Babel's Dawn

Lucy's Voice

I see Discover has a report on Bart de Boer's work on vocal tracts in australopithecus. It would be surprising to learn that "Lucy" sounded like something other than a female ape, but it needs to be checked out. de Boer is the number one authority on vocal tract development.

George Miller 1920-2012

Sorry to be a couple of days late with this but I just noticed an obituary for George Miller whose work I have admired for many decades. I tend to think of him as a founder of psycholinguistics  (along with Chomsky) but he did many more things than thatl. One of his main techniques was to point a promising graduate student or two in a promising direction and let them become the founders of a new subdivision of cognitive psychology.