Download Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles by Steven Pinker PDF

By Steven Pinker

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects jointly for the 1st time a lot of Steven Pinker's such a lot influential scholarly paintings on language and cognition. Pinker's seminal learn explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, notion, social relationships, baby improvement, human evolution, and theories of human nature.

This eclectic assortment spans Pinker's thirty-year occupation, exploring his favourite subject matters in higher intensity and clinical element. It comprises 13 of Pinker's vintage articles, ranging over themes similar to language improvement in youngsters, psychological imagery, the popularity of shapes, the computational structure of the brain, the that means and makes use of of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature-nurture debate, and the common sense of innuendo and euphemism. each one outlines an incredible thought or takes up a controversy with one other widespread pupil, comparable to Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. that includes a brand new creation through Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly paintings, this assortment displays crucial contributions to cognitive technology by way of certainly one of our best thinkers and public intellectuals.

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Heuristic Grammar Construction A L G O R I T H M S A N D H E U R I S T I C S F O R L A N G UA G E L E A R N I N G Like many other computational problems, language learning can be attempted by algorithmic or heuristic techniques (see Newell and Simon, 1973). 1 Unfortunately they are also prohibitively time-consuming and wildly implausible as models of children. Heuristic language learning procedures, on the other hand, may hold greater promise in these regards. They differ from the enumerative procedures in two respects.

Klein, 1976; Reeker, 1976; Siklóssy, 1971, 1972) avoid this device but only learn to produce meager, ill-defined fragments of natural languages, often generating many non-sentences at the same time. The exception among these efforts is Anderson’s Language Acquisition System (LAS; 1974, 1975, 1977). As we have seen, Anderson has carefully defined certain heuristics that his program employs and the properties of natural languages that make these heuristics useful. As well, the program can acquire well-defined infinite subsets of natural languages, its semantic representations have an independent theoretical motivation, and it avoids for the most part psychologically unrealistic strategies.

REDUCING LEARNING TIME Efficient Enumeration The learners we have considered generate grammars rather blindly, by using a grammar-grammar that creates rules out of all possible combinations of symbols. This process will yield many grammars that can be shown to be undesirable even before they are tested against the sample. For example, grammars could be completely equivalent to other grammars except for the names of their auxiliary symbols; they could have some rules that grind to a halt without producing a sentence, and others that spin freely without affecting the sentence that the other rules produce; they could be redundant or ambiguous, or lack altogether a certain word known to appear in the language.

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