Tecumseh Fitch

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W. Tecumseh Fitch (real William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III ; * 1963 in Boston ) is an American evolutionary and cognitive biologist .

Life

Fitch studied at Brown University in Providence , where he worked as a research assistant from 1989 until his doctorate in 1994 . From 1996 to 1999 he worked as a post doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge . From 1999 to 2002 he taught at Harvard University and was then visiting professor at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin until 2003 before he was appointed to the University of St Andrews , where he taught at the Institute of Psychology until 2009. In the 2005/2006 winter semester he held a Leibniz visiting professorship at the University of Leipzig and taught at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig . In 2009 Fitch accepted a position at the University of Vienna , where he has since headed the Institute for Cognitive Biology; he is also an honorary professor at the University of St Andrews.

Fitch is a direct descendant of US General William T. Sherman , from whom he owes his name.

research

Fitch's main research interests are the evolution and neuroscientific foundations of cognition and communication, theoretical biology , biolinguistics and bioacoustics as well as biomusics . He is co-editor of the journals Biolinguistics and Journal of Experimental Biology .

Fonts (selection)

Monographs
  • The Evolution of Language . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010.
Essays
  • Vocal tract length and formant frequency dispersion correlate with body size in rhesus macaques. In: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , Volume 102, 1997, pp. 1213-1222.
  • The evolution of speech: A comparative review. In: Trends in Cognitive Sciences , Volume 4, 2000, pp. 258-267.
  • (together with David Réby): The descended larynx is not uniquely human. In: Proceedings of the Royal Society , Section B: Biological Sciences , Volume 268, 2001, pp. 1669-1675.
  • (together with Marc Hauser and Noam Chomsky ): The Language Faculty: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? In: Science , Vol. 298, 2002, pp. 1569-1579.
  • (together with Marc Hauser): Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a nonhuman primate. In: Science , Volume 303, 2004, pp. 377-380.
  • The evolution of language: A comparative review. In: Biology and Philosophy , Volume 20, 2006, pp. 193-230.
  • The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective. In: Cognition , Volume 100, 2006, pp. 173-215.
  • Prolegomena to a future science of biolinguistics. In: Biolinguistics , Volume 3.4, 2009, pp. 283-320.

Web links

See also

Evolution of language skills

Remarks

  1. ↑ Curriculum vitae W. Tecumseh Sherman (PDF; 197 kB) on the website of the University of Vienna (accessed on October 20, 2012)
personal data
SURNAME Fitch, Tecumseh
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fitch, W. Tecumseh; Fitch, William Tecumseh Sherman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American behavioral scientist and cognitive biologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1963
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , USA