GLOSSARY
[prepared for Language Origins Society by RMA]

• Action constancy An analogy to perceptual constancy in that purposeful actions are performed to achieve constant results despite the differing circumstances in which they are performed.
• Action potential Nerve impulse; brief electrical signal that propagates along an axon or muscle fibre.
• Afferent Axon carrying an action potential from the periphery towards the central nervous system (eg from the retina of the eye to the visual areas of the brain).
• Anencephalic neonates Infants born without all or part of the brain, particularly the cerebral cortex.
• Anthropomorphism Ascribing human characteristics to animals or physical events.
• Apraxia Inability to carry out controlled purposeful movements (often accompanying aphasia).
• Artificial Intelligence Al Making of computer programs or machines that simulate human abilities eg language, problem solving, vision.
• Auditory targetting In articulating a word, or collection of speech-sounds, the speaker aims to produce a particular final result, despite any otherwise distorting or constraining factors, eg speaking in a whisper, speaking with teeth clenched (in the same way as in trying to touch an object, a person aims his hand at the target, using a pattern of movement appropriate to the particular circumstances).
• Axon Nerve fibre leading from a neuron or nerve-cell which transmits the ali-or-nothing axon potential (electrical signal) to another nerve-cell or to a muscle end-organ.
• Ballistic Movement powered and guided only when it is begun, 96 as in throwing or firing a rocket. In the case of ballistic eye movements, the assumption is that rapid movements are pre-programmed, and not subject to alteration or correction before they reach their target.
• Between category/within category See categorical perception. Sounds may differ in their physical features but be perceived as the same sound, that is, there is within category variation. Other sounds may be distinguished as belonging to different categories: between category perception.
• Bipedalism Having two feet (like birds, or humans).
• Categorical perception Perception in terms of distinct categories eg blue, red, yellow.
• Categorical perception of speech means perception of speech-sounds as eg /b/ or /p/ and not any intermediate sound between /b/ and /p/.
• Central nervous system The brain and spinal cord as distinct from the peripheral nervous system, that is, sensory receptors, nerves directly stimulating muscles and 50 on.
• Central pattern generator CPG Collections of linked nerve-cells which without external stimulus produce a self-sustaining pattern of activity and are responsible eg for wing-movements in flying, swimming etc.
• Cerebral cortex The sheet of nerve cells and fibres covering the surface of the human brain.
• Chinchilla A small rodent the size of a large squirrel native to the mountains of Peru and Chile.
• Co-articulation In the acoustic analysis of speech-sound, the recorded traces show that there is overlapping in the production of speech-sounds.
• Code A set of signs, sounds, or other physical events adopted to form a system for the communication of information.
• Cognitive map The existence in the nervous system of patternings having a topological or other orderly relation to features of the external world.
• Coriolis Force arising as a result of rotation.
• Corollary discharge Pattern of afferent nerve impulses which convey information about projected movements to other parts of the brain than those directly concerned with producing the movements.
• Cortical map The display of receptor neurons over the cortical surface in the relative positions that they occupy on the body surface.
• Critical period (sensitive period) Time during which in a developing organism (kitten, young infant) the nervous system is ready, if given a suitable input, to develop a program provided by its inherited capacity, for instance for vision or language.
• Cross-modal In the central nervous system, activity that links together neural systems concerned with different modalities eg linking perception of colour and perception of musical sounds.
• Culture The particular system of symbols, ideas, values, and artefacts used by a group of people.
• Cuspids Mathematical term referring to the point on a graph at which a curve begins to reverse its direction and to trace a mirror image of itself (a tooth-like pattern on the graph).
• Deafferentiation The cutting or otherwise destruction of the peripheral nervous machinery which normally conveys sensory information to the central nervous system.
• Dendrite Process of a neuron specialized to act as a receptor; post-synaptic region of a neuron.
• Efferent An axon that conducts impulses away from the central nervous system to the periphery, particularly the axons of nerves concerned with movement.
• Embryogenesis The process of development of the embryo.
• Ethology The study of animal behaviour in natural conditions.
• Excitatory Tending to stimulate a nerve~ll to produce an action potential.
• Expressive motor programs Patterns of action which express internal states of organization eg facial expression and, by extension, speech patterns.
• Extraocular muscles Six small muscles between the eyeball and eye socket, producing movements of the eye.
• Feature analysers See feature detection. Part of the nervous system concerned eg with vision may operate by breaking up the total visual stimulus at any time into 'features' that is, individual parts of the visual input that are recognized by specialized cell-organizations that form feature-detectors.
• Feature detectors Cells in the brain that are especially sensitive to specific external events eg to a visible contour set at a particular angle or to a particular speech sound.
• Fixed action patterns Programs of action of animals which in their course are predetermined and follow a regular sequence eg nest-building, burrow- construction. Animals vary in the extent to which the action patterns are fully determined or are open to modification in course of execution or in different environmental circumstances.
• Fluid genome Recent discovery that the genetic material of an individual is subject to much greater change and variation than had previously been supposed, with the multiple repetition of large parts of the genome, the transfer of parts of genes to different positions on a chromosome or between different chromosomes, the occurrence of cases where information is read into the genome from the external cellular environment (reverse transcription).
• Ganglion Discrete collection of nerve ceils; ganglion cells.
• Gene A hereditary unit located on the chromosomes in the nucleus of cells.
• Genetic/epigenetic In relation to development of an embryo, the terms distinguish between information contained in the genome, the inherited information of the individual, and processes involved as the inherited information is used in the development of the organism.
• Genome The complete set of genes of an individual, that is, the total hereditary material.
• Genotype The inherited program of instructions that controls the development and life of an individual belonging to a particular species.
• Group-selection Darwinian evolutionary theory of natural selection is based on the idea that organisms less well-adapted to the environment will not survive or will not leave descendants in competition with other better-adapted individuals. Group-selection is an extension of this which suggests that competition to survive also operates between groups as well as between individuals, and that the success or failure of a group can have effects on the evolutionary history of different species, with groups developing more effective means of cooperative action, communication etc, surviving or growing at the expense of less well-adapted groups.
• Gustofacial Relating to facial movements associated with tasting.
• Hardware The actual material of a computer. The system of operation determined by the construction of the computer and not by the user of it, the programmer.
• Hard-wired Programs incorporated into the structure of a computer and therefore not variable by the software program. In the body, 'reflexes' are hard-wired and 50 are other connections formed by heredity and not subject to modification by learning.
• Hierarchical structure A system in which there are higher and lower levels, arranged systematically in a pyramid, as in the structure of an army, or in the structure of a language built up from elementary speech-sounds, formed into words, combined into sentences and then into stretches of discourse.
• Holistic Relating to the total operation of a complex system eg the view that the brain operates as a whole and some activities of it cannot be broken down into component parts.
• Innate A rather imprecise word which assumed that behavioural or other characteristics of a living creature must be either fully developed before birth or acquired subsequently by learning after birth.
• Interneuron A neuron that is neither sensory nor motor but constitutes a link between other neurons, which may themselves be interneurons, sensory or motor neurons.
• Inverse dynamics Contrasted with inverse kinematics ie the determination of the component forces which have gone to produce an observed final change in forces eg of a moving object.
• Inverse kinematics Given knowledge of an achieved pattern of movement, calculation of the component elements of movement required to produce the observed movement.
• Isomorphic Having a structure related in a uniform way to the structure of another system.
• Kinematic Dealing with aspects of motion without consideration of force or interaction (contrasted with dynamics).
• Kinesic Concerned with bodily activity, related to praxis.
• Laterality The specialization of the left and right hemispheres of the brain for different functions eg the left hemisphere is usually more concerned with speech and language than the right hemisphere.
• Lexical Relating to the lexicon of language, that is, the collection of individual words which are available in the language-community.
• Markov chain A set of actions or events where the nature of each individual action or event is determined by probabilities derived from the immediately preceding action or event.
• Modality A category of function. Vision, hearing and touch are afferent sensory modalities. More specifically the segment of brain function concerned with a particular aspect of perception or behaviour, eg the speech modality.
• Model A representation of something by a process of mapping of its characteristics.
• Modular organization A system built up from structurally or functionally uniform component elements; a structure made from a limited number of building blocks.
• Morphology The study of the form and structure of organisms; used also to refer to the form and structure of a particular animal or animal part.
• Mosaic evolution A process of evolution in which over time a number of elements which have come into existence independently come together to form a new more complicated system. A technological analogy might be the independent development and later coming together of steam-generation, electromagnetic induction and engineering techniques to make possible construction of an electric power station.
• Motor Relating to those parts of the nervous system concerned with the control of movement.
• Motor control The system in the central nervous system which determines patterns of bodily movement.
• Motoneuron (motor neuron) A neuron that innervates skeletal muscle.
• Motor program A program of the brain for producing a particular pattern of action.
• Motor theory of speech perception Theory associated with the Haskins Laboratory that there is a direct relation between the perception of speech-sounds and the neuromuscular organization responsible for the production of speech-sounds.
• Motor theory of thought Theory associated with J.B. Watson which assumed that thought was nothing but subvocal speech.
• Motor unit The unit formed by a motor neuron and the skeletal muscle fibres it innervates.
• Mynah bird A variety of Asian starling (Gracula religiosa) easily taught to pronounce words when kept in captivity.
• Nanocephalic With an abnormally small brain.
• Neocortical Relating to the neocortex, the posterior part of the cerebral cortex, an area of brain controlling higher-thought processes.
• Nerve A collection of axons (nerve-fibres), usually peripheral, that travel a common route.
• Nerve impulse The electrical signal that passes without decrement along a nerve fibre, also called an action potential.
• Neural motor system The parts of the central nervous system involved in the control of bodily movement.
• Neuroecology The idea that in the embryonic development of the nervous system, nerve-cells compete with each other for survival (many die) and their fate depends on the surrounding dynamic State of the developing nervous system.
• Neuroembryology Study of the embryonic development of the nervous system.
• Neuromuscular Involving nerves and muscles.
• Neuron A nerve ceil, made up of a cell body with nucleus, receptive dendrites and (usually) an axon carrying nerve impulses to other ceils via synaptic connections. Different types are motor neurons, interneurons and sensory neurons.
• Neuropathy Abnormal State of the nerves or nervous system.
• Neutral mutation An alteration in a gene which produces no immediate change in the phenotype but is transmitted to subsequent generations and makes possible an adaptive change in the form or behaviour of a species as a response to a new environmental situation.
• Oculomotor Concerned with control of movements of the eyeball.
• Ontogeny The process by which an individual living creature develops into its adult form, contrasted with phylogeny, that is, the process by which in evolution particular species acquire their characteristic properties.
• Perceptual constancy The mechanisms in visual perception which lead to recognition of identity or similarity despite differing circumstances eg seeing objects as being of constant size despite differing distance away, seeing cubes as cubes despite differing angles of presentation.
• Phenotype The visible (or otherwise discernible) characteristics of an animal that arise during development, or more specifically the expression in a particular individual belonging to a species of the inherited characteristics of the species, as modified by environment and developmental processes.
• Phonemic system The set of phonemes in any particular language, that is, the pattern of speech-sounds which are used to form meaningful words in the language.
• Phonemes The smallest sound units that can change meaning in a language (eg in 'bit' /b/ /i/ /t/).
• Phonology The study of the sounds used in speech, or more specifically the system of speech sounds used in a particular language.
• Points of inflection Mathematical term. Points on the graph of a curve where the line traced changes from convex to concave or vice versa (where the tangent to the curve changes sign).
• Polymorphic A collection of units, eg nerve-cells, which can be linked together in a variety of ways to produce different patterns of action.
• Praxis A term developed as an antonym to 'apraxia'. Praxis is used to refer to the ability to produce organized and purposeful patterns of action.
• Pre-wired See hard-wired. An analogy in neural organization drawn from the construction and operation of computers. Certain patterns of behaviour are thought to be the result of the prior establishment of neuronal connections which are not modified by learning, practice or experience.
• Primate An order of mammals including monkeys, apes and humans.
• Program A coded set of instructions that indicates the actions to be performed by a living system or computer.
• Pseudospeciation The formation of species is defined conventionally in terms of the inability of different species to mate with one another, either because of their physical structure or because eg they are adapted to different environments. Pseudospeciation refers to the observation that groups may fail to mate with one another for other reasons, of which in the human case, certainly in the past, examples were divergencies of languages, cultures or religions.
• Reflex Involuntary movement or other responses elicited by a stimulus applied to the periphery, transmitted to the central nervous system, and reflected back out to the periphery.
• Rhesus monkey Small pale brown Indian monkey (Macaca Mulatta).
• Saccades Fast involuntary eye movements as part of the process of visual perception.
• Saccadic system The neuromotor system underlying the production of saccades.
• Schema A stored pattern in the nervous system eg for recognition of visible objects or for execution of a particular action.
• Sensorimotor Functioning in both sensory and motor aspects of bodily activity.
• Somatosensory feedback Sensory information derived from the body other than from the eyes, cars, etc and fed back to affect a pattern of neural activity.
• Sound-symbolism The existence of a relation between the sounds of particular words and their meanings.
• Synaesthesia A particular example of cross-modal or transfunctional neural action seen eg in the perception by some individuals of colours systematically associated with differing (musical) sounds.
• Synapse Site at which neurons make functional contact. The terminal knob by which the end of a presynaptic axon comes into contact with the dendrite of a postsynaptic nerve cell.
• Syntactic structure The particular ways in which in any given language words are assembled into groups, phrases, sentences and discourse; the orderly way in which a language brings together the meanings of individual words in order to convey a more extended meaning, the meaning of the sentence.
• Takete/Maluma Invented words used by Kohler which subjects were invited to match with two 'nonsense' line-drawings, one angular and the other rounded. Experimental results consistently suggested a relation between visual patterns and word-forms.
• Trajectory The line followed by a moving object eg movement of the hand.
• Transduction The conversion of one pattern of organization into another eg of sound-waves into electrical energy in a microphone, or of mechanical vibration in the ear into electrical signals in the central nervous system.
• Transfunctional Refers to active neural relation between distinct functions eg vision and speech. Near-synonym for cross-modaL
• Voicing contrast Distinction between speech sounds uttered with and without vibration of the vocal cords.