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Child's Play
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- December 22, 2010
- 09:43 PM
- 523 views
Bad Metaphors Make for Bad Theories
by melodye in Child's Play
Imagine for a moment, that you have been thrown back into the Ellisonesque world of the 1980’s, with a delightful perm and even better trousers. One fragile Monday morning, you are sitting innocently enough at your cubicle, when your boss comes to you with the summary of a report you have never read, on a [...]... Read more »
Ramscar, M.,, Yarlett, D.,, Dye, M.,, Denny, K.,, & Thorpe, K. (2010) The Effects of Feature-Label-Order and their implications for symbolic learning. Cognitive Science, 34(6), 909-957. info:/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01092.x
- October 14, 2010
- 03:57 PM
- 1,347 views
The Knobe Effect
by melodye in Child's Play
As an avid reader of Language Log, my interest was recently piqued by a commenter asking for a linguist’s eye-view on the “Knobe Effect”: “Speaking of Joshua Knobe, has any linguist looked into the Knobe Effect? The questionnaire findings are always passed off as evidence for some special philosophical character inherent in certain concepts like intentionality [...]... Read more »
Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63(279), 190-194. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8284.00419
Knobe, J. (2005) Theory of mind and moral cognition: exploring the connections. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(8), 357-359. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2005.06.011
Ramscar, M., Matlock, T., & Dye, M. (2010) Running down the clock: the role of expectation in our understanding of time and motion. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(5), 589-615. info:/
- October 5, 2010
- 03:50 AM
- 339 views
The reality of a universal language faculty?
by melodye in Child's Play
An argument is often made that similarities between languages (so-called “linguistic universals“) provide strong evidence for the existence of an innate, universal grammar (UG) that is shared by all humans, regardless of language spoken. If language were not underpinned by such a grammar, it is argued, there would be endless (and extreme) variation, of the [...]... Read more »
Evans N, & Levinson SC. (2009) The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 32(5), 429. PMID: 19857320
Pinker, S., & Jackendoff, R. (2009) The reality of a universal language faculty. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(05), 465. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X09990720
- September 30, 2010
- 01:27 AM
- 346 views
Intelligent Nihilism
by melodye in Child's Play
I wanted to register a quick reply to some of the comments on last week’s post “The question is : are you dumber than a rat?” In the comments there, and in posts on other blogs, our research program has been accused of intelligent nihilism. By one such characterization, our position is that “we don’t [...]... Read more »
Pullum, Geoffrey K., & Scholz, Barbara C. (2007) Systematicity and natural language syntax. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 7(21), 375-402. info:/
Pullum, G., & Rawlins, K. (2007) Argument or no argument?. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(2), 277-287. DOI: 10.1007/s10988-007-9013-y
Gross, M. (1979) On the Failure of Generative Grammar. Language, 55(4), 859. DOI: 10.2307/412748
- September 23, 2010
- 05:58 AM
- 343 views
The question is : are you dumber than a rat?
by melodye in Child's Play
Many developmental psychologists buy into an argument that suggests that children are dumber than rats. Should you? Human cognition is geared towards the central task of predicting the world around it. As you may remember from an earlier post I did on the A-not-B task in infants, children aren’t born understanding causal relationships right off [...]... Read more »
Ramscar, M.,, Yarlett, D.,, Dye, M.,, Denny, K.,, & Thorpe, K. (2010) The Effects of Feature-Label-Order and their implications for symbolic learning. Cognitive Science, 34(6), 909-957. info:/
Rescorla, R. (1988) Pavlovian conditioning: It's not what you think it is. American Psychologist, 43(3), 151-160. DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.43.3.151
- September 6, 2010
- 07:02 AM
- 1,145 views
Why are Zipfian distributions found in language?
by melodye in Child's Play
This post is a scholarly addendum to today’s main post, aimed to satisfy the curiosity of my academic readers. I’m going to leave you with an excerpt from an excellent book chapter, “Repetition and Reuse in Child Language Learning,” by Colin Bannard and Elena Lieven. The two take up the question of why Zipfian distributions [...]... Read more »
Simon, H.A. (1955) On a class of skew distribution functions. Biometrika, 425-440. DOI: 10.2307/2333389
Miller, G.A. (1957) Some effects of intermittent silence. . The American Journal of Psychology. DOI: 10.2307/1419346
Howes, D. (1968) Zipf's Law and Miller's Random-Monkey Model. The American Journal of Psychology., 81(2), 269-272. DOI: 10.2307/1421275
Ferrer-i-Cancho, R., & Sole, R. V. (2003) Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 788-791. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0335980100
Biemann, C. (2007) A Random Text Model for the Generation of Statistical Language Invariants. Proceedings of HLT-NAACL-07, Rochester, NY, USA. info:/
- September 6, 2010
- 06:30 AM
- 1,248 views
Mollies, PokeBalls, and Naked Ladies : A Topsy-Turvy Lesson in Learning Words from Context
by melodye in Child's Play
This morning, I scrawled a letter to a friend that began with the following: Spent the weekend at the FyeahFest with a starry-eyed lot of starving hipsters, in vintage hops and wingtips. Had not realized how obvious the effects of doing molly are on the pupils… the droves wandering past had eyes like shining saucers. [...]... Read more »
KW Church,, & WA Gale. (1995) Inverse document frequency (IDF): A measure of deviations from Poisson. In A. et al. (Ed.), NLP using Very Large Corpora. Kluwer Academic Publishers. . info:/
DeLong, K., Urbach, T., & Kutas, M. (2005) Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nature Neuroscience, 8(8), 1117-1121. DOI: 10.1038/nn1504
- September 2, 2010
- 07:49 PM
- 503 views
But Science Doesn’t Work That Way : Miller and Chomsky (1963)
by melodye in Child's Play
In this post, our heroine — spurred on by her godly pursuit of science and a bevy of caffeinated drinks — compares the standard approach to language to intelligent design. It might get noodly. Pick one : Does language “emerge” full-blown in children, guided by a hierarchy of inbuilt grammatical rules for sentence formation and comprehension? Or [...]... Read more »
Rescorla RA. (1988) Pavlovian conditioning. It's not what you think it is. American Psychologist, 43(3), 151-60. PMID: 3364852
Bannard C, Lieven E, & Tomasello M. (2009) Modeling children's early grammatical knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(41), 17284-9. PMID: 19805057
Ramscar, M., Yarlett, D., Dye, M., Denny, K., & Thorpe, K. (2010) The Effects of Feature-Label-Order and their Implications for Symbolic Learning. Cognitive Science, 34(7), 909-957. info:/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01092.x
Scholz, B., & Pullum, G. (2006) Irrational Nativist Exuberance. Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, 59-80. info:/
- August 26, 2010
- 09:41 PM
- 331 views
Why dictionaries don’t supply meaning : Miller on communication
by melodye in Child's Play
At the moment, I am taking a (temporary) break from my furious critiquing of peer review, and have begun working busily on a new series about the workings of human languages. Writing about this is for a general audience is hard, particularly because I suspect that many people have unexamined intuitive views about language that [...]... Read more »
Lieven, E., Pine, J., & Baldwin, G. (1997) Lexically-based learning and the development of grammar in early multi-word speech. Journal of Child Language, 24(1), 187-219. info:/
Lieven E, Behrens H, Speares J, & Tomasello M. (2003) Early syntactic creativity: a usage-based approach. Journal of child language, 30(2), 333-70. PMID: 12846301
- August 9, 2010
- 05:40 PM
- 355 views
A Thinking Machine: On metaphors for mind
by melodye in Child's Play
“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”–B. F. Skinner. The study of mind begins with a metaphor. In the 20th century (and now on into the 21st) the metaphor that has dominated our study of mind is the [...]... Read more »
Rescorla, R. (1988) Pavlovian conditioning: It's not what you think it is. American Psychologist, 43(3), 151-160. DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.43.3.151
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