for direct perception. However Gibson provided two mutually inconsistent accounts of the medium leading to problems for his radical empiricism. We develop an account of the medium that does justice to ecological psychology’s radical empiricist roots. To complement this account of the medium we detail a usage-based account of information. Together they allow us to propose a novel radical empiricist view of direct perception. We then return to the notion of medium and expand it to include sociomaterial practices. We show how direct perception happens in the midst of social life, and is made possible by an active achieving and maintaining of a pragmatic relation with the environment.

In many languages in Micronesia, clever ways of extending their counting systems to numbers far beyond imagination were developed in precolonial times. Here, we provide an exhaustive overview of these systems, highlight their characteristics, and account for some of their most intriguing features. Based on a critical assessment of the available data and the in-depth analysis of both paradigmatic cases and peculiarities, we draw inferences about some more general patterns that suggest a rather long tradition of specific ways of counting both in Micronesia and the area beyond. publishedVersion

This study investigates the form of deictic gestures used by speakers of the Quiahije variety of Eastern Chatino (Otomangean, Zapotecan) spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico. An analysis of over six hours of interviews about local landmarks reveals that Quiahije Chatino speakers consistently use the far-is-up strategy to convey target distance in their deictic gestures—the farther the target, the higher and more expansive the form of the gesture. Participants in the study consistently used the far-is-up strategy to modify two types of deictic gestures: points and ‘go’ emblems (a gesture conveying forward motion). For points alone, participants combined the far-is-up strategy with the use of distinct handshapes for pointing to nearby versus distant targets. By systematically examining how deictic gestures are modified in one community in Mexico, this study lays the groundwork for further comparative and typological research on gestural deixis.

Abstract In this article I demonstrate that there is a pervasive lexico-semantic association bones are strength in the languages of Melanesia, but that its linguistic expression is highly varied; languages are scattered along a lexical-to-clausal cline in their expression of the association between bone and strength, with a large number of language-specific idioms based on the association to be observed in Melanesia. I argue that the striking areality of this lexico-semantic association is readily missed in top-down approaches to lexical semantic typology that rely, for instance, on databases of word lists, or on narrow search domains limited to the meanings of simplex lexemes.

This paper presents some facts about the syntax of subject pronouns in contact. We investigate agreement and EPP-checking in Brazilian Venetan, a heritage northern Italo-Romance variety spoken in southern Brazil in contact with Brazilian Portuguese. Central Venetan, the northern Italo-Romance variety that constitutes the basis of Brazilian Venetan, is a null-subject language presenting agreement-like subject clitics; Brazilian Portuguese is a partial pro-drop language, in which null subjects are allowed only in precise syntactic conditions and it is developing reduced pronominal subjects. We will address two changes we detected in Brazilian Venetan with respect to the syntax of subject pronouns: the non-contrastive realisation of the first person singular tonic pronoun, and the change in the syntax of subject clitics, which seem to be used as weak pronouns rather than agreement items. We will claim that the first change has to be connected to the simplification of interface conditions between syntax and discourse, a pattern which is commonly attested in bilingual speakers, while the second can be quite safely ascribed to the contact with a partially overlapping structure, namely the reduced pronominal subjects in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. We analyse the two phenomena, trying to find possible links between them in order to develop an analysis of subject clitics in contact and the conditions in which we may most probably find an effect of contact.