Psychology of Language

 

Psychology 37500

Winter 2008

 

 

Description

This course explores the relation of language and thought, broadly construed, with an emphasis on recent work.  The course relies in part on computational ideas, but no prior computational background is required.  The course is intended for psychology or linguistics graduate students; a related undergraduate course can be found here.

 

Website

http://www.psych.uchicago.edu/~regier/language/grad.html

 

Instructor

Terry Regier

Email: regier at uchicago dot edu

Office: Green 414

Phone: 2-0918

 

Time & location

Fridays 1:30-3:30 in Green 117.  

 

Grading

Your grade will be based on:

  1. Participation in discussion (40%), and
  2. A final paper (60%).

 

Final paper

Your final paper should be a literature review (roughly 10 pages) of some topic that interests you and that concerns human language. Please run the topic past me in advance – and please feel free to propose something that will be useful to you in your trial or dissertation research.   In your paper, report what is known on your selected topic, how that knowledge has been arrived at (with an emphasis on recent work), what questions are left open, and how those questions might be effectively addressed.  There is some leeway on how computational this should be.  At a minimum, please try to include at least two computational papers in your review, conceptually integrating their results with the remainder.  At the other extreme, if you would like to actually answer some of the open questions that you identify using ideas from this course, please contact me and we’ll try to work something out.  Your final paper is due Monday March 17, at 12 noon.  Please drop hardcopy in my office door inbox (Green 414).

 

Readings and schedule

All assigned readings are in electronic form, and are linked from this page.

 

Jan 11: Why is language uniquely human?

Hauser, M. et al. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?  Science 298: 1569-1579.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition.  Chapter 1: A puzzle and a hypothesis.  (Brief book review here.)

Gentner, T. et al. (2006). Recursive syntactic pattern learning by songbirds. Nature 440: 1204-1207.

Tomasello, M. (2000). The item-based nature of children’s early syntactic development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4: 156-163.

[Optional] Pinker, S., and Jackendoff, R. (2005). The faculty of language: What’s special about it? Cognition 95: 201-236.

 

Jan 18: Formal languages

Davis, M. (2000).  The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing.  pp. 1-7, 15-17 (Leibniz); pp. 61, 74-76 (Cantor [optional]); pp. 142, 146-167 (Turing). There are a few extraneous pages on Boole – ignore them.

Crash course in formal language theory.

[Optional] Slides on diagonal method.

[Optional] Leibniz, G. (1678).  Preface to a universal characteristic.

 

Jan 25: Poverty of the stimulus

Chomsky, N. (1965,1980). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Rules and Representations. [excerpts].

Reali, F. & Christiansen, M. (2005). Uncovering the richness of the stimulus: Structure dependence and indirect statistical evidence. Cognitive Science 29, 1007-1028.

Kam, X., et al. (2005). Statistics vs. UG in language acquisition: Does a bigram analysis predict auxiliary inversion? In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Psychocomputational Models of Human Language Acquisition.  Association for Computational Linguistics.

Perfors, A. et al. (2006). Poverty of the stimulus? A rational approach. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

[Optional] Perfors, A. et al. (draft, submitted, do not cite). The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. 

[Optional] Pullum, G., & Scholz, B. (2002). Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments.  The Linguistic Review 19: 9-50.

[Optional] Chater, N., & Vitanyi, P. (2003). Simplicity: a unifying principle in cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 19-22.

 

Feb 1: Word learning

Hare, B., et al. (2002). The domestication of social cognition in dogs.  Science 298: 1634 – 1636.

Kaminski, J., et al. (2004). Word learning in a domestic dog: Evidence for “fast mapping”.  Science 304: 1682-1683.

Xu, F. & Tenenbaum, J. (2007). Sensitivity to sampling in Bayesian word learning. Developmental Science 10: 288-297.

Regier, T. et al. (2001). The emergence of words. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

 

Feb 8: Language structure through language evolution

Kirby, S. (2002).  Learning, bottlenecks, and the evolution of recursive syntax.  In Ted Briscoe (Ed.), Linguistic Evolution through Language Acquisition: Formal and Computational Models. Cambridge University Press.

Kalish, M., Griffiths, T.L., & Lewandowsky, S. (2007).  Iterated learning: Intergenerational knowledge transmission reveals inductive biases.  Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 14: 288-294.

 

Feb 15: Linguistic relativity: color

Sapir, E. (1929).  The status of linguistics as a science.  Language 5, 207-214.  (Read pp. 209-210.)

Davidoff, J., et al. (1999). Colour categories in a stone-age tribe. Nature, 398, 203-204.

Gilbert, A., et al. (2006). Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. PNAS, 103, 489-494.

Regier, T., et al. (2007). Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space. PNAS, 104, 1436-1441.

 

Feb 22: Linguistic relativity: space

Majid, A. et al. (2004). Can language restructure cognition? The case for space. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8: 108-114.

Hespos, S. J. & Spelke, E. S. (2004). Conceptual precursors to spatial language. Nature 430: 453 - 456.

 

Feb 29: Categories and particulars   

Huttenlocher, J. et al. (1991).  Categories and particulars: Prototype effects in estimating spatial location. Psychological Review 98: 352-376.

Feldman, N. & Griffiths, T. (2007). A rational account of the perceptual magnet effect.  Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Background material.

[For fun] Nelson, L. & Simmons, J. (2007). Moniker maladies: When names sabotage success.  Psychological Science 18: 1106-1112.  [Vaguely related news story]

 

Mar 7: Pirahã and language universals (class is 10:30-12 this day only; same room)

Everett, D. (2005). Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language. Current Anthropology 46 (4): 621-46. 

Recursion and human thought: Why the Pirahã don’t have numbers.  A talk with Daniel L. Everett.  Edge.org, 2007.  (Be sure to continue to the following page of commentary.)

 

 (Reading period: Thu-Fri Mar 13-14)

 

Mar 17: Final paper due at noon.