MDye | Spring 2012

Survey Course: Big Ideas in the Study of Language

1. Linguistic Nativism
Chomsky, N. (2001). New Horizons of a Science of Mind.*
Fodor, J.A. (1998). Concepts: Where Cognitive Science went Wrong.*
Chomsky, N. (1967). A Review of B.F. Skinners Verbal Behavior. In Leon
A. Jakobovits and Murray S. Miron (eds.), Readings in the Psychology of
Language, Prentice-Hall, pp. 142-143.
Pylshyn, Z.W. (1972). Competence and psychological reality. American
Psychologist, 27(6), 546-552.

2. Linguistic Empiricism
Chiesa, M. (1992). Radical behaviorism and scientific frameworks. From
mechanistic to relational accounts. The American Psychologist, 47(11),
12871299.
Skinner, B.F. (1950). Are theories of learning necessary? The
Psychological Review, 57(4), 193-216.
Skinner, B.F. (1965). Science and Human Behavior.*
MacCorquodale, K. (1970). On Chomskys Review of Skinners Verbal
Behavior. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 13, 83-99.
Behme, C. (2014). A Galilean science of language. Journal of
Linguistics, 50(03), 671704.

3. Engineering Grammar
Chomsky, N. (1956). Three models for the description of language.
Information Theory, IRE Transactions on, 2(3), 113124.
Norvig, P. (2011). On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical
Learning.
Manning, C. (2003). Probabilistic Syntax. In Rens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and
Stefanie Jannedy (eds), Probabilistic Linguistics, pp. 289-341.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Halevy, A., Norvig, P., & Pereira, F. (2009). The Unreasonable
Effectiveness of Data. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 24(2), 812.

4. Language Acquisition
Pinker, S. (1995). The language instinct: How the mind creates
language.*
Carey, S., Spelke, E.S. Domain-specific knowledge and conceptual
change. In: Hirschfeld L, Gelman S (eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain
specificity in cognition and culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press; 1994. pp. 169-200.
Cowie, F. (2010). Innateness and Language. In Edward Zalta (ed.), The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.*
Pullum, G. K., & Scholz, B. C. (2002). Empirical assessment of stimulus
poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review, 19(1-2), 950.
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5. Language Development
Kuhl, P. K. (2000). A new view of language acquisition. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, 97(22), 1185011857.
Yu, C. & Smith, L.B. (2007). Rapid word learning under uncertainty via
cross-situational statistics. Psychological Science, 18, 414-420.
Kam, C. H., & Newport, E. L. (2005). Regularizing unpredictable
variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language formation
and change. Language Learning and Development, 1(2), 151195.
Ramscar, M., Dye, M. & McCauley, S. (2013) Error and expectation in
language learning: The curious absence of mouses in adult speech.
Language, 89(4), 760-793.

6. Developing Minds
Anderson, S.R., & Lightfoot, D.W. (1999). The human language faculty as
an organ. Annual Review of Physiology, 62, 697-7221.
Dek, G.O. (2004). The development of cognitive flexibility and language
abilities. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 31 , 271-327.
Thompson-Schill, S. L., Ramscar, M., & Chrysikou, E. G. (2009). Cognition
without control: When a little frontal lobe goes a long way. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 18(5), 259263.
Diamond, A. (2002). Normal development of prefrontal cortex from birth
to young adulthood: cognitive functions, anatomy, and biochemistry. In
D. Stuff & R. Knight (eds.), Principles of Frontal Lobe Function. Oxford
University Press: New York, NY.

7. Language Universals
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. (1997). Genes, peoples, and languages. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 94, 7719-772.
Evans, N., & Levinson, S. C. (2009). The myth of language universals:
Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(05), 429448.
Lupyan, G., & Dale, R. (2010). Language structure is partly determined
by social structure. PLoS ONE, 5(1), e8559.
Atkinson, Q. D., & Gray, R. D. (2005). Curious parallels and curious
connectionsphylogenetic thinking in biology and historical linguistics.
Systematic Biology, 54(4), 513526.

8. Linguistic Relativity
Burenhult, N., & Majid, A. (2011). Olfaction in Aslian ideology and
language. The Senses and Society, 6(1), 1929.
Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky,
L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color
discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
104(19), 77807785.
Slobin, D.I. (2013). Language and thought online: Cognitive
consequences of linguistic relativity. D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow
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(Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and

thought (pp. 157-192). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sapir, E. (1985). Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and
Personality.*

9. Language Evolution
Hauser, M.D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W.T. (2002). The Faculty of
Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science, 298,
1569-1579.
Kirby, S., Cornish, H., & Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution
in the laboratory: an experimental approach to the origins of structure
in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
105(31), 1068110686.
Christiansen, M. H., & Chater, N. (2008). Language as shaped by the
brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(05), 489509.
Beckner et al. (2009). Language is a complex adaptive system.
Language Learning, 59, 1-26.
Deacon, T.W. (1998). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language
and the brain.*
Boyd, R. & Richerson, P.J. (2005). The origin and evolution of cultures.*

10. Animal Communication

Gardner, R.A. & Gardner, B.T. (1969). Teaching sign language to a
chimpanzee. Science, 165(3894), 664-672.
Miklsi, . (1999). The ethological analysis of imitation. Biological
Reviews, 74, 347-374.
Shettleworth, S. (2010). Cognition, evolution, and behavior.*
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition.*

11. Language and Prediction

Davidson, D. (1986). A nice derangement of epitaphs. In R. Grandy & R.
Warner (eds.), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. Oxford University
Press. pp. 157174.
Warren, R. M. (1970). Perceptual restoration of missing speech sounds.
Science, 167(3917), 392393.
Altmann, G.T. & Mirkovi, J. (2009). Incrementality and prediction in
human sentence processing. Cognitive Science, 33(4), 583-609.
Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy?
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(1), 811.

12. Language Semantics

Olson, D.R. (1970). Language and thought: aspects of a cognitive theory
of semantics. Psychological Review, 77, 257-73.
Osgood, C.E. (1952). The nature and measurement of meaning.
Psychological Bulletin, 49(3), 197237.
Miller, G.A. (1951). Language and Communication.*
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13. Language Semantics 2

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By.*
Kovecses, Z. (1993). Metaphor: A practical introduction.*
Thibodeau, P.H. & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we think with: The
role of metaphor in reasoning. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16782.
Hoffman, J.L., Percy, E.J., & Sherman, S.J. (2011). Sticky Metaphors and
the Persistence of the Traditional Voluntary Manslaughter Doctrine.
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 44(2), 383-427.

14. Linguistic Coordination

Brennan, S. E., & Clark, H. H. (1996). Conceptual pacts and lexical choice
in conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 22(6), 14821493.
Brown-Schmidt, S., & Tanenhaus, M. (2008). Real-time investigation of
referential domains in unscripted conversation: A targeted language
game approach. Cognitive Science, 32(4), 643684.
Fusaroli, R., Bahrami, B., Olsen, K., Roepstorff, A., Rees, G., Frith, C., &
Tyln, K. (2012). Coming to terms: quantifying the benefits of linguistic
coordination. Psychological Science, 23(8), 931939.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and
Cognition.*
Reddy, M. J. (1979). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in
our language about language. Metaphor and Thought.

*Selected Excerpts
Updated: May 2012