S. Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. William Morro, New York, NY, 1994.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....having been trained on a corpus (CHILDES) containing transcribed speech of parents directed to small children. 1 Introduction A central tenet of generative linguistics is that extensive innate knowledge of grammar is essential to explain the acquisition of language from positive only data [1, 2]. Here, we explore an alternative hypothesis, according to which syntax is an abstraction that emerges from exposure to language [3] coexisting with the corpus data within the same representational mechanism. Far from parsimonious, the representation we introduce allows partial overlap of ....

S. Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. William Morro, New York, NY, 1994.

....child of schooling (and thence of literacy) is a crime. Natural predisposition. Universal literacy and the culture that goes with it are possible because they externalize, discipline, and sublimate natural language and natural language happens to be something we humans are wired for from birth[9, 44], like walking. We can train ourselves though with some e#ort to be at home with the ever more complex external constructions that society builds on language only because the foundations of these constructions are solidly within ourselves. 1 The contrast of this with certain arguments of ....

Pinker, Steven, The Language Instinct: How the mind creates language, Harper 2000.

.... These unexpected findings in children are hard to reconcile with one of the most popular ideas in neuropsychology: that the left hemi sphere of the human brain contains an innate and highly specialized organ for language (e.g. Fodor, 1983; Gopnik, 1990; Gopnik and Crago, 1991; Newmeyer, 1997; Pinker, 1994; Rice, 1996) The language organ hypothesis is appealing on many grounds. Aside from its value in explaining left hemisphere specialization, the existence of a specialized language organ might help to explain why all normal adults are virtuosi in this domain. For example, adult speakers of ....

Pinker, S., 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow.

....approach to language (e.g. Chomsky, 1986) this head direction consistency has been explained in terms of an innate module known as X theory which specifies constraints on the phrase structure of languages. It has further been suggested that this module emerged as a product of natural selection (Pinker, 1994). As such, it comes as part of the body of innate linguistic knowledge i.e. the Universal Grammar (UG) that every child supposedly is born with. All that remains for a child to learn about this aspect of her native language is the direction (i.e. head first or head last) of the so called ....

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: NY: William Morrow and Company.

....ethnolinguistic tribe. We suppose that the symbolically marked, cooperating ingroup adaptation was based on psychological decision making system analogous to Chomsky s view of language as an innate set of algorithmic principles, whose parameters are set culturally by the specific language learned (Pinker 1994: 111 2) The propensity to cooperate with sympathy inspiring ingroup members, and to use symbolic markers to define ingroups, is a like the innate principles of language. The specific markers, size of group(s) and internal structure of the group(s) to which individuals belong are culturally ....

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language instinct: how the mind creates language. William Morrow, New York.

....growing networks, adaptive learning rates, and intrinsic changes in learning that come about because of node saturation. The reader is referred to Elman et al. for detailed examples at all of these levels. For our purposes here, the point is that strong nativist claims about language (Fodor, 1983; Pinker, 1994), physics (Spelke, 1991) or social reasoning (Horgan, 1995; Leslie, 1994) have to assume representational nativism, implicitly or explicitly, because that is the only level with the required coding power for the implementation of knowledge that is independent of experience. For example, Noam ....

.... was observed that only affects regular grammatical morphemes (e.g. walk walked) with no other effect on any other aspect of cognition or language, including irregular grammatical morphemes (e.g. give gave) The initial report generated a great deal of excitement (Gopnik, 1990; Pinker, 1994), but it was ultimately shown to be premature and largely incorrect. More comprehensive studies show that the affected members of this family suffer from a host of deficits inside and outside of language, and the putative dissociation between regular and irregular morphemes does not replicate ....

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: William Morrow.

....the most widely held view is one in which linguistic meaning is viewed as a symbolic system which maps onto a universal and symbolic conceptual system. This conceptual system may be innate or learned pre linguistically. For example, this is the view of two very influential frameworks, those of Pinker (1994) and Jackendoff (1992) We will refer to models that adhere to this view as symbolic models of linguistic behavior and acquisition. On the symbolic view, language acquisition involves learning about the particular language s semantic structures and how they map onto universal conceptual ....

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: W. Morrow.

....which is surprising considering the complexity of the task. Several proposals have been made in order to provide a solution to this problem, often called the poverty of stimulus argument or Plato s problem. One well known explanation comes from Chomsky (e.g. 1981) and more recently, Pinker (1994). It proposes an innate language faculty, a language specific module in the brain, with a universal grammar. Children need only to look for examples of their innate knowledge of some grammatical rules and categories in the linguistic input, instead of trying to induce them. Others (e.g. Clark, ....

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: how the mind creates language.New York: William Morrow and Co.

.... that human 2 Explicit generation of negative examples using a closed world assumption is performed automatically in many systems such as Foil (Quinlan, 1990) language acquisition exploits fairly restrictive constraints or biases in order to learn complex natural languages from limited data (Pinker, 1994). Of course, evaluating the success of this approach is, ultimately, an empirical question. In this paper, we compare the generic approach with a specific alternative, namely Chill, which acquires parsers by specializing a general parsing architecture by learning control rules. 2.2 Parser ....

Pinker, S. (Ed.). (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.

....is hypothesized that it might have arisen as a by product of increased brain size following evolutionary pressures driven by other functions than language, or, perhaps, as a consequence of random mutations. The other camp (e.g. Bloom, 1994; Corballis, 1992, 1994; Greenfield, 1991; Hurford, 1991; Pinker, 1994; Pinker Bloom, 1990) emphasizes a gradual evolution of the human language faculty through natural selection. In this picture, it is assumed that having a language confers added reproductive fitness on humans and that this, in turn, leads to a selective pressure towards increasingly more complex ....

....organs develop; and that multipurpose learning strategies are no more likely to exist than general principles of growth of organs that account for the shape, structure, and function of the kidney, the liver, the heart, the visual system, and so forth (Chomsky, 1980: P. 245) More recently, Pinker (1994) has argued that language is better construed as an instinct because it conveys the idea that people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs (p. 18) Both terms carry much the same nativist commitments on their sleeves, indicating that only highly ....

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Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: NY: William Morrow and Company.

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Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. William Morrow and Company, New York, 1994.

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Pinker, Steven (1994), The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, New York: William Morrow.

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Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow and Co.

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