Language and Thought

Terry Regier

University of Chicago

regier at uchicago dot edu

Cognitive science summer school

New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria

July 7-13, 2008

Description

This course explores the relation of language and thought, broadly construed, with an emphasis on recent work.  We will explore such questions as: Is language uniquely human, and if so, why? What knowledge does every language user have, and is that knowledge innate or learned? Does the language you speak affect the way you think, or do human languages reflect a universal conceptual repertoire? An overarching theme of the course is that while the study of language and thought is presently largely empirical, both the field’s past and interesting aspects of its future are computational in nature. The course relies on computational ideas, but no prior computational background is required.

Lectures

Lecture 1: Language, thought, and computation

Davis, M. (2000). The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing. W. W. Norton and Company. pp. 1-7, 15-17 (Leibniz); pp. 61, 74-76 (Cantor); pp. 142, 146-167 (Turing).

Thomas, M. S. C. & McClelland, J. L. (2008). Connectionist models of cognition. In R. Sun (Ed). The Cambridge handbook of computational psychology. Cambridge University Press. [Read pp. 1-22, 46-58.]

Griffiths, T. L. et al. (2008). Bayesian models of cognition. In R. Sun (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of computational psychology. Cambridge University Press. [Read pp. 1-12.]

Lecture 2: Is linguistic knowledge innate?

Chomsky, N. (1986). Preface & Knowledge of language as a focus of inquiry. In Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use (pp. xxv-14). Westport, CT: Praeger.

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

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 (submitted, do not cite).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

Lecture 3: Words, symbols, and social cognition

Tomasello, M. (2007). If they’re so good at grammar, then why don’t they talk? Hints from apes’ and humans’ use of gestures. Language Learning and Development, 3, 133-156.

Regier, T. (2005). The emergence of words: Attentional learning in form and meaning. Cognitive Science, 29, 819-865.

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

Lecture 4: The Whorf hypothesis

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

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

Pica, P. et al. (2004). Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science, 306, 499-503.

[Optional] Pullum, G. (1991). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. University of Chicago Press. pp. 159-171.

Lecture 5: Beyond Whorf

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.

Grading

Your grade will be based on:

1. Participation in morning lecture and afternoon discussion.
2. Participation in an experiment.
3. A 3-5 page research proposal on a topic that concerns the relation of language and thought, and that you personally find interesting.