Psy3210, Language and Cognition, Fall 2001

Course description

Human language stands out among communication systems both for its level of abstractness and its level of complexity. Its complexity has led to theories of acquisition and processing that give language a special status, as an aspect of cognition that is largely innate (rather than acquired via general learning mechanisms), and largely encapsulated from other aspects of cognition and behavior. The complexity of language has also forced psycholinguists to cut language into more approachable subdomains of study, such as speech perception, word recognition, word production, sentence processing, etc. In this seminar, we will critically examine the arguments for treating language as a series of special systems. We will discuss several key subdomains of psycholinguistics, their relations to each other, and influences of non-linguistic aspects of cognition on language acquisition and processing.

Course requirements

Grading: Grades will be based on the following three factors: Weekly written assignments (20%), class participation (20%), and research paper (60%). All students should plan to meet with me at least once during the course to discuss research paper topics. Additional meetings are optional, but encouraged.  

(1) Weekly written assignments . By 4:00 p.m. on the Monday afternoon before each class (beginning with the third week), you must turn in a brief set of questions or commentaries raised by the week’s readings. Although clarification questions are permissible, at least one question must examine strengths and/or weaknesses of the readings, or possible future research approaches. Ideally, you will discuss broader issues raised throughout the readings rather than address a single point from one paper. Note that you should not just submit a list of questions; discuss solutions  to problems that you raise.

You should try to do this in one page or less. This assignment has two purposes. First, it will motivate you to critically examine the readings, and second, we will use the questions as a springboard for class discussions. Please submit your writing assignment to the course bulletin board (see instructions ). For guidelines on preparing your comments, see this page.

You do not need to submit a commentary the weeks you are a scheduled discussant.

(2) Class participation . Everyone is expected to come to class prepared to discuss the assigned articles and to contribute to the group learning process. The weekly assignments are designed to help you prepare for this aspect of the class. In addition, one or two students will help lead the discussion each week (students will be assigned topics at the beginning of the semester).

(3) Research paper . This should take the form of a critical review paper. Although you can discuss your paper with me anytime during the semester, you should meet with me once, at least three weeks prior to the due date, before choosing a topic. Your paper should be based not only on the assigned readings, but also on the suggested readings and a set of additional readings to be agreed upon during this research meeting. Because this is a critical review paper, important criteria for grading will be evidence that you are not simply outlining or regurgitating the readings, but are attempting to synthesize them, organize them around a theoretical perspective, point out areas of controversy and most importantly, suggest a novel perspective or avenue for future research. There is no explicit page limit, but you will probably need 10 to 20 pages (double-spaced). For guidelines on structuring your paper and finding additional sources, see this page. I strongly recommend that you begin research on your topic fairly early in the semester so that you can develop and reflect on your ideas throughout the class. Papers are due by 5:00 p.m. on the Tuesday following the final week of classes (12/11/2001) . Please put a hard copy in my mailbox.

Optional: At least 2 weeks prior to the due date, you may give me a draft of your paper. This draft will not be graded. But I will give you feedback to guide you in preparing your final draft. Please do not give me really rough drafts. While I won't be expecting a polished paper, you should give me a complete, spell-checked draft.

Course syllabus

Revised 9/18/01

Reading List. Each topic will have a required set of readings which typically will include an introductory reading from a textbook or another introductory source and 2-4 empirical or review journal articles or book chapters. The introductory readings are designed to provide a general empirical and theoretical background for the more advanced readings. In each major section, we will progress from basic issues to current controversies in the literature. The assigned articles and chapters should form the main focus of classroom discussion. The reading list will also include suggested readings for those who want additional information on a topic (and provide potential starting points for research papers). Readings will be made available on-line whenever possible. Two sets of the readings that are not available on-line will be available in the library for sign-out and photocopying.

Readings

Note on MIT ECS (Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science) Readings

You can connect to MIT CogNet using the CU site license. You must register for this service. First, connect to http://cognet.mit.edu/ . Enter your COLUMBIA.EDU email address, make up a password for cognet , and then register to use the site license (note that you can only do this from machines on the CU network). Once you are registered, you can follow the links in the syllabus.

Take some time to explore the ECS. It is a marvelous resource.

Section 1: Preliminaries and core questions

Week 1 (9/4/01) : Overview and introduction to core issues

1. Miller, G. A. (1990). The place of language in a scientific psychology. Psychological Science, 1, 7-14.
2. Gardner, R. A. & Gardner, B. T. (1998). The Structure of Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (pp. 1-9).

Week 2 (9/11/01) : Linguistics and psycholinguistics overview

1. Reisberg, D. (2001). Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind (2^nd Ed.). New York: Norton, Ch. 9 (346-393)
2. Miller, G. A. (1996). The Science of Words (revised edition). New York: Scientific American Library/W. H. Freeman. (Chapter 4 [pp. 64-87]).

• Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow (pp. 83-125, 158-191).
• Chomsky, N. (1967). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (pp. 3-27, 47-62).

Week 3 (9/18/01) : Concepts, categories, and the lexicon

1. Hampton, J. Concepts. MIT ECS. [ Via CU site license (see directions above) ]
2. Medin, D. L., and Aguilar, C. Categorization. MIT ECS. [ Via CU site license (see directions above) ]
3. Medin, D. L., Lynch, E. B., and Solomon, K. O. (2000). Are there kinds of concepts? Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 121-157. [ PDF via CU Libraries ] [ HTML via CU Libraries ]
4. Miller, G. A. (1996). The Science of Words (revised edition). New York: Scientific American Library/W. H. Freeman. (Chapter 7 [pp. 120-143], Chapter 8 [144-169]).

• Rosch, E. (1999/1978). Principles of categorization. Reprinted in E. Margolis and S. Lawrence (Eds.), Concepts: Core Readings (pp. 189-206).
• Smith, E. E. and Medin, D. L. (1981). Categories and Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard (pp. 1-21, 143-161).

Week 4 (9/25/01) : The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

1. Lucy, J. Linguistic relativity hypothesis. MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]
2. Au, T. Language and thought. MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]
3. Whorf, B. L. (1940). Science and linguistics. In J. B. Carroll (Ed.), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, pp. 207-219.
4. Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow (pp. 55-67).
5. Brown, R.  & Lenneberg, E. H. (1954). A study in language and cognition. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 454-462.
6. Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 1-22. [ Via CU Library ]

** Skim both 5 and 6, but you need read only one of them **

• Pullum, G. K. (1991). The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (pp. 159-171). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nazzi, T. & Gopnik, A. (2000). Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: when does language become a tool for categorization? Cognition, 80 (3), B11-B20. [ Via CU Libary ]
• Au, T. K.-F. (1983). Chinese and English counterfactuals: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revisited. Cognition, 15, 155-187.
• Bloom, A. H. (1984). Caution – the words you use may affect what you say. A response to Au. Cognition, 17, 275-287.
• Au, T. K.-F. (1984). Counterfactuals: In reply to Alfred Bloom. Cognition, 17, 289-302.

Section 2: Language acquisition

Week 5 (10/02/01): Introduction to language acquisition

1. Gleitman, L. R. & Newport, E. L. (1995). The invention of language by children: Environmental and biological influences on the acqusition of language. In L. R. Gleitman and M. Liberman (Eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, pp. 1-24. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2. Wexler, K. Innateness of language. MIT ECS [ Via CU site license (see directions above)]
3. Tomasello, M. (2001). Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life. In M. Bowerman and S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (pp. 132-158).

• Chomsky, N. (1967). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (pp. 3-27, 47-62).
• Elman, J. L. (1999). The emergence of language: A conspiracy theory. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The Emergence of Language, pp. 1-27. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Week 6 (10/9/01): Cognitive development and language acquisition

1. Newport, E. L. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science, 14, 11-28.
2. Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J. R., & Newport, E. L. (1999). Statistical learning in linguistic and nonlinguistic domains. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The Emergence of Language, pp. 359-380. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
3. Smith, L. B. (1999). Children's noun learning: How general learning prcesses make specialized learning mechanisms. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The Emergence of Language, pp. 277-303. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• Hertwig, R. and Todd, P. (in press). More is not always better: The benefits of cognitive limits. Chapter to appear in: L. Macchi and D. Hardman (eds.), The psychology of reasoning and decision making: A handbook. Chichester: Wiley. [ Electronic version ]
• Elman, J. L. (1993). Learning and development in neural networks: The importance of starting small. Cognition, 48, 71-99.
• Keil, F. Conceptual change. MIT ECS. [ Via CU site license (see directions above) ]
• Gelman, R. Cognitive development. MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]
• Spelke, E. Infant cognition. MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]
• Gibson, E., Adolph, K., & Eppler, M. Perceptual development. MIT ECS [Via CU license ]

Section 3: Language understanding

Week 7 (10/16/01) : Introduction to speech perception and word recognition

1. Nygaard, L. C., & Pisoni, D. B. (1995). Speech perception: New directions in research and theory. In J. L. Miller & P. D. Eimas (Eds.), Speech, Language and Communication, pp. 63-96. San Diego: Academic Press.
2. Miller, J. Speech perception. MIT ECS. [ Via CU license ]
3. Cutler, A. Spoken word recognition. MIT ECS. [ Via CU license ]

• Luce, P. A., & Pisoni, D. B. (1998). Recognizing spoken words: The neighborhood activation model. Ear and Hearing, 19, 1-36.
  
• Andruski, J. E., Blumstein, S. E., Burton, M. (1994). The effect of subphonetic differences on lexical access. Cognition, 52, 163-187.
• McMurray, B., and Spivey, M. (2000) The categorical perception of consonants: the interaction of learning and processing. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society, 34(2). [MS Word format ].
  

Week 8 (10/23/01) : Models of word recognition: pattern matching vs. episodic memory accounts

1. Frauenfelder, U. H. (1996). Computational models of spoken word recognition. In T. Dijkstra & K. de Smedt (Eds.), Computational Psycholinguistics: AI and Connectionist Models of Human Langauge Processing (pp. 114-138). London, UK: Talylor & Francis.
2. Tulving, E. Episodic vs. semantic memory. MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]
3. Goldinger, S. D. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review, 105, 251-279.

• McClelland, J. L., & Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1-86.
• Magnuson, J. S. (handout). A brief overview of TRACE. [Electronic version will be available soon]
• Elman, J. L. and McClelland, J. L. (1988). Cognitive penetration of the mechanisms of perception: Compensation for coarticulation of lexically restored phonemes. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 143-165.
• Pitt, M. A. & McQueen, J. M. (1998). Is compensation for coarticulation mediated by the lexicon? Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 347-370. [ Via CU Library ]

Week 9 (10/30/01) : Introduction to sentence processing

1. Clifton, C., and Duffy, S. A. (2001). Sentence and text comprehension: Roles of linguistic structure. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2001, Vol. 52: 167-196. [PDF via CU library ] [ HTML via CU library ]
2. Tanenhaus, M. K., and Trueswell, J. C. (1995). Sentence comprehension. In J. L. Miller & P. D. Eimas (Eds.), Speech, Language and Communication, pp. 217-262. San Diego: Academic Press.
3. Tanenhaus, M. K. & Sedivy, J. Ambiguity. MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]
4. MacDonald, M. C. (1999). Distributional information in lagnuage comprehension, production and acquisition: Three puzzles and a moral. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The Emergence of Language, pp. 177-196. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J. & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703.
• Gibson, E., & Schutze, C. (1999). Disambiguation preferences in noun phrase conjunction do not mimic corpus frequency. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 263-279. [ Via CU Library ]
• Gorrell, P. Sentence processing. In MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]

Week 10 (11/6/01) : Memory and sentence processing

1. Smith, E. Working memory. MIT ECS [ Via CU Library ]
2. Gibson, E., & Pearlmutter, N. (1998). Constraints on syntactic dependencies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 262-268. [ Via CU Library ]
3. Just, M.A. & Carpenter, P.A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 98, 122-149.
4. MacDonald, M.C. & Christiansen, M.H. (in press). Reassessing working memory: A comment on Just & Carpenter (1992) and Waters & Caplan (1996). Psychological Review. [ Electronic version ]

• Waters, G. S., & Caplan, D. (1996). The capacity theory of sentence comprehension: Critique of Just and Carpenter (1992). Psychological Review, 103, 761-772.
• Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., & Keller, T. A. (1996). The capacity theory of comprehension: New frontiers of evidence and arguments. Psychological Review, 103, 773-780.

Section 4: Language in context

Week 11 (11/13/01): Modularity and interaction

1. Karmiloff-Smith, A. Modularity of mind. MIT ECS [ Via CU License ]
2. Frazier, L. Modularity and language. MIT ECS [ Via CU License ]
3. Tanenhaus, M. K., Leiman, J. M. & Seidenberg, M. S. (1979). Evidence for multiple stages in the processing of ambiguous words in syntactic contexts. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 427-440.
4. Shillcock, R. C. & Bard, E. G. (1993). Modularity and the processing of closed-class words. In G. T. M. Altmann & R. C. Shillcock (Eds.), Cognitive Models of Speech Processing, pp. 163-185.

• Fodor, J. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [On reserve]

Week 12 (11/20/01): Natural tasks, vision and language

1. Magnuson, J. S., Bensinger, D. G, Hayhoe, M., and Ballard, D. (1998). Learning to form visual chunks: On the structure of visuo-spatial working memory. In Gernsbacher, M. A., and Derry, S. J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 645-650. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. ** Focus on the first 2 pages ** [ Electronic Version ]
   
2. Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M., Eberhard, K., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information is spoken-language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634.
3. Allopenna, P. D., Magnuson, J. S., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 419-439 [but skip Experiment 2]. [ Via CU Library ]

• Kowler, E. Eye movements and visual attention. MIT ECS [ Via CU License ]
• Ballard, D. H., Hayhoe, M. H., Pook, P. K., Rao, R. P. N. (1997). Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 20, Issue 04. December 1997. pp723-742. [ Via CU Libary : go to the link, then 'show back volumes', choose 1997 (volume 20), then choose issue 04, wait for the page to load, then find this article (near end of list)]

Week 13 (11/27/01): Two traditions: Language-as-action, language-as-product

1. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [3-28, 92-124].
2. Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., Balin, J. A., & Paek, T. S. (1998). Definite reference and mutual knowledge: Process models of common ground in comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 1-20. [ Via CU Library ]
3. Hanna, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., Trueswell, J. C., and Novick, J. M. (in preparation). The effects of linguistic form and common ground on referential interpretation. Unpublished manuscript, University of Rochester. [ Electronic copy ]

• Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [29-58].
• Hanna, J. E. (2001). The effects of linguistic form, common ground, and persepective on domains of referential interpretation. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Rochester. [ Electronic copy ]

Week 14 (12/4/01) : Embodied language

1. Krauss, R. M., Chen, Y., & Gottesman, R. F. (2000). Lexical gestures and lexical access: A process model. In D. McNeill (Ed.), Language and gesture (pp. 261-283). New York: Cambridge University Press.
2. McNeill, D., and Duncan, S. D. (2000). Growth points in thinking-for-speaking. In D. McNeill (Ed.), Language and gesture (pp. 141-161). New York: Cambridge University Press.
3. Kaschak, M. P. and Glenberg, A. M. (2000). Constructing meaning: The role of affordances and grammatical constructions in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 508-529 [ Via CU Library ]

• Duncan, S. Language and communication. MIT ECS [ Via CU license ]
• Glenberg, A. M. & Robertson, D. A. (2000). Symbol grounding and meaning: A comparison of high-dimensional and embodied theories of meaning. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 379-401. [ Via CU Library ]
• Burgess, C. (2000). Theory and operational definitions in computational memory models. A response to Glenberg and Robertson. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 402-408. [ Via CU Library ]

Week 15 : Finals week  (research paper due 12/11/01)