Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Where does grammar come from? How does it develop in children? Developmental psycholinguists who set out to answer these questions quickly find themselves impaled on the horns of a dilemma, caught up in a modern variant of the ancient war between ...

Linguistic theory in the generative tradition is based on a small number of simple but important observations about human languages and how they are acquired. First, the structure of language is extremely complex—so complex that it is often argued that it ...

Language is puzzling. On the one hand, there are compelling reasons to believe that the possession of language by humans has deep biological roots. We are the only species that has a communication system with the complexity and richness of language. There are ...

In every spoken language, the words have two fundamental properties. 1 First, they are temporal sequences; in the articulatory domain, a word is a sequence of gestures, and in the auditory domain, a sequence of sounds. Second, the relation between this serially ...

How do infants learn to understand and produce spoken language? Despite decades of intensive investigation, the answer to this question remains largely a mystery. This is, in part, because although the use of language seems straightforward to adult native speakers, ...

When one looks at all that children come to know so rapidly, so inevitably—knowledge of language, of objects, of number, of space, of other minds—it is easy to conclude that development is driven by mechanisms and principles specific to each domain. There are ...

“… By “grammar of the language L” I will mean a device of some sort (that is, a set of rules) that provides, at least, a complete specification of an infinite set of grammatical sentences of L and their structural description. In addition to making precise the notion “structural ...MORE ⇓

In the traditional view of argument structure, the main verb directly determines the overall form and meaning of the sentence. That is, the verb is assumed to project its argument structure. This view has been widely accepted on the basis of basic sentences such as the ...

How do infants break the word learning barrier and learn their first words? How (if at all) do their word learning strategies change with development? The answer to these questions begins with the study of the youngest word learners in the last trimester of the 1st year of ...

The term social in the tide of this chapter is being used in two senses. In its first sense, social refers to the capacities of the infant and young child, which I argue are the source out of which language emerges. In its second sense, social refers to the context in which ...

Any theory of language development, whether emergentist or nativist, must address the child's phonological development. A child's pronunciation of words is often quite different from an adult's, in a way that does not obviously reflect the phonological system of the ...

By common definition, emergence means “to come forth from concealment or obscurity”(Webster's Dictionary). In the context of this book, emergence also implies “without prescription or stipulation.” That is, in contrast to a developmental process that unfolds ...

The model of toddlers' and preschool-age children's lexical processing that I am developing goes by the acronym CALLED, which stands for Competition, Attention, and Learned LExical Descriptions. Although the utility of acronyms can be debated, at least this one provides a ...

How do people arrive at an interpretation of a sentence? The thesis put forth by this chapter is that sentence processing is not a crisp symbolic process, but instead emerges from bringing together a number of soft constraints, such as the syntactic structure of the ...

One of the unwritten rules of psycholinguistics is that acquisition, comprehension, and production research each keeps to itself—the questions addressed in these three fields, and the researchers who ask them, overlap in only the most general ways. In acquisition, for ...