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
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
ISBN | 9780262334778 |
---|---|
Related ISBN(s) | 9780262034319 |
MARC Record | Download |
OCLC | 945376431 |
Pages | 344 |
Launched on MUSE | 2016-07-29 |
Language | English |
Open Access | No |