" If you are not already a Steven Pinker addict, this book will make you one."--Jared
Diamond In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker explores profound mysteries of language by
picking a deceptively simple phenomenon--regular and irregular verbs--and examining it …

Language and cognition have been explained as the products of a homogeneous
associative memory structure or alternatively, of a set of genetically determined
computational modules in which rules manipulate symbolic representations. Intensive study …

Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in
overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance (" U-shaped
development"). The errors seem paradigmatic of rule use, hence bear on central issues in …

What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is
the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of
connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language …

In The Algebraic Mind, Gary Marcus attempts to integrate two theories about how the mind
works, one that says that the mind is a computer-like manipulator of symbols, and another
that says that the mind is a large network of neurons working together in parallel. Resisting …

Both regular inflectional patterns (walk-walked) and irregular ones (swing-swung) can be
applied productively to novel words (eg wug-wugged; spling-splung). Theories of generative
phonology attribute both generalisations to rules; connectionist theories attribute both to …

The authors present a theory of how relational inference and generalization can be
accomplished within a cognitive architecture that is psychologically and neurally realistic.
Their proposal is a form of symbolic connectionism: a connectionist system based on …

Pinker and colleagues propose two mechanisms–a rule system and a lexical memory–to
form past tenses and other inflections. They predict that children's acquisition of the regular
inflection is sudden; that the regular inflection applies uniformly regardless of phonological …

Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive
and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the
core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional …

Theories of language production propose that utterances are constructed by a mechanism
that separates linguistic content from linguistic structure, Linguistic content is retrieved from
the mental lexicon, and is then inserted into slots in linguistic structures or frames. Support …