In their study "Vocal Learning in the Functionally Referential Food Grunts of Chimpanzees", Watson et al.[1] claimed that they "provide the first evidence for vocal learning in a referential call in non-humans". We challenge this conclusion, on two counts. For one, we are not convinced that the authors controlled for arousal (or at least they did not report such data); furthermore, the vocal ch...

XML is rapidly becoming one of the most widely adopted technologies for information exchange and representation on the World Wide Web. However, the large part of data is still stored in a relational database and we need to convert those relational data into an XML document. There are existing approaches such as NeT and CoT to convert relational models to XML models but those approaches only con...

A referential communication task conducted with five pairs of native speakers of Yucatec Maya produced evidence of “referential promiscuity” in the selection among spatial frames of reference (FoRs): speakers switched freely between FoRs and pervasively combined multiple types in single descriptions. In contrast, a recall memory experiment conducted with 18 speakers revealed a strong bias towar...

For a long time philosophers and psychologists have been intrigued by the question of the self. More recently, this has become a topic of discussion in neuroscience. In this article, we suggest that the processing of self-referential stimuli in cortical midline structures (CMS) is a fundamental component in generating a model of the self. Drawing from neuroimaging studies, we distinguish betwee...

Violations of the maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over-specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural data suggest that under-specified expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-specified expressions are also detrimental to compreh...

The purpose of this paper is to open for investigation a range of phenomena familiar from dynamical systems or chaos theory which appear in a simple fuzzy logic with the introduction of self-reference. Within that logic, self-referential sentences exhibit properties of fixed point attractors, fixed point repellers, and full chaos on the [0, 11 interval. Strange attractors and fractals appear in...