Contents
Science, Language, and the Science of Language
■ BOX 1.1 Wrong or insightful? Isaac Asimov on testing students’ knowledge
1.1 What Do Scientists Know about Language?
■ BOX 2.1 Hockett’s design features of human language
■ METHOD 2.1 Minding the gap between behavior and knowledge
2.2 The Social Underpinnings of Language
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 2.1 Social scaffolding for language
■ METHOD 2.2 Exploring what primates can’t (or won’t) do
■ BOX 2.2 The recursive power of syntax
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 2.1 Engineering the perfect language
■ BOX 2.3 Practice makes perfect: The “babbling” stage of human infancy
■ BOX 2.4 What can songbirds tell us about speaking?
2.5 How Humans Invent Languages
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 2.2 From disability to diversity: Language studies and Deaf culture
■ BOX 2.5 Linguistic and non-linguistic impairments in Williams and Down syndromes
2.7 Survival of the Fittest Language?
■ BOX 2.6 Evolution of a prayer
■ DIGGING DEEPER Language evolution in the lab
3.1 Evidence from Damage to the Brain
■ BOX 3.1 Phineas Gage and his brain
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 3.1 One hundred names for love: Aphasia strikes a literary couple
■ METHOD 3.1 The need for language diversity in aphasia research
3.2 Mapping the Healthy Human Brain
■ METHOD 3.2 Comparing apples and oranges in fMRI
■ BOX 3.2 The functional neuroanatomy of language
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 3.2 Brain bunk: Separating science from pseudoscience
■ BOX 3.3 Are Broca and Wernicke dead?
3.3 The Brain in Real-Time Action
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 3.3 Using EEG to assess patients in a vegetative state
■ BOX 3.4 A musical P600 effect
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 3.1 Using ERPs to detect cross-language activation
■ DIGGING DEEPER Language and music
■ METHOD 4.1 The head-turn preference paradigm
■ BOX 4.1 Phonotactic constraints across languages
■ BOX 4.2 ERPs reveal statistical skills in newborns
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 4.1 The articulatory phonetics of beatboxing
■ METHOD 4.2 High-amplitude sucking
4.4 Learning How Sounds Pattern
■ BOX 4.4 Allophones in complementary distribution: Some crosslinguistic examples
4.5 Some Patterns Are Easier to Learn than Others
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 4.1 Investigating potential learning biases
■ DIGGING DEEPER How does learning change with age and experience?
5.1 Words and Their Interface to Sound
■ BOX 5.1 Some sources of non-arbitrariness in spoken languages
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 5.1 How different languages cut up the concept pie
5.3 Understanding Speakers’ Intentions
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 5.1 Assessing the accuracy of adult speakers
■ METHOD 5.1 Revisiting the switch task
5.5 The Role of Language Input
■ BOX 5.2 Learning from bilingual input
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 5.2 McLanguage and the perils of branding by prefix
■ BOX 5.3 The very complex morphology of Czech
■ BOX 5.4 Separate brain networks for words and rules?
■ DIGGING DEEPER The chicken-and-egg problem of language and thought
Learning the Structure of Sentences
6.1 The Nature of Syntactic Knowledge
■ BOX 6.1 Stages of syntactic development
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 6.1 Constituent structure and poetic effect
■ BOX 6.2 Rules versus constructions
■ BOX 6.3 Varieties of structural complexity
6.2 Learning Grammatical Categories
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 6.1 The usefulness of frequent frames in Spanish and English
6.3 How Abstract Is Early Syntax?
■ BOX 6.4 Quirky verb alterations
■ BOX 6.5 Syntax and the immature brain
6.4 Complex Syntax and Constraints on Learning
■ BOX 6.6 Specific language impairment and complex syntax
■ METHOD 6.1 The CHILDES database
6.5 What Do Children Do with Input?
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 6.2 Language universals, alien tongues, and learnability
■ METHOD 6.2 What can we learn from computer simulations of syntactic learning?
■ DIGGING DEEPER Domain-general and domain-specific theories of language learning
7.1 Coping with the Variability of Sounds
■ BOX 7.1 The articulatory properties of English consonants
■ BOX 7.2 Variability in the pronunciation of signed languages
■ BOX 7.3 Categorical perception in chinchillas
■ METHOD 7.1 What can we learn from conflicting results?
■ BOX 7.4 Does music training enhance speech perception?
7.3 Adapting to a Variety of Talkers
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 7.1 To dub or not to dub?
■ BOX 7.5 Accents and attitudes
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 7.1 Adjusting to specific talkers
7.4 The Motor Theory of Speech Perception
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 7.2 How does ventriloquism work?
■ BOX 7.6 What happens to speech perception as you age?
■ DIGGING DEEPER The connection between speech perception and dyslexia
■ BOX 8.1 Controlling for factors that affect the speed of word recognition
■ METHOD 8.1 Using the lexical decision task
■ BOX 8.2 Words: All in the mind, or in the body too?
■ BOX 8.3 Why do languages tolerate ambiguity?
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 8.1 Evidence for the activation of “sunken meanings”
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 8.1 The persuasive power of word associations
8.3 Recognizing Spoken Words in Real Time
■ BOX 8.4 Do bilingual people keep their languages separate?
■ BOX 8.5 Word recognition in signed languages
■ BOX 8.6 Do different writing systems engage the brain differently?
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 8.2 Should English spelling be reformed?
■ DIGGING DEEPER The great modular-versus-interactive debate
Understanding Sentence Structure and Meaning
9.1 Incremental Processing and the Problem of Ambiguity
■ BOX 9.1 Key grammatical terms and concepts in English
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 9.1 Crash blossoms run amok in newspaper headlines
■ METHOD 9.1 Using reading times to detect misanalysis
9.2 Models of Ambiguity Resolution
■ BOX 9.2 Two common psychological heuristics
■ BOX 9.3 Not all reduced relatives lead to processing implosions
9.3 Variables That Predict the Difficulty of Ambiguous Sentences
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 9.1 Subliminal priming of a verb’s syntactic frame
■ BOX 9.4 Doesn’t intonation disambiguate spoken language?
■ BOX 9.5 The language experience of bookworms versus socialites
■ BOX 9.6 How does aging affect sentence comprehension?
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 9.2 A psycholinguist walks into a bar…
■ DIGGING DEEPER The great debate over the “bilingual advantage”
Speaking: From Planning to Articulation
10.1 The Space between Thinking and Speaking
■ BOX 10.1 What spoken language really sounds like
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 10.1 The sounds of silence: Conversational gaps across cultures
10.2 Ordered Stages in Language Production
■ BOX 10.2 Common types of speech errors
■ BOX 10.3 Learning to fail at speaking
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 10.1 Message planning in real time
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 10.2 “Clean” speech is not better speech
■ METHOD 10.1 Finding patterns in real-world language
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 10.3 Language detectives track the unique “prints” of language users
10.5 Putting the Sounds in Words
■ METHOD 10.2 The SLIP technique
■ BOX 10.4 Was Freud completely wrong about speech errors?
■ BOX 10.5 Patterns in speech errors
■ DIGGING DEEPER Sentence production in other languages
11.1 From Linguistic Form to Mental Models of the World
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 11.1 Probing for the contents of mental models
■ BOX 11.1 Individual differences in visual imagery during reading
■ METHOD 11.1 Converging techniques for studying mental models
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 11.1 What does it mean to be literate?
■ BOX 11.2 Pronoun systems across languages
■ BOX 11.3 Pronoun types and structural constraints
11.4 Drawing Inferences and Making Connections
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 11.2 The Kuleshov effect: How inferences bring life to film
■ BOX 11.4 Using brain waves to study the time course of discourse processing
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 11.3 The use and abuse of metaphor
■ DIGGING DEEPER Shallow processors or builders of rich meaning?
12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 12.1 Learning through social interaction
■ BOX 12.1 Social gating is for the birds
■ METHOD 12.1 Referential communication tasks
■ BOX 12.2 Does language promote mind reading?
12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 12.1 On lying and implying in advertising
■ BOX 12.3 Examples of scalar implicature
■ BOX 12.4 Using conversational inference to resolve ambiguity
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 12.2 Being polite, indirectly
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 12.3 Why are so many professors bad at audience design?
■ DIGGING DEEPER Autism research and its role in mind-reading debates
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 13.1 The great language extinction
13.1 What Do Languages Have in Common?
■ BOX 13.1 Language change through language contact
13.2 Explaining Similarities across Languages
■ RESEARCHERS AT WORK 13.1 Universals and learning biases
■ METHOD 13.1 How well do artificial language learning experiments reflect real learning?
■ BOX 13.2 Do genes contribute to language diversity?
■ BOX 13.3 Can social pressure make languages less efficient?
13.3 Words, Concepts, and Culture
■ BOX 13.4 Variations in color vocabulary
■ BOX 13.5 ERP evidence for language effects on perception
13.4 Language Structure and the Connection between Culture and Mind
■ METHOD 13.2 Language intrusion and the variable Whorf effect
■ BOX 13.6 Mark Twain on the awful memory-taxing syntax of German
13.5 One Mind, Multiple Languages
■ LANGUAGE AT LARGE 13.2 Can your language make you broke and fat?