Psych 426/726: Learning Language

Read this first. This is a seminar in cognitive psychology; very little prior knowledge of linguistics or computation is assumed. However, there is a prerequisite: Psych/Cogst/Info 214/614, offered every Fall.

In this seminar, we shall attempt to understand the cognitive function that is at the core of the human nature: language. Thematically, the material to be covered focuses on two issues: (1) the structure of language, and (2) its learning. Consequently, the papers that we shall read shed light on the nature of linguistic knowledge ("grammar") possessed by normal adult speakers, and on the acquisition of this knowledge by children.

There is also a bulletin board, where you can post messages and questions (including links and attachments), and set up an account to receive email notification about new postings.

Weekly reading list:

week/date	topic	required reading	supplementary reading
week 1: 1/23 [Shimon]	What needs to be explained: structure of language	C. Phillips, *Syntax, Macmillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (2001).	M. Hauser, N. Chomsky and T. Fitch, *The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?, Science 298:1569-1579 (2002). S. Pinker and R. Jackendoff, *The faculty of language: what's special about it?, Cognition 95:201-236 (2005).
week 2: 1/30 [Shimon]	What needs to be explained: acquisition of language	A. Clark, *Nativism and the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (chapter 2, PhD thesis, University of Sussex at Brighton, 2001). C. D. Yang, *Universal Grammar, statistics or both?, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8:451-456 (2004).	L. Gleitman and P. Bloom, Language Acquisition (MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, 2003). [Online access for Cornell users] P. Adriaans and M. van Zaanen, *Computational Grammar Induction for Linguists, Grammars 7:57-68 (2004).
week 3: 2/6 [Shimon]	What counts as evidence, and what is explanation	M. Penke and A. Rosenbach, *What counts as evidence in linguistics? The case of innateness, Studies in Language 28:480-526 (2004). S. Edelman, Bridging language with the rest of cognition: computational, algorithmic and neurobiological issues and methods, Proc. Ithaca EMCL workshop (John Benjamins, 2007, in press).	C. Schutze, The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology, U. of Chicago Press, 1996.
week 4: 2/13 [Shimon]	Psychological reality of syntax — the good, the bad, and the ugly	Y. Nakano, C. Felser, and H. Clahsen, *Antecedent priming at trace positions in Japanese long-distance scrambling, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 31:531-570 (2002). N. F. Johnson, The psychological reality of phrase-structure rules, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 4:469-475 (1965).	M. Ben-Shachar, T. Hendler, I. Kahn, D. Ben-Bashat, and Y. Grodzinsky, *The neural reality of syntactic transformations: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging, Psychological Science 14:433-438 (2003).
week 5: 2/20 [Wendy]	Evidence for item- and usage-based development	E. Bates and J. C. Goodman, *On the Emergence of Grammar From the Lexicon, 29-79, in Emergence of Language, B. MacWhinney, ed., Erlbaum (1999). M. Tomasello, *The item-based nature of children's early syntactic development, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4:156-163 (2000).	E. Lieven, H. Behrens, J. Speares, and M. Tomasello, *Early syntactic creativity: a usage-based approach, Journal of Child Language 30:333-370 (2003). K. Abbot-Smith, and M. Tomasello, *Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition, The Linguistic Review 23:275-290 (2006).
week 6: 2/27 [Florencia]	The nature of the Primary Linguistic Data (PLD)	G. K. Pullum and B. Scholz, *Empirical assessment of poverty of the stimulus arguments, The Linguistic Review 19:9-50 (2002). F. Reali and M. H. Christiansen, *Uncovering the richness of the stimulus: Structural dependence and indirect statistical evidence, Cognitive Science 29:1007-1028 (2005).	B. MacWhinney, *A multiple process solution to the logical problem of language acquisition, Journal of Child Language, 31:883-914 (2004).
week 7: 3/6 [Thomas]	Evidence for imperfect adult performance	A. J. Sanford and P. Sturt, *Depth of processing in language comprehension: not noticing the evidence, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6:382-386 (2002). F. Ferreira, K. G. D. Bailey, and V. Ferraro, *Good-enough representations in language comprehension, Current Directions in Psychological Science 11:11-15 (2002).	E. Gibson and N. Pearlmutter, *Constraints on sentence comprehension, Trends in Cognitive Science 2:262-268 (1998).
week 8: 3/13 [Tywanquila]	Evidence for imperfect adult "competence"	N. Chipere, Real Language Users, CogPrints (1998). N. Chipere, *Native speaker variations in syntactic competence: implications for first language teaching, Language Awareness 10:107-124 (2001).	E. Dabrowska and J. Street, *Individual differences in language attainment: Comprehension of passive sentences by native and non-native English speakers, Language Sciences 28:604-615 (2006).
Spring Break
week 9: 3/27 [Lauren]	Evidence for continuity with the rest of cognition	C. L. Harris and E. Bates, *Clausal backgrounding and pronominal reference: A functionalist approach to c-command, Language and Cognitive Processes 17:237-270 (2002).	R. A. Zwaan, R. A. Stanfield, and R. H. Yaxley, *Language comprehenders mentally represent the shapes of objects, Psychological Science 13:168-172 (2002).
week 10: 4/3 [Jeremy]	Evidence for the effects of experience	C. L. Harris, Psycholinguistic studies of entrenchment, in Conceptual Structures, Language and Discourse, volume 2, J. Koenig, ed., CSLI (1998). A. L. Theakston, *The role of entrenchment in children's and adults' performance on grammaticality judgment tasks, Cognitive Development 19:15-34 (2004).	M. Gross, Lexicon-Grammar: Application to French, 2195-2205, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, R. E. Asher, ed., Pergamon Press (1994). B. Erman and B. Warren, *The idiom principle and the open-choice principle, Text 20:29-62 (2000).
week 11: 4/10 [Zofia]	Evidence of statistical learning of simple linguistic structures	J. Saffran, *Constraints on statistical language learning, Journal of Memory and Language 47:172-196 (2002). T. Regier and S. Gahl, *Learning the unlearnable: the role of missing evidence, Cognition 93:147-155 (2004).	B. Krenn and C. Samuelsson, The Linguist's Guide to Statistics (Don't Panic) (1997).
week 12: 4/17 [Shimon]	A unifying perspective: Construction Grammar	A. E. Goldberg, *Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7:219-224 (2003). M. Tomasello, *Acquiring linguistic constructions, in Handbook of Child Psychology, R. Siegler and D. Kuhn, eds., pp. 1-48, Oxford University Press (2006).	P. F. Dominey, *From Sensorimotor Sequence to Grammatical Construction: Evidence from Simulation and Neurophysiology, Adaptive Behavior 13:347-361 (2005).
week 13: 4/24 [Shimon]	Learning grammar: ADIOS, HOLA	Z. Solan, D. Horn, E. Ruppin, and S. Edelman, *Unsupervised learning of natural languages, in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (102:11629-11634, 2005). B. Sandbank, S. Edelman, and E. Ruppin, *From ConText to Grammar: a step towards practical probabilistic context free grammar inference, submitted (April 2007).	Z. Solan, D. Horn, E. Ruppin, and S. Edelman, *supplementary material to Unsupervised learning of natural languages. N. Chater and C. D. Manning, *Probabilistic models of language processing and acquisition, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10:335-344 (2006).
week 14: 5/1 [nobody]	no meeting