Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing

by Morten H. Christiansen, Nick Chater, Peter W. Culicover (Foreword by)

Overview

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262334785
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/18/2016
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Morten H. Christiansen is Professor of Psychology and Codirector of the Cognitive Science Program at Cornell University.

Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick.

Peter Culicover is Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Foreword Peter W. Culicover vii

Preface xi

I Theoretical and Empirical Foundations 1

1 Language Created across Multiple Timescales 3

1.1 Generative Approaches to Language Processing, Acquisition, and Evolution 6

1.2 An Integrated Framework for Language Processing, Acquisition, and Evolution 10

1.3 Overview of the Book 14

2 Language as Shaped by the Brain 19

2.1 The Logical Problem of Language Evolution 21

2.2 Evolution of Universal Grammar by Biological Adaptation 24

2.3 Evolution of Universal Grammar by Non-adaptationist Means 37

2.4 Language as Shaped by the Brain 40

2.5 Constraints on Language Structure 50

2.6 How Constraints Shape Language over Time 56

2.7 Summary 65

3 Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution 67

3.1 C-induction and N-induction 69

3.2 Implications for Learning and Adaptation 72

3.3 The Emergence of Binding Constraints 77

3.4 Broader Implications for Language Acquisition and Development 83

3.5 Summary 90

4 The Now-or-Never Processing Bottleneck 93

4.1 The Now-or-Never Bottleneck 95

4.2 Chunk-and-Pass Language Processing 99

4.3 Acquisition is Learning to Process 114

4.4 Language Change Is Item-Based 122

4.5 Explaining Key Properties of Language 127

4.6 Summary 132

II Implications for the Nature of Language 135

5 Language Acquisition through Multiple-Cue Integration 137

5.1 A Pressure for Arbitrary Signs: A Cultural Evolution Perspective 141

5.2 How Systematic Is Spoken Language? 143

5.3 The Sound of Syntax 148

5.4 Multiple-Cue Integration by a Domain-General Sequence Learner 155

5.5 Multiple-Cue Integration in Acquisition and Processing 158

5.6 The Cultural Evolution of Multiple Cues in Language 160

5.7 Further Implications of Multiple-Cue Integration 164

5.8 Summary 167

6 Experience-Based Language Processing 169

6.1 Processing Biases as a Reflection of Linguistic Input 172

6.2 Individual Differences in Chunk-and-Pass Processing 182

6.3 Summary 194

7 Recursion as a Usage-Based Skill 197

7.1 Sequence Learning as the Basis for Recursive Structure 203

7.2 A Usage-Based Model of Complex Recursive Structure 213

7.3 Summary 224

8 From Fragmentation to Integration 227

8.1 Integration or Conflation? 228

8.2 The Cumulative Emergence of Linguistic Order 244

8.3 Return of the Lumpers: Putting the Language Sciences Back Together 246

References 249

Name Index 309

Subject Index 323

What People are Saying About This

Elena Lieven

This book is unique in its attempt to take a usage-based and unified approach to the sciences of language: its evolution, historical change, processing, and acquisition. It covers an extraordinarily wide range of relevant and up-to-date literature from which it builds an important theoretical approach. It provides the foundation for asking all the fundamental questions in language research.

Adele E. Goldberg

Our understanding of language—its evolution, acquisition, and processing—is undergoing a seismic shift and this engaging, ambitious book clarifies and motivates the new exciting landscape.

Endorsement

Christiansen and Chater's Creating Language presents a compelling account of how acquisition and processing mutually constrain one another in shaping both linguistic performance and the nature of language. Then, to top it off, they fearlessly touch the linguistic third rail, language evolution, and the time scales shift from milliseconds and months, to millennia. The book will excite controversy, but it most certainly will excite.

—Gary S. Dell, Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

From the Publisher

Our understanding of language—its evolution, acquisition, and processing—is undergoing a seismic shift and this engaging, ambitious book clarifies and motivates the new exciting landscape.

—Adele E. Goldberg, Professor of Psychology, Princeton University

This book is unique in its attempt to take a usage-based and unified approach to the sciences of language: its evolution, historical change, processing, and acquisition. It covers an extraordinarily wide range of relevant and up-to-date literature from which it builds an important theoretical approach. It provides the foundation for asking all the fundamental questions in language research.

—Elena Lieven, Professor, ESRC LuCiD Child Study Centre, University of Manchester; coauthor of Child Language Acquisition: Contrasting Theoretical Approaches

Christiansen and Chater's Creating Language presents a compelling account of how acquisition and processing mutually constrain one another in shaping both linguistic performance and the nature of language. Then, to top it off, they fearlessly touch the linguistic third rail, language evolution, and the time scales shift from milliseconds and months, to millennia. The book will excite controversy, but it most certainly will excite.

—Gary S. Dell, Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Gary S. Dell

Christiansen and Chater's Creating Language presents a compelling account of how acquisition and processing mutually constrain one another in shaping both linguistic performance and the nature of language. Then, to top it off, they fearlessly touch the linguistic third rail, language evolution, and the time scales shift from milliseconds and months, to millennia. The book will excite controversy, but it most certainly will excite.