Abstract

Human language is the result of both biological and cultural evolution. To have the best chance of understanding language we must seek all the constraints of that evolution. In the first part of my thesis I propose the general hypothesis that the sensorimotor system is one of those constraints and argue that regardless of whether language is the result of biological evolution, cultural evolution, or both, we should expect idiosyncrasies of the sensorimotor system to be reflected in linguistic structure. The bulk of the thesis explores a particular version of this hypothesis – namely that visual attention and classification of objects are reflected in noun phrase syntax. Within the noun phrase the noun stem (e.g. “dog”) and number morphology (e.g. “-s”) are contributed by separate syntactic elements; I argue that this reflects a separation of functionality in the sensorimotor system. To begin an exploration of this hypothesis I draw upon existing models of visual attention by Itti and Koch (2000) and object classification by Mozer and Sitton (1998), adapting and combining them into a new computational model. The key new idea in the model is