Language Created across Multiple Timescales
Language Created across Multiple Timescales
The apparently unified picture of language and language processing from classical cognitive science does not provide a compelling picture: the relationship between processing and acquisition is tenuous; language evolution seems miraculous. The standard defense of the classical picture against concerns of this kind is that it is “the only game in town”; there is simply no alternative framework for understanding language. But recent developments in language research mean that this defense is no longer valid. There have been important developments in a range of fields, including statistical natural language processing, corpus-based linguistics, learnability theory, functional linguistics, computational modeling, psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults, and developments in the theory of language evolution. This book provides what has been missing: a comprehensive new framework for bringing these diverse lines of evidence together to understand how language is created across multiple timescales. Chapter 1 introduces the core elements of this innovative synthesis of research on language evolution, acquisition and processing, and provides an overview of the main arguments of the book.
Keywords: Multiple timescales, Language evolution, Language acquisition, Language processing, Cognitive science
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