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Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare, and the theory of universal grammar remains controversial among linguists.
Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists, tend to share certain working assumptions such as the competence–performance distinction and the notion that some domain-specific aspects of grammar are partly innate in humans. These assumptions are rejected in non-generative approaches such as usage-based models of language. Generative linguistics includes work in core areas such as syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, with additional extensions to topics including biolinguistics and music cognition.
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a Universal Grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages.
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Linda B. Smith is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science, proposing, through theoretical and empirical studies, a new way of understanding developmental processes. Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception, action, language, and categorization, showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning.
In linguistics, Poverty of the stimulus (POS) arguments are arguments that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. Poverty of the stimulus arguments are used as evidence for universal grammar, the notion that at least some aspects of linguistic competence are innate. The term "poverty of the stimulus" was coined by Noam Chomsky in 1980. Their empirical and conceptual bases are a topic of continuing debate in linguistics.
Bilingualism, a subset of multilingualism, means having proficiency in two languages. A bilingual individual is traditionally defined as someone who understands and produces two languages on a regular basis. A bilingual individual's initial exposure to both languages may start in early childhood, e.g. before age 3, but exposure may also begin later in life, in monolingual or bilingual education. Equal proficiency in a bilingual individuals' languages is rarely seen as it typically varies by domain. For example, a bilingual individual may have greater proficiency for work-related terms in one language, and family-related terms in another language.
Roger William Brown was an American psychologist. He was known for his work in social psychology and in children's language development.
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Dr. Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Landau specializes in language learning, spatial representation and relationships between these foundational systems of human knowledge. She examines questions about how the two systems work together to enhance human cognition and whether one is actually foundational to the other. She is known for her research on unusual cases of development and is a leading authority on language and spatial information in people with Williams syndrome.
Vyvyan Evans is a British cognitive linguist, digital communication technologist, popular science author, science fiction author and public intellectual. He has published fifteen books, both non-fiction and fiction. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University. He is an advocate of the usage-based model of language development, the domain-general view of mind, and the importance of non-verbal, paralinguistic cues in communication—the development of emoji as a system of digital communication being a case in point. Evans is also a published science fiction author. His writing envisages a near future in which language is not learned but streamed.
Word learning biases are certain biases or assumptions that allow children to quickly rule out unlikely alternatives in order to effectively process and learn word meanings. They begin to manifest themselves around 18 months, when children begin to rapidly expand their vocabulary. These biases are important for children with limited processing abilities if they are to be successful in word learning. The guiding lexical principles have been defined as implicit and explicit strategies towards language acquisition. When a child learns a new word they must decide whether the word refers to the whole object, part of the object, or the object's characteristics, solving an indeterminacy problem.
Statistical language acquisition, a branch of developmental psycholinguistics, studies the process by which humans develop the ability to perceive, produce, comprehend, and communicate with natural language in all of its aspects through the use of general learning mechanisms operating on statistical patterns in the linguistic input. Statistical learning acquisition claims that infants' language-learning is based on pattern perception rather than an innate biological grammar. Several statistical elements such as frequency of words, frequent frames, phonotactic patterns and other regularities provide information on language structure and meaning for facilitation of language acquisition.
Eve Vivienne Clark is a British-born American linguist. Clark's research focuses on first language acquisition, especially the acquisition of meaning. She has also worked on the acquisition and use of word-formation, including comparative studies of English and Hebrew in children and adults. Some of her research examines what children can learn about conventional ways to say things based on adult responses to child errors during acquisition.
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The frequency illusion, is a cognitive bias in which a person notices a specific concept, word, or product more frequently after recently becoming aware of it.
David Adger is a Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Adger is interested in the human capacity for syntax. Adger served as president of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 2015 to 2020.
The usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage. It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics, on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition. Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels. Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.
Vera Demberg is a German computational linguist and professor of computer science and computational linguistics at Saarland University.
References
- 1 2 "Culbertson". Young Academy of Europe. 2019-11-21. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
- 1 2 "Prof. Jennifer Culbertson". jennifer-culbertson.github.io. Retrieved 2024-06-26.
- ↑ "Glushko Dissertation Prize". Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
- 1 2 "Jennifer Culbertson". University of Edinburgh Research Explorer. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
- ↑ "Cogsci 2022". Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved 2024-06-28.
- ↑ Dryer, Matthew S. (2018). "On the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun". Language. 94 (4): 798–833. doi:10.1353/lan.2018.0054. ISSN 1535-0665.
- ↑ Dunn, Michael; Greenhill, Simon J.; Levinson, Stephen C.; Gray, Russell D. (2011-04-13). "Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals". Nature. 473 (7345): 79–82. Bibcode:2011Natur.473...79D. doi:10.1038/nature09923. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0013-3B19-B . ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 21490599.
- ↑ Bybee, Joan L. (2008-01-24), "5 Formal Universals as Emergent Phenomena: The Origins of Structure Preservation", Linguistic Universals and Language Change, Oxford University PressOxford, pp. 108–122, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199298495.003.0005, ISBN 978-0-19-929849-5 , retrieved 2024-06-28
