Where word and world meet: Language and vision share an abstract representation of symmetry.

Symmetry is ubiquitous in nature, in logic and mathematics, and in perception, language, and thought. Although humans are exquisitely sensitive to visual symmetry (e.g.

Recollecting What We Once Knew: My Life in Psycholinguistics.

The mid-twentieth century brought a radical change in how the linguistics community formulated its major goal, moving from a largely taxonomic science to Chomsky's revolution, which conceptualized language as a higher-order cognitive function. This article reviews the paths (not always direct) that brought Lila Gleitman into contact with that revolution, her contributions to it, and the evolution in her thinking about how language is learned by every child, regardless of extreme variation in the input received. To understand how that occurs, we need to discover what must be learned by the child and what is already there to guide that learning-what must be, in Plato's terms, "recollected.

The violin case.

Three humorous episodes, reproduced here, illustrate debates that played out on the pages of Cognition under the aegis of its founding editor, Jacques Mehler. These are the formal structure of language, the mechanisms by which speech unfolds in time, and the constrained creativity of ordinary language use.

Structural cues for symmetry, asymmetry, and non-symmetry in Central Taurus Sign Language.

We investigate how predicates expressing symmetry, asymmetry and non-symmetry are encoded in a newly emerging sign language, Central Taurus Sign Language (CTSL). We find that predicates involving symmetry (i.e.

The emergence of the formal category "symmetry" in a new sign language.

Logical properties such as negation, implication, and symmetry, despite the fact that they are foundational and threaded through the vocabulary and syntax of known natural languages, pose a special problem for language learning. Their meanings are much harder to identify and isolate in the child's everyday interaction with referents in the world than concrete things (like spoons and horses) and happenings and acts (like running and jumping) that are much more easily identified, and thus more easily linked to their linguistic labels (, , , ). Here we concentrate attention on the category of symmetry [a relation is symmetrical if and only if (iff) for all , : if (,), then (,)], expressed in English by such terms as , , , and After a brief introduction to how symmetry is expressed in English and other well-studied languages, we discuss the appearance and maturation of this category in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL).

Easy Words: Reference Resolution in a Malevolent Referent World.

This article describes early stages in the acquisition of a first vocabulary by infants and young children. It distinguishes two major stages, the first of which operates by a stand-alone word-to-world pairing procedure and the second of which, using the evidence so acquired, builds a domain-specific syntax-sensitive structure-to-world pairing procedure. As we show, the first stage of learning is slow, restricted in character, and to some extent errorful, whereas the second procedure is determinative, rapid, and essentially errorless.

Two- and three-year-olds track a single meaning during word learning: Evidence for Propose-but-verify.

A child word-learning experiment is reported that examines 2- and 3-year-olds' ability to learn the meanings of novel words across multiple, referentially ambiguous, word occurrences. Children were told they were going on an animal safari in which they would learn the names of unfamiliar animals. Critical trial sequences began with hearing a novel word (e.

The Pursuit of Word Meanings.

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from naturalistic corpora of parent-child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models.

Semantic ambiguity and syntactic bootstrapping: The case of conjoined-subject intransitive sentences.

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl" two-year olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g.

Perceiving referential intent: Dynamics of reference in natural parent-child interactions.

Two studies are presented which examined the temporal dynamics of the social-attentive behaviors that co-occur with referent identification during natural parent-child interactions in the home. Study 1 focused on 6.2 h of videos of 56 parents interacting during everyday activities with their 14-18 month-olds, during which parents uttered common nouns as parts of spontaneously occurring utterances.

Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later.

Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic context, an aspect of input quality.

Propose but verify: fast mapping meets cross-situational word learning.

We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of referentially ambiguous trials. Successful learning under such conditions has been argued to be the product of a learning procedure in which participants provisionally pair each novel word with several possible referents and use a statistical-associative learning mechanism to gradually converge on a single mapping across learning instances [e.g.

How words can and cannot be learned by observation.

Three experiments explored how words are learned from hearing them across contexts. Adults watched 40-s videotaped vignettes of parents uttering target words (in sentences) to their infants. Videos were muted except for a beep or nonsense word inserted where each "mystery word" was uttered.

Spatial reasoning in Tenejapan Mayans.

Language communities differ in their stock of reference frames (coordinate systems for specifying locations and directions). English typically uses egocentrically-defined axes (e.g.

Use of Speaker's Gaze and Syntax in Verb Learning.

Speaker eye gaze and gesture are known to help child and adult listeners establish communicative alignment and learn object labels. Here we consider how learners use these cues, along with linguistic information, to acquire abstract relational verbs. Test items were perspective verb pairs (e.

On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation.

Two experiments are reported which examine how manipulations of visual attention affect speakers' linguistic choices regarding word order, verb use and syntactic structure when describing simple pictured scenes. Experiment 1 presented participants with scenes designed to elicit the use of a perspective predicate (The man chases the dog/The dog flees from the man) or a conjoined noun phrase sentential Subject (A cat and a dog/A dog and a cat). Gaze was directed to a particular scene character by way of an attention-capture manipulation.

Effect of congenital blindness on the semantic representation of some everyday concepts.

This study explores how the lack of first-hand experience with color, as a result of congenital blindness, affects implicit judgments about "higher-order" concepts, such as "fruits and vegetables" (FV), but not others, such as "household items" (HHI). We demonstrate how the differential diagnosticity of color across our test categories interacts with visual experience to produce, in effect, a category-specific difference in implicit similarity. Implicit pair-wise similarity judgments were collected by using an odd-man-out triad task.

When we think about thinking: the acquisition of belief verbs.

Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear.

Why stereotypes don't even make good defaults.

Many concepts have stereotypes. This leaves open the question of whether concepts are stereotypes. It has been argued elsewhere that theories that identify concepts with their stereotypes or with stereotypical properties of their instances (e.

When English proposes what Greek presupposes: the cross-linguistic encoding of motion events.

How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and non-linguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry between the two languages, such that English speakers are overall more likely to include manner of motion information than Greek speakers. However, mention of manner of motion in Greek speakers' descriptions increases significantly when manner is not inferable; by contrast, inferability of manner has no measurable effect on motion descriptions in English, where manner is already preferentially encoded.

Argument structure and the child's contribution to language learning.

One of the oldest questions in cognitive science asks whether children are able to learn language (or anything) because they are equipped with a very powerful general-purpose learning mechanism or because they are equipped with a domain-specific constrained language acquisition device. Recent advances in statistical approaches to language learning seem to boost the plausibility of general-purpose learning. However, in this article we propose that in the domain of verb learning, children rely more on their internally generated preconceptions about linguistic structure than on robust cues in the input, suggesting that at least in this aspect of language learning, domain-specific grammatical knowledge guides linguistic development.

Understanding how input matters: verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar.

Studies under the heading "syntactic bootstrapping" have demonstrated that syntax guides young children's interpretations during verb learning. We evaluate two hypotheses concerning the origins of syntactic bootstrapping effects. The "universalist" view, holding that syntactic bootstrapping falls out from universal properties of the syntax-semantics mapping, is shown to be superior to the "emergentist" view, which holds that argument structure patterns emerge from a process of categorization and generalization over the input.

Shake, rattle, 'n' roll: the representation of motion in language and cognition.

Languages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g.

Adjectives really do modify nouns: the incremental and restricted nature of early adjective acquisition.

By 24 months, most children spontaneously and correctly use adjectives. Yet prior laboratory research that has studied lexical acquisition in young children reports that children up to 3-years-old map novel adjectives to object properties only in very limited situations (Child Development 59 (1988) 411; Child Development 64 (1993) 1651; Child Development 71 (2000) 649; Developmental Psychology 36 (2000) 571; Child Development 69 (1998) 1313). In Experiments 1 and 2 we introduced 36-month-olds (Experiment 1) and 24-month-olds (Experiment 2) to novel adjectives while providing rich referential and syntactic information to indicate what the novel words mean.

Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning.

This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the spatial organization and reasoning styles of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf-Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectual limbo, has recently returned to prominence in the anthropological, linguistic, and psycholinguistic literatures. Our point of departure is an influential group of cross-linguistic studies that appear to show that spatial reasoning is strongly affected by the spatial lexicon in everyday use in a community (e.