Download or read book Empiricism and Language Learnability written by Nick Chater and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. Written by four researchers in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and cognitive science, it sheds light on the problems of learnability and language, and their implications for key theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.

Download or read book Empiricism and Language Learnability written by Nick Chater and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-07-09 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary new work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. The authors, from different backgrounds—-linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology and cognitive science-explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be unfeasible on practical and theoretical grounds. In the book, the authors present a variety of precisely specified mathematical and computational results that show that empiricist approaches can form a viable solution to the problem of language acquisition. It assumes limited technical background and explains the fundamental principles of probability, grammatical description and learning theory in an accessible and non-technical way. Different chapters address the problem of language acquisition using different assumptions: looking at the methodology of linguistic analysis using simplicity based criteria, using computational experiments on real corpora, using theoretical analysis using probabilistic learning theory, and looking at the computational problems involved in learning richly structured grammars. Written by four researchers in the full range of relevant fields: linguistics (John Goldsmith), psychology (Nick Chater), computer science (Alex Clark), and cognitive science (Amy Perfors), the book sheds light on the central problems of learnability and language, and traces their implications for key questions of theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.

Download or read book Language Learnability and L2 Phonology written by J. Archibald and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Archibald describes two studies conducted within a parametric framework in the area of second language acquisition. The studies are designed to investigate the acquisition of English stress patterns (via both production and perception tasks) by adult speakers of Polish and Hungarian. Archibald argues that interlanguage grammars can be understood as a mix of L1 transfer and the effects of Universal Grammar. Metrical parameters related to such things as quantity--sensitivity, extrametricality, and word--tree dominance determine the structure of the interlanguage. The author reports that the subjects are remarkably successful at acquiring English stress and do not appear to violate proposed universals of metrical phonology. This book is one of the few attempts to investigate the acquisition of L2 phonology within a UG framework. Empirical support is provided for the parametric model to an extent uncommon in most syntactic studies.

Download or read book Empiricism and Language Learnability written by Nick Chater and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. Written by four researchers in linguistics, psychology, computer science, and cognitive science, it sheds light on the problems of learnability and language, and their implications for key theoretical linguistics and the study of language acquisition.

Download or read book Learnability and Linguistic Theory written by R.J. Matthews and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impetus for this volume developed from the 1982 University of Western Ontario Learnability Workshop, which was organized by the editors and sponsored by that University's Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Cognitive Science. The volume e~plores the import of learnability theory for contemporary linguistic theory, focusing on foundational learning-theoretic issues associated with the parametrized Government-Binding (G-B) framework. Written by prominent re searchers in the field, all but two of the eight contributions are pre viously unpublished. The editor's introduction provides an overview that interrelates the separate papers and elucidates the foundational issues addressed by the volume. Osherson, Stob, and Weinstein's "Learning Theory and Natural Language" first appeared in Cognition (1984); Matthews's "The Plausi bility of Rationalism" was published in the Journal of Philosophy (1984). The editors would like to thank the publishers for permission to reprint these papers. Mr. Marin Marinov assisted with the preparation of the indices for the volume. VB ROBERT 1. MATTHEWS INTRODUCTION: LEARNABILITY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY 1. INTRODUCTION Formal learning theory, as the name suggests, studies the learnability of different classes of formal objects (languages, grammars, theories, etc.) under different formal models of learning. The specification of such a model, which specifies (a) a learning environment, (b) a learn ing strategy, and (c) a criterion for successful learning, determines (d) a class of formal objects, namely, the class that can be acquired to the level of the specified success criterion by a learner implementing the specified strategy in the specified enviroment.

Download or read book What s Within written by Fiona Cowie and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work reconsiders the influential nativist position towards the mind. It claims that the view that certain skills are hardwired into the brain is mistaken, arguing that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different - and probably inconsistent - theses.

Download or read book Shaping Phonology written by Diane Brentari and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-10 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the past forty years, the field of phonology—a branch of linguistics that explores both the sound structures of spoken language and the analogous phonemes of sign language, as well as how these features of language are used to convey meaning—has undergone several important shifts in theory that are now part of standard practice. Drawing together contributors from a diverse array of subfields within the discipline, and honoring the pioneering work of linguist John Goldsmith, this book reflects on these shifting dynamics and their implications for future phonological work. Divided into two parts, Shaping Phonology first explores the elaboration of abstract domains (or units of analysis) that fall under the purview of phonology. These chapters reveal the increasing multidimensionality of phonological representation through such analytical approaches as autosegmental phonology and feature geometry. The second part looks at how the advent of machine learning and computational technologies has allowed for the analysis of larger and larger phonological data sets, prompting a shift from using key examples to demonstrate that a particular generalization is universal to striving for statistical generalizations across large corpora of relevant data. Now fundamental components of the phonologist’s tool kit, these two shifts have inspired a rethinking of just what it means to do linguistics.

Download or read book Is the Language Faculty Non Linguistic written by Umberto Ansaldo and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A line of research in cognitive science over several decades has been dedicated to finding an innate, language-specific cognitive system, a faculty which allows human infants to acquire languages natively without formal instruction and within short periods of time. In recent years, this search has attracted significant controversy in cognitive science generally, and in the language sciences specifically. Some maintain that the search has had meaningful results, though there are different views as to what the findings are: ranging from the view that there is a rich and rather specific set of principles, to the idea that the contents of the language faculty are - while specifiable - in fact extremely minimal. But other researchers rigorously oppose the continuation of this search, arguing that decades of effort have turned up nothing. The fact remains that the proposal of a language-specific faculty was made for a good reason, namely as an attempt to solve the vexing puzzle of language in our species. Much work has been developing to address this, and specifically, to look for ways to characterize the language faculty as an emergent phenomenon; i.e., not as a dedicated, language-specific system, but as the emergent outcome of a set of uniquely human but not specifically linguistic factors, in combination. A number of theoretical and empirical approaches are being developed in order to account for the great puzzles of language - language processing, language usage, language acquisition, the nature of grammar, and language change and diversification. This research topic aims at reviewing and exploring these recent developments and establishing bridges between these young frameworks, as well as with the traditions that have come before. The goal of this Research Topic is to focus on current developments in what many regard as a paradigm shift in the language sciences. In this Research Topic, we want to ask: If current explicit proposals for an innate, dedicated faculty for language are not supported by data or arguments, how can we solve the problems that UG was proposed to solve? Is it possible to solve the puzzles of language in our species with an appeal to causes that are not specifically linguistic?

Download or read book Language Cognition and Human Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time much of Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker's seminal research explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, perception, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. This eclectic collection spans Pinker's thirty-year career, exploring his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. It includes thirteen of Pinker's classic articles, ranging over topics such as language development in children, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the computational architecture of the mind, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature-nurture debate, and the logic of innuendo and euphemism. Each outlines a major theory or takes up an argument with another prominent scholar, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this collection reflects essential contributions to cognitive science by one of our leading thinkers and public intellectuals.

Download or read book Dark Matter of the Mind written by Daniel L. Everett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it in our nature to be altruistic, or evil, to make art, use tools, or create language? Is it in our nature to think in any particular way? For Daniel L. Everett, the answer is a resounding no: it isn’t in our nature to do any of these things because human nature does not exist—at least not as we usually think of it. Flying in the face of major trends in Evolutionary Psychology and related fields, he offers a provocative and compelling argument in this book that the only thing humans are hardwired for is freedom: freedom from evolutionary instinct and freedom to adapt to a variety of environmental and cultural contexts. Everett sketches a blank-slate picture of human cognition that focuses not on what is in the mind but, rather, what the mind is in—namely, culture. He draws on years of field research among the Amazonian people of the Pirahã in order to carefully scrutinize various theories of cognitive instinct, including Noam Chomsky’s foundational concept of universal grammar, Freud’s notions of unconscious forces, Adolf Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind, and works on massive modularity by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker. Illuminating unique characteristics of the Pirahã language, he demonstrates just how differently various cultures can make us think and how vital culture is to our cognitive flexibility. Outlining the ways culture and individual psychology operate symbiotically, he posits a Buddhist-like conception of the cultural self as a set of experiences united by various apperceptions, episodic memories, ranked values, knowledge structures, and social roles—and not, in any shape or form, biological instinct. The result is fascinating portrait of the “dark matter of the mind,” one that shows that our greatest evolutionary adaptation is adaptability itself.

Download or read book Computational Construction Grammar written by Jonathan Dunn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-06 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element introduces a usage-based computational approach to Construction Grammar that draws on techniques from natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning. This work explores how to represent constructions, how to learn constructions from a corpus, and how to arrange the constructions in a grammar as a network. From a theoretical perspective, this Element examines how construction grammars emerge from usage alone as complex systems, with slot-constraints learned at the same time that constructions are learned. From a practical perspective, this work is accompanied by a Python package which enables linguists to incorporate construction grammars into their own corpus-based work. The computational experiments in this Element are important for testing the learnability, variability, and confirmability of Construction Grammar as a theory of language. All code examples will leverage the cloud computing platform Code Ocean to guide readers through implementation of these algorithms.

Download or read book A Companion to Chomsky written by Nicholas Allott and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-04-16 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky’s intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky’s theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky’s rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a “Galilean” methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky’s thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky’s intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.

Download or read book An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching written by Keith Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching provides an engaging, student-friendly guide to the field of foreign language learning and teaching. Aimed at students with no background in the area and taking a task-based approach, this book: introduces the theoretical and practical aspects of both learning and teaching; provides discussion and workshop activities throughout each chapter of the book, along with further reading and reflection tasks; deals with classroom- and task-based teaching, and covers lesson planning and testing, making the book suitable for use on practical training courses; analyses different learning styles and suggests strategies to improve language acquisition; includes examples from foreign language learning in Russian, French, and German, as well as English; is accompanied by a brand new companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/johnson, which contains additional material, exercises, and weblinks. Written by an experienced teacher and author, An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching is essential reading for students beginning their study in the area, as well as teachers in training and those already working in the field.

Download or read book How Children Learn the Meanings of Words written by Paul Bloom and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-01-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind. According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways. This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field.

Download or read book Reflections on Language and Language Learning written by Marcel Bax and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reflections on Language and Language Learning: In honour of Arthur van Essen, thirty-one leading language scholars and educational linguists in the Netherlands and abroad with whom over the years Professor van Essen, one of the grandees of applied linguistics, has collaborated provide original essays and studies which discuss the most recent insights and trends in the fields of linguistics and foreign language teaching. While interdisciplinary in scope, the volume encompasses theoretical advances in (educational) linguistic thinking; for example, the perceptive articles written by Michael Byram, Christopher N. Candlin, Natalia Gvishiani, Peter Jordens, Jan Koster, Leo van Lier, and Bondi Sciarone — as well as a sample of the latest methodological developments in areas such as ELT, LSP, and content-based language teaching; cases in point are the useful contributions by Jeanine Deen & Hilde Hacquebord, Michaël Goethals, Paul Meara & Ignacio Rodríguez Sánchez, Rosamond Mitchell & Christopher Brumfit, and Uta Thürmer.

Download or read book The Psychology of Language written by Trevor A. Harley and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 1083 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thorough revision and update of the popular second edition contains everything the student needs to know about the psychology of language: how we understand, produce, and store language.

Download or read book The Origin of Concepts written by Susan Carey and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New in paperback-- A transformative book on the way we think about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought.