- W. Tecumseh Fitch
William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III (born 1963) is an American
evolutionary biologist andcognitive scientist at theUniversity of St. Andrews (Fife, Scotland ).He studies the biology and evolution of cognition and communication, both in humans and other animals, and in particular the evolution of speech, language and music. In doing so, he concentrates on comparative approaches as advocated by
Charles Darwin , i.e. the study of homologous and analogous structures and processes in a wide range ofspecies .Fitch was born in
Boston and received both hisB.A. (1986) in biology and hisPh.D. (1994) in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences fromBrown University . From 1996-2000, he worked as aPostdoctoral fellow atHarvard University underMarc Hauser .He bears the name of his great-great-great-grandfather,
William Tecumseh Sherman , as did his father and grandfather before him.Bibliography
* Fitch, W. T. (1997). "Vocal tract length and formant frequency dispersion correlate with body size in rhesus macaques," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 102: 1213-1222.
* Fitch, W. T. (2000). "The evolution of speech: a comparative review," Trends Cog. Sci. 4, 258-267.
* Fitch, W.T. and D. Réby (2001), "The descended larynx is not uniquely human". Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, 268(1477): 1669-1675.
* Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N. & Fitch, W. T. (2002). "The Language Faculty: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?" Science 298: 1569-1579.
* Fitch, W. T., & Hauser, M. D. (2004). "Computational constraints on syntactic processing in a nonhuman primate". Science 303: 377-380.
* Fitch, W. T. (2005). "The evolution of language: A comparative review," Biology and Philosophy 20: 193–230.
* Fitch, W. T. (2006). "The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective," Cognition 100: 173-215.See also
*
Biolinguistics
*Biomusicology
*Comparative psychology
* Descended larynx
*Evolutionary psychology
*Hoover (seal)
*Origin of language
*Origin of music
*Vocal learning External links
* [http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/ Homepage of W. Tecumseh Fitch]
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