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Sentence First, Arguments Afterward – Essays in Language and Learning - Oxford Scholarship Online
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Sentence First, Arguments Afterward: Essays in Language and Learning

Lila Gleitman and Jeffrey Lidz

Abstract

This book collects the most significant papers written by Lila R. Gleitman, spanning 50 years of research on language and its acquisition. The book traces the roots of developmental psycholinguistics while presenting empirically driven arguments in favor of a rationalist theory of language acquisition. Gleitman’s work simultaneously shows how learners acquire knowledge richer than what can be found in the environment and how they use their input to acquire a specific language. The book also includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky and an introductory chapter by Jeffrey Lidz contextualizing Gleitman ... More

Keywords: language acquisition, syntax, syntactic bootstrapping, word learning, semantics, conceptual development, linguistic relativity

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2020 Print ISBN-13: 9780199828098
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2020 DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199828098.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

Lila Gleitman, author
Professor Emerita of Psychology and Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania

Jeffrey Lidz, editor
Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, and Professor of Linguistics, University of Maryland

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Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Dedication

Part I Preliminaries

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Contributors

1 From Structuralism to Cognitive Science

Jeffrey Lidz

Part II What Do They Know and When Did They Know It?

2 The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (And How They Do It)

Lila R. Gleitman, Mark Y. Liberman, Cynthia A. McLemore, and Barbara H. Partee

3 A Study in the Acquisition of Language

Elizabeth F. Shipley, Carlota S. Smith, and Lila R. Gleitman*

4 The Emergence of the Child as Grammarian

Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, and Elizabeth F. Shipley

5 Language Use and Language Judgment

Henry Gleitman and Lila R. Gleitman

Part III Where Does Language Knowledge Come From? Input and Innateness

6 Mother, I’d Rather Do It Myself

Elissa L. Newport, Henry Gleitman, and Lila R. Gleitman

7 Beyond Herodotus

Heidi Feldman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, and Lila R. Gleitman

8 Every Child an Isolate

Lila R. Gleitman and Barbara Landau

Part IV Hard Words and Syntactic Bootstrapping A: Establishing Plausibility

9 The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

Lila R. Gleitman

10 On the Semantic Content of Subcategorization Frames

Cynthia Fisher, Henry Gleitman, and Lila R. Gleitman

11 Human Simulations of Vocabulary Learning

Jane Gillette, Henry Gleitman, Lila R. Gleitman, and Anne Lederer

Part V Hard Words and Syntactic Bootstrapping B: But Is It True?

12 Understanding How Input Matters

Jeffrey Lidz, Henry Gleitman, and Lila R. Gleitman

13 Hard Words

Lila R. Gleitman, Kimberly Cassidy, Anna Papafragou, Rebecca Nappa, and John C. Trueswell

14 When We Think About Thinking

Anna Papafragou, Kimberly Cassidy, and Lila R. Gleitman

Part VI Easy Words? Not So Easy

15 How Words Can and Cannot Be Learned by Observation

Tamara Nicol Medina, Jesse Snedeker, John C. Trueswell, and Lila R. Gleitman

16 Propose But Verify

John C. Trueswell, Tamara Nicol Medina, Alon Hafri, and Lila R. Gleitman

17 Quality of Early Parent Input Predicts Child Vocabulary 3 Years Later

Erica A. Cartmill, Benjamin F. Armstrong III, Lila R. Gleitman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Tamara Nicol Medina, and John C. Trueswell

18 The Easy Words

Lila R. Gleitman and John C. Trueswell

Part VII Words and Concepts

19 What Some Concepts Might Not Be*

Sharon Lee Armstrong, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry Gleitman

20 Why Stereotypes Don’t Even Make Good Defaults

Andrew C. Connolly,1Jerry A. Fodor, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry Gleitman

21 Similar, and Similar Concepts

Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Carol Miller, and Ruth Ostrin

22 The Emergence of the Formal Category “Symmetry” in a New Sign Language

Lila R. Gleitman, Ann Senghas, Molly Flaherty, Marie Coppola, and Susan Goldin-Meadow

23 Turning the Tables

Peggy Li and Lila R. Gleitman

24 Relations Between Language and Thought

Lila R. Gleitman and Anna Papafragou

End Matter

Index