In this Book

Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing

Book
Morten H. Christiansen
2016
Published by: The MIT Press
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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

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

pp. i-iv

Contents

pp. v-vi

Foreword

pp. vii-x

Preface

pp. xi-xiv

I Theoretical and Empirical Foundations

pp. 1-2

1 Language Created across Multiple Timescales

pp. 3-18

2 Language as Shaped by the Brain

pp. 19-66

3 Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution

pp. 67-92

4 The Now-or-Never Processing Bottleneck

pp. 93-134

II Implications for the Nature of Language

pp. 135-136

5 Language Acquisition through Multiple-Cue Integration

pp. 137-168

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
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