In this Book
- Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: The MIT Press
summary
Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales.Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.
Table of Contents
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- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. i-iv
- 2 Language as Shaped by the Brain
- pp. 19-66
- 4 The Now-or-Never Processing Bottleneck
- pp. 93-134
- II Implications for the Nature of Language
- pp. 135-136
- 6 Experience-Based Language Processing
- pp. 169-196
- 7 Recursion as a Usage-Based Skill
- pp. 197-226
- 8 From Fragmentation to Integration
- pp. 227-248
- References
- pp. 249-308
- Name Index
- pp. 309-322
- Subject Index
- pp. 323-330
Additional Information
ISBN
9780262334778
Related ISBN(s)
9780262034319
MARC Record
OCLC
945376431
Pages
344
Launched on MUSE
2016-07-29
Language
English
Open Access
No