Learning and Inventing Language

 

Psychology 41603

Winter 2007

 

 

Instructors

Susan Goldin-Meadow (sgm at uchicago dot edu)

John Lucy (johnlucy at uchicago dot edu)

Terry Regier (regier at uchicago dot edu)

 

Time & location         Mondays from 9am-noon, except for two weeks as noted below.  All meetings are in Green 104.

 

Website                        http://www.psych.uchicago.edu/~regier/lg-creation/

 

Readings and schedule

 

Mon Jan 8: Overview, and language development in middle childhood I

Introduction, then lecture and discussion of excerpts from Berman and Slobin (see next week’s readings).

 

Recommended background reading:

 

Jakobson, R.  (1957/1971).  Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb.  In Selected Writings, Vol. 2: Word and Language, 130-136.  The Hague: Mouton.

 

Wolfgang Klein 1994 Time in Language (1-13).  New York: Routledge.

 

John Lucy  1993  Reflexive language and the human disciplines.  In J. Lucy, Reflexive language: reported speech and metapragmatics (9-32).  Cambridge: CUP.

 

John Lucy 2004  Language, culture, and mind in comparative perspective.  In M. Achard and S. Kemmer (Ed.), Language, Culture, and Mind (1-21).  Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications.

 

Fri Jan 19 (1:30-4:30): Language development in middle childhood II

Determiners:  Karmiloff-Smith, Annette (1979). A functional approach to child language: A study of determiners and reference.  Cambridge.   Chapter 5 Production experiments: anaphoric function of determiners (141-147);  Chapter 8 Comprehension experiments: anaphoric function of determiners (200-206);  Chapter 9 Synthesis of the child’s acquisition of the plurifunctionality of determiners (214-227);  Chapter 10 General implications for language acquisition and child development (only 237-241).

 

Tense:  Ruth A. Berman and Dan I. Slobin 1994 Relating events in narrative: a cross-linguistic developmental study.  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  Developmental profiles (57-84);  Present and/or Past Tense (130-137);  [Stimuli:] Appendix I: Frog, where are you (647-654).

 

Reported Speech:  Maya Hickmann  1993.  The boundaries of reported speech in narrative discourse: some developmental aspects. In J. Lucy, Reflexive language  (63-90). Cambridge: CUP.

 

Mon Jan 22: Language evolution

Deacon, T. (2003). Universal grammar and semiotic constraints. In Morten Christiansen and Simon Kirby (Eds.), Language Evolution, Oxford University Press. pp. 111-139.

Corballis, M. (2003). From hand to mouth: The gestural origins of language. In Morten Christiansen and Simon Kirby (Eds.), Language Evolution, Oxford University Press.  pp. 201-218.

 

Mon Jan 29:  Language creation alone, in communities, and over time

Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). What language creation in the manual modality tells us about the foundations of language.  Linguistic Review, 22, 199-225.

Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Ozyurek, A.  (2004).  Children creating core properties of language:  Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua.  Science, 305, 1779-1782.

Sandler, W., Meir, I., Padden, C., & Aronoff, M.  (2005).  The emergence of grammar:  Systematic structure in a new language.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 2661-2665.

 

Mon Feb 5:  Models of language evolution

Kirby, S. & Christiansen, M. (2003). From language learning to language evolution.  In Morten Christiansen and Simon Kirby (Eds.), Language Evolution, Oxford University Press.  pp. 272-294.

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.

 

Fri Feb 9 (1:30-4:30): Models of language evolution, continued

Kalish, M., Griffiths, T.L., & Lewandowsky, S. (in press).  Iterated learning: Intergenerational knowledge transmission reveals inductive biases.  Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

Regier, T., Kay, P., & Khetarpal, N. (2007).  Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 1436-1441.

 

Mon Feb 19: Humans creating and learning artificial languages

Hudson Kam, C. & Newport, E. L.  (2005). Regularizing unpredictable variation in creole formation:  The roles of adult and child learners.  Language Learning and Development, 1, 151-195.

Gershkoff-Stowe, L., & Goldin-Meadow, S.  (2002).  Is there a natural order for expressing semantic relations?  Cognitive Psychology, 45 (3), 375-412.

Galantucci, B.  (2005).  An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems.  Cognitive Science, 29, 737-767.

 

Mon Feb 26

Hopper, P. & Traugott, E. (2003).  Grammaticalization, 2nd edition.  Chapters one, three, and four.

 

Optional background reading:

Lehmann, C. (1995). Thoughts on grammaticalization.  Munich: Lincom Europa.

Slobin, D. (1994). Talking perfectly: Discourse origins of the present perfect.  In William Pagliuca (Ed.), Perspectives on Grammaticalization.

Haspelmath, M. (2002). The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison.  In Michael Tomasello (Ed.), The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

 

Mon Mar 5 (SGM out of town)

            TBD