The organizing committee of Evolang9 to be held next March in Kyoto, Japan, have announced the preliminary list of Plenary Speakers. 


Plenary Speakers:

• Noam Chomsky
• Terrence Deacon
• Simon Fisher
• Tetsuro Matsuzawa
• Jenny Saffran
• Minoru Asada
• Simon Kirby
• Tom Griffiths
• Cedric Boeckx

More details will be announced as they become available at kyoto.evolang.org
 

Call deadline: 15 June 2011
Event Dates: 19-21 September 2011
Event Location: Torun, Poland
Event URL: http://www.protolang.umk.pl/

In response to a number of requests submission deadline has been extended to 15th June 2011.

Protolang is a biennial conference organised by the Department of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun. One of the primary goals of this conference is bringing together researchers representing a variety of areas in order to gain a multidisciplinary perspective on the range of currently available evidence relevant to early language evolution. The focus of the conference is on the early stages of the emergence of symbolic, language-like communication in hominids. The conference will reflect the inherently interdisciplinary nature of research into the evolution of language. We invite papers from a wide range of subjects related to language evolution.

Keynote Speakers:

John Gowlett (University of Liverpool; Lucy to Language British Academy Project) - "Language Beginnings – a view from the early archaeological record"

Juliane Kaminski (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) - "Do dogs get the point"

Adam Kendon (Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania)- "An evolutionary approach to explaining why patterned visible bodily action commonly occurs when people speak"

Katie Slocombe (Department of Psychology, University of York)
"Vocal communication in chimpanzees"