Steven Pinker

Language is the remarkable faculty by which humans convey thoughts to one another by means of a highly structured signal. Language works by two principles: a dictionary of memorized symbols, that is, words, and a set of generative rules organized into several subsystems, that is, grammar. The machinery of language appears to have been designed to encode and decode propositional information for the purpose of sharing it with others. Language is universally complex and develops reliably throughout the species, partly independently of general intelligence. I suggest that language is an adaptation for sharing information. It fits with many other features of our zoologically distinctive 'informavore' niche, in which people acquire, share and apply knowledge of how the world works to outsmart plants, animals and each other.

Does the human mind include psychological adaptations that were selected because they fostered the competitive advantage of ancestral groups, even if they harmed the individuals that bore those adaptations? This notion of group selection is the default folk theory of evolution among most nonbiologists, and even among many biologists until the 1960s, when the theory was shown to be at best improbable and at worst incoherent. Nonetheless group selection refuses to die, and has recently been endorsed by a few prominent biologists and anthropologists. I show that the intuitive appeal of group selection is based on multiple confusions. First, group psychology—the phenomenon in which people identify and make sacrifices for their group—should not be equated with group selection. Second, the size, power, influence, or geographic spread of a group over the course of history (the loose analogue of fitness in cultural evolution) is not analogous to an increase in the number of copies of a replicator in biological evolution. Finally, the appeal of group selection rests on an unexamined and highly implausible assumption: that the groups most victorious in violent combat were those that practiced the greatest degree of kindness and generosity within their own societies. I conclude that the theory of natural selection should be invoked in its rigorous sense of the differential representation of replicators across generations, and that “group selection” is a pernicious concept in evolutionary psychology, guaranteed to confuse. Keywords: group selection; altruism; cultural evolution; individual selection; inclusive fitness

Language is often explained as the product of generative rules and a memorized lexicon. For example, most English verbs take a regular past tense suffix (ask-asked), which is applied to new verbs (faxed, wugged), suggesting the mental rule "add -ed to a Verb." Irregular verbs (break-broke, go-went) would be listed in memory. Alternatively, a pattern associator memory (such as a connectionist network) might record all past tense forms and generalize to new ones by similarity; irregular and regular patterns would differ only because of their different numbers of verbs. We present evidence that mental rules are indispensible. A rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs or their sound patterns, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access fails. We find 21 such circumstances for regular past tense formation, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words; in every case, people inflect them regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, sabre-tooths, walkmans). Contrary to the connectionist account, these effects are not due to regular words constituting a large majority of vocabulary. The German participle -t applies to a much smaller percentage of verbs than its English counterpart, and the German plural -s applies to a small minority of nouns. But the affixes behave in the language like their English counterparts, as defaults. We corroborate this effect in two experiments eliciting ratings of participle and plural forms of novel German words. Thus default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory. Because default cases do not occupy a cohesive similarity space, but do correspond to the range of a symbol, they are evidence for a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.

Abstract Research is reviewed that addresses itself to human language learning by developing precise, mechanistic models that are capable in principle of acquiring languages on the basis of exposure to linguistic data. Such research includes theorems on language learnability from mathematical linguistics, computer models of language acquisition from cognitive simulation and artificial intelligence, and models of transformational grammar acquisition from theoretical linguistics. It is argued that such research bears strongly on major issues in developmental psycholinguistics, in particular, nativism and empiricism, the role of semantics and pragmatics in language learning, cognitive development, and the importance of the simplified speech addressed to children.

Abstract This article is a tutorial overview of a sample of central issues in visual cognition, focusing on the recognition of shapes and the representation of objects and spatial relations in perception and imagery. Brief reviews of the state of the art are presented, followed by more extensive presentations of contemporary theories, findings, and open issues. I discuss various theories of shape recognition, such as template, feature, Fourier, structural description, Marr-Nishihara, and massively parallel models, and issues such as the reference frames, primitives, top-down processing, and computational architectures used in spatial cognition. This is followed by a discussion of mental imagery, including conceptual issues in imagery research, theories of imagery, imagery and perception, image transformations, computational complexities of image processing, neuropsychological issues, and possible functions of imagery. Connections between theories of recognition and of imagery, and the relevance of the papers contained in this issue to the topics discussed, are emphasized throughout.

Abstract Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland have described a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense in English which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) and irregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of children. Yet the model contains no explicit rules, only a set of neuronstyle units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the stem, a set of units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the past form, and an array of connections between the two sets of units whose strengths are modified during learning. Rumelhart and McClelland conclude that linguistic rules may be merely convenient approximate fictions and that the real causal processes in language use and acquisition must be characterized as the transfer of activation levels among units and the modification of the weights of their connections. We analyze both the linguistic and the developmental assumptions of the model in detail and discover that (1) it cannot represent certain words, (2) it cannot learn many rules, (3) it can learn rules found in no human language, (4) it cannot explain morphological and phonological regularities, (5) it cannot explain the differences between irregular and regular forms, (6) it fails at its assigned task of mastering the past tense of English, (7) it gives an incorrect explanation for two developmental phenomena: stages of overregularization of irregular forms such as bringed, and the appearance of doubly-marked forms such as ated and (8) it gives accounts of two others (infrequent overregularization of verbs ending in t/d, and the order of acquisition of different irregular subclasses) that are indistinguishable from those of rule-based theories. In addition, we show how many failures of the model can be attributed to its connectionist architecture. We conclude that connectionists' claims about the dispensability of rules in explanations in the psychology of language must be rejected, and that, on the contrary, the linguistic and developmental facts provide good evidence for such rules.

It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries ... (Preface, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, 1755).

How do speakers predict the syntax of a verb from its meaning? Traditional theories posit that syntactically relevant information about semantic arguments consists of a list of thematic roles like "agent", "theme", and "goal", which are linked onto a hierarchy of grammatical positions like subject, object and oblique object. For verbs involving motion, the entity caused to move is defined as the "theme" or "patient" and linked to the object. However, this fails for many common verbs, as in fill water into the glass and cover a sheet onto the bed. In more recent theories verbs' meanings are multidimensional structures in which the motions, changes, and other events can be represented in separate but connected substructures; linking rules are sensitive to the position of an argument in a particular configuration. The verb's object would be linked not to the moving entity but to the argument specified as "affected" or caused to change as the main event in the verb's meaning. The change can either be one of location, resulting from motion in a particular manner, or of state, resulting from accommodating or reacting to a substance. For example, pour specifies how a substance moves (downward in a stream), so its substance argument is the object (pour the water/glass); fill specifies how a container changes (from not full to full), so its stationary container argument is the object (fill the glass/water). The newer theory was tested in three experiments. Children aged 3;4-9;4 and adults were taught made-up verbs, presented in a neutral syntactic context (this is mooping), referring to a transfer of items to a surface or container. Subjects were tested on their willingness to encode the moving items or the surface as the verb's object. For verbs where the items moved in a particular manner (e.g., zig-zagging), people were more likely to express the moving items as the object; for verbs where the surface changed state (e.g., shape, color, or fullness), people were more likely to express the surface as the object. This confirms that speakers are not confined to labeling moving entities as "themes" or "patients" and linking them to the grammatical object; when a stationary entity undergoes a state change as the result of a motion, it can be represented as the main affected argument and thereby linked to the grammatical object instead.

How do we recognize objects despite differences in their retinal projections when they are seen at different orientations? Marr and Nishihara (1978) proposed that shapes are represented in memory as structural descriptions in objectcentered coordinate systems, so that an object is represented identically regardless of its orientation. An alternative hypothesis is that an object is represented in memory in a single representation corresponding to a canonical orientation, and a mental rotation operation transforms an input shape into that orientation before input and memory are compared. A third possibility is that shapes are stored in a set of representations, each corresponding to a different orientation. In four experiments, subjects studied several objects each at a single orientation, and were given extensive practice at naming them quickly, or at classifying them as normal or mirror-reversed, at several orientations. At first, response times increased with departure from the study orientation, with a slope similar to those obtained in classic mental rotation experiments. This suggests that subjects made both judgments by mentally transforming the orientation of the input shape to the one they had initially studied. With practice, subjects recognized the objects almost equally quickly at all the familiar orientations. At that point they were probed with the same objects appearing at novel orientations. Response times for these probes increased with increasing disparity from the previously trained orientations. This indicates that subjects had stored representations of the shapes at each of the practice orientations and recognized shapes at the new orientations by rotating them to one of the stored orientations. The results are consistent with a hybrid of the second (mental transformation) and third (multiple view) hypotheses of shape recognition: input shapes are transformed to a stored view, either the one at the nearest orientation or one at a canonical orientation. Interestingly, when mirrorimages of trained shapes were presented for naming, subjects took the same time at all orientations. This suggests that mental transformations of orientation can take the shortest path of rotation that will align an input shape and its memorized counterpart, in this case a rotation in depth about an axis in the picture

Abstract I examine Gleitman's (1990) arguments that children rely on a verb's syntactic subcategorization frames to learn its meaning (e.g., they learn that see means ‘perceive visually’ because it can appear with a direct object, a clausal complement, or a directional phrase). First, Gleitman argues that the verbs cannot be learned byb observing then situations in which they are used , because many verbs refer to overlapping situations, and because parents do not invariably use a verb when its perceptual correlates are present. I suggest that these arguments speak only against a narrow associationist view in which the child is sensitive to the temporal contiguity of sensory features and spoken verb, If the child can hyppthesize semantic representations corresponding to what parents are likely to be referring to, and can refine such representations across multiple situations, the objections are blunted;, indeed, Gleitman's theory requires such a learning process despite her objections to it. Second, Gleitmans suggests that there is enough information in a verb's subcategorization frames to predict its meaning ‘quite closely’ . Evaluating this argument requires distinguishing a verb's root plus its semantic content (what She boiled the water shares with The water boiled and does not share with She broke the glass ), and a verb frame plus its semantic perspective (what She boiled the water shares with She broke the glass and does not share with The water boiled ). I show that learning a verb in a single frame only gives a learner coarse information about its semanic perspective in that frame (e.g., number of arguments, type of arguments); it tells the learner nothing about the verb root's content across frames (e.g., hot bubbling liquid). Moreover, hearing a verb across all its frames also reveals little about the verb root's content. Finally, I show that Gleitman's empirical arguments all involve experiments where children are exposed to a single verb frame, and therefore all involve learning the frame's perpective meaning, not the root's content meaning, which in all the experiments was acquired by observing the accompanying scene. I conclude that attention to a verb's syntactic frame can help narrow down the child's interpretation of the perspective meaning of the verb in that frame, but disagree with the claim that there is some in-principle limitation in learning a verb's content.

Abstract Recently ‘connectionist’ or ‘parallel distributed processing’ (PDP) approaches to brain modelling have attracted an enormous amount of attention. These models are said to be faithful to neurophysiological and to behavioral data in a way that previous approaches based on symbolic computation were not. A PDP simulation by Rumelhart and McClelland of children's acquisition of the past tense in English has been one of the most famous demonstrations of the advantages of the connectionist approach. In a recent special issue of the journal Cognition devoted to Connectionism and Symbol Systems, Steven Pinker and Alan Prince examine this model and the relevant data in great detail, finding severe limitations in the ability of current PDP models to explain human language and cognition. The key points of their analysis are summarised in the following article.

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is "perfect," non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals’ communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.’s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky’s conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for "difficult" syntactic phenomena but also for "easy" syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated. The size of the dataset also provides novel insight into several other outstanding questions in language acquisition.

Between 2005 and 2007, a quartet of bestsellers by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens launched the New Atheism. Emboldened by the growing success of science in explaining the world (including our own minds), inspired by new research on the sources of religious belief, and galvanized by the baleful influence of religion in world affairs (particularly 9/11 and its aftermath), these Four Horsemen of the New Atheism — as they came to be called — pressed the case that God does not exist and that many aspects of organized religion are pernicious.

The distinction between singular and plural enters into linguistic phenomena such as morphology, lexical semantics, and agreement and also must interface with perceptual and conceptual systems that assess numerosity in the world. Three experiments examine the computation of semantic number for singulars and plurals from the morphological properties of visually presented words. In a Stroop-like task, Hebrew speakers were asked to determine the number of words presented on a computer screen (one or two) while ignoring their contents. People took longer to respond if the number of words was incongruent with their morphological number (e.g., they were slower to determine that one word was on the screen if it was plural, and in some conditions, that two words were on the screen if they were singular, compared to neutral letter strings), suggesting that the extraction of number from words is automatic and yields a representation comparable to the one computed by the perceptual system. In many conditions, the effect of number congruency occurred only with plural nouns, not singulars, consistent with the suggestion from linguistics that words lacking a plural affix are not actually singular in their semantics but unmarked for number.

Specific language impairment (SLI), a genetic developmental disorder, offers insights into the neurobiological and computational organization of language. A subtype, Grammatical-SLI (G-SLI), involves greater impairments in ‘extended' grammatical representations, which are nonlocal, hierarchical, abstract, and composed, than in ‘basic' ones, which are local, linear, semantic, and holistic. This distinction is seen in syntax, morphology, and phonology, and may be tied to abnormalities in the left hemisphere and basal ganglia, consistent with new models of the neurobiology of language which distinguish dorsal and ventral processing streams. Delineating neurolinguistic phenotypes promises a better understanding of the effects of genes on the brain circuitry underlying normal and impaired language abilities.

The acquisition of the passive in English poses a learnability problem. Most transitive verbs have passive forms (e.g., kick/was kicked by), tempting the child to form a productive rule of passivization deriving passive participles from active forms. However, some verbs cannot be passivized (e.g. cost/was cost by). Given that children do not receive negative evidence telling them which strings are ungrammatical, what prevents them from overgeneralizing a productive passive rule to the exceptional verbs (or if they do incorrectly passivize such verbs, how do they recover)? One possible solution is that children are conservative: they only generate passives for those verbs that they have heard in passive sentences in the input. We show that this proposal is incorrect: in children's spontaneous speech, they utter passive participles that they could not have heard in parental input, and in four experiments in which 3–8-year-olds were taught novel verbs in active sentences, they freely uttered passivized versions of them when describing new events. An alternative solution is that children at some point come to possess a semantic constraint distinguishing passivizable from nonpassivizable verbs. In two of the experiments, we show that children do not have an absolute constraint forbidding them to passivize nonactional verbs of perception or spatial relationships, although they passivize them somewhat more reluctantly than they do actional verbs. In two other experiments, we show that children's tendency to passivize depends on the mapping between thematic roles and grammatical functions specified by the verb: they selectively resist passivizing made-up verbs whose subjects are patients and whose objects are agents; and they are more likely to passivize spatial relation verbs with location subjects than with theme subjects. These trends are consistent with Jackendoff's “Thematic Hierarchy Condition” on the adult passive. However, we argue that the constraint on passive that adults obey, and that children approach, is somewhat different: passivizable verbs must have object arguments that are patients, either literally for action verbs, or in an extended abstract sense that individual languages can define for particular classes of nonactional verbs.

According to the 'word/rule' account, regular inflection is computed by a default, symbolic process, whereas irregular inflection is achieved by associative memory. Conversely, pattern-associator accounts attribute both regular and irregular inflection to an associative process. The acquisition of the default is ascribed to the asymmetry in the distribution of regular and irregular tokens. Irregular tokens tend to form tight, well-defined phonological clusters (e.g. sing-sang, ring-rang), whereas regular forms are diffusely distributed throughout the phonological space. This distributional asymmetry is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of a regular default. Hebrew nominal inflection challenges this account. We demonstrate that Hebrew speakers use the regular masculine inflection as a default despite the overlap in the distribution of regular and irregular Hebrew masculine nouns. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrates that regular inflection is productively applied to novel nouns regardless of their similarity to existing regular nouns. In contrast, the inflection of irregular sounding nouns is strongly sensitive to their similarity to stored irregular tokens. Experiment 2 establishes the generality of the regular default for novel words that are phonologically idiosyncratic. Experiment 3 demonstrates that Hebrew speakers assign the default regular inflection to borrowings and names that are identical to existing irregular nouns. The existence of default inflection in Hebrew is incompatible with the distributional asymmetry hypothesis. Our findings also lend no support for a type-frequency account. The convergence of the circumstances triggering default inflection in Hebrew, German and English suggests that the capacity for default inflection may be general.

The role of Broca's area in grammatical computation is unclear, because syntactic processing is often confounded with working memory, articulation, or semantic selection. Morphological processing potentially circumvents these problems. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we had 18 subjects silently inflect words or read them verbatim. Subtracting the activity pattern for reading from that for inflection, which indexes processes involved in inflection (holding constant lexical processing and articulatory planning) highlighted left Brodmann area (BA) 44/45 (Broca's area), BA 47, anterior insula, and medial supplementary motor area. Subtracting activity during zero inflection (the hawk; they walk) from that during overt inflection (the hawks; they walked), which highlights manipulation of phonological content, implicated subsets of the regions engaged by inflection as a whole. Subtracting activity during verbatim reading from activity during zero inflection (which highlights the manipulation of inflectional features) implicated distinct regions of BA 44, 47, and a premotor region (thereby tying these regions to grammatical features), but failed to implicate the insula or BA 45 (thereby tying these to articulation). These patterns were largely similar in nouns and verbs and in regular and irregular forms, suggesting these regions implement inflectional features cutting across word classes. Greater activity was observed for irregular than regular verbs in the anterior cingulate and supplementary motor area (SMA), possibly reflecting the blocking of regular or competing irregular candidates. The results confirm a role for Broca's area in abstract grammatical processing, and are interpreted in terms of a network of regions in left prefrontal cortex (PFC) that are recruited for processing abstract morphosyntactic features and overt morphophonological content.

Certain idioms called freezes, e.g.,first and foremost, mish-rnash, display a characteristic fixed word order determined by phonological and semantic rules. Native speakers of English and learners of English were asked to indicate their preferences for one of two possible orderings of minimally contrasting nonsense pairs, e.g., FIM FUM versus FUM-FIM. Both native and beginning speakers' judgments respected rules claimed to be universal; only native speakers' judgments respected those rules for which evidence for universality is lacking. In a second study, French native speakers and English native speakers learning French judged French-sounding pairs. Once again, overall judgments respected the putatively universal rules; but only the English speakers' judgments respected the putatively English-specific rules. It is concluded that rules of frozen word order are psychologically real, with the possible function of aiding speech perception. The class of idiom-like expressions known as freezes constitutes one of those linguistic domains in which an apparently superficial phenomenon is found to be governed by surprisingly orderly and deeply rooted prin

The vast expressive power of language is made possible by two principles: the arbitrary sound-meaning pairing underlying words, and the discrete combinatorial system underlying grammar. These principles implicate distinct cognitive mechanisms: associative memory and symbol-manipulating rules. The distinction may be seen in the difference between regular inflection (e.g., walk-walked ), which is productive and open-ended and hence implicates a rule, and irregular inflection (e.g., come-came , which is idiosyncratic and closed and hence implicates individually memorized words. Nonetheless, two very different theories have attempted to collapse the distinction; generative phonology invokes minor rules to generate irregular as well as regular forms, and connectionism invokes a pattern associator memory to store and retrieve regular as well as irregular forms. I present evidence from three disciplines that supports the traditional word/rule distinction, though with an enriched conception of lexical memory with some of the properties of a pattern-associator. Rules, nonetheless, are distinct from pattern-association, because a rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs or their sound patterns, but applies as the ‘default’, whenever memory access fails. I present a dozen such circumstances, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words, in which people inflect the words regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, low-lifes , and Walkmans ). A comparison of English to other languages shows that contrary to the connectionist account, default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory, but to a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.

What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas regular forms can be computed by a concatenation rule, which requires the procedural system. Irregulars have the psychological, linguistic and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars often have the signatures of grammatical processing. Furthermore, because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it whenever memory fails.

We agree that connectionist networks are not always analogy mechanisms. Our point (based on explications by McClelland and other connectionists) is that pattern associators (the most common connectionist model of the past tense) tend towards analogy when learning competing patterns under standard training regimes. This is what gives such models their predictive power with irregular forms. The claim that some connectionist model can, given a specific architecture, training schedule and input features, approximate any linguistic phenomenon might be true, but it is in danger of reducing connectionism to a universal statistical approximation technique rather than a source of empirical predictions. Language cannot be treated as just a collection of ‘regularities in the input’ that can be approximated by some mechanism; those regularities are themselves the products of human minds and need to be explained.

study, taking truly independent ratings to see which verbs participants considered to be denominal or deverbal (i.e. exocentric or not). The results of this new experiment were clear. The semantic similarity (or otherwise) of verbs-incontext to ordinary irregular usage predicted the acceptability of past-tense forms. Whether or not verbs were perceived to be exocentric was irrelevant to this. It is worth noting that these results were obtained using the verbs put forward by Kim et al. [5] to try to demonstrate their theory. Thetheorythathomophoneverbprocessingcanbeexplained by exocentricity fails completely in the face of examples like shoe–shoo, where it is the denominal verb that is irregular (shoe–shod) and the deverbal verb regular (shoo–shooed). (Further support for these findings comes from on-line studies that have shown that semantics – and not exocentric form – predictcomprehensiontimeforhomophoneverbs[7].) What is the relevance of these data to the past-tense debate? First, they demonstrate that the ‘in-principle’ objection to single-route models supposedly posed by homophone verbs is wrong. Inflections of homophone verbs are determined by complex semantic and phonological patterns, not grammatical status. Second, they show that children’s ability to process homophone verbs is not indicative of their innate sensitivity to nouns and verbs [8], but rather is indicative of children’s ability to learn languages. Finally, because the exocentricity thesis is false, the dual-route theory itself cannot account for the processing of homophone verbs. Providing an account of homophone-verb inflection is vital to explaining past-tense processing [1–4]; the evidence suggests that it is two routes that this phenomenon rules out, not one.

Abstract What might a theory of mental imagery look like, and how might one begin formulating such a theory? These are the central questions addressed in the present paper. The first section outlines the general research direction taken here and provides an overview of the empirical foundations of our theory of image representation and processing. Four issues are considered in succession, and the relevant results of experiments are presented and discussed. The second section begins with a discussion of the proper form for a cognitive theory, and the distinction between a theory and a model is developed. Following this, the present theory and computer simulation model are introduced. This theory specifies the nature of the internal representations (data structures) and the processes that operate on them when one generates, inspects, or transforms mental images. In the third, concluding, section we consider three very different kinds of objections to the present research program, one hinging on the possibility of experimental artifacts in the data, and the others turning on metatheoretical commitments about the form of a cognitive theory. Finally, we discuss how one ought best to evaluate theories and models of the sort developed here.

Abstract Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

Abstract While endorsing Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) call for rigorous documentation of variation, we defend the idea of Universal Grammar as a toolkit of language acquisition mechanisms. The authors exaggerate diversity by ignoring the space of conceivable but nonexistent languages, trivializing major design universals, conflating quantitative with qualitative variation, and assuming that the utility of a linguistic feature suffices to explain how children acquire it.

Abstract Self-deception is a powerful but overapplied theory. It is adaptive only when a deception-detecting audience is in the loop, not when an inaccurate representation is invoked as an internal motivator. First, an inaccurate representation cannot be equated with self-deception, which entails two representations, one inaccurate and the other accurate. Second, any motivational advantages are best achieved with an adjustment to the decision rule on when to act, not with a systematic error in an internal representation.

Abstract Political bias has indeed been a distorter of psychology, not just in particular research areas but in an aversion to the explanatory depth available from politically fraught fields like evolution. I add two friendly amendments to the target article: (1) The leftist moral narrative may be based on zero-sum competition among identity groups rather than continuous progress; and (2) ideological bias should be dealt with not just via diversity of ideological factions but by minimizing the influence of ideology altogether.

This article is extraordinarily rigorous and rich, although there are reasons to be skeptical of its theory that music originated to signal group quality and infant solicitude. These include the lack of any signature of the centrality of these functions in the distribution or experience of music; of a role for the pleasure taken in music; and of its connections with language.

ABSTRACT What is the input to the mental System that computes inflected forms like walked, came, dogs , and men ? Recent connectionist models feed a word's phonological features into a single network, allowing it to generalize both regular and irregular phonological patterns, like stop-stopped, step-stepped and fling-flung, cling-clung . But for adults, phonological input is insufficient: verbs derived from nouns like ring the city always have regular past tense forms ( ringed ), even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs ( ring the bell ). Similarly, nouns based on names, like two Mickey Mouses , and compounds based on possessing rather than being their root morpheme, such as two sabertooths , take regular plurals, even when they are homophonous with irregular nouns like mice and teeth . In four experiments, testing 70 three- to ten-year-old children, we found that children are sensitive to such nonphonological information: they were more likely to produce regular inflected forms for forms like to ring (‘to put a ring on’) and snaggletooth (a kind of animal doll with big teeth) than for their homophonous irregular counterparts, even when these counterparts were also extended in meaning. Children's inflectional Systems thus seem to be like adults': irregular forms are tied to the lexicon but regular forms are computed by a default rule, and words are represented as morphological tree structures reflecting their derivation from basic word roots. Such structures, which determine how novel complex words are derived and interpreted, also govern whether words with irregular sound patterns will be regularized: a word can be irregular only if its structure contains an irregular root in ‘head’ position, allowing the lexically stored irregular information to percolate up to apply to the word as a whole. In all other cases, the inflected form is computed by a default regular rule. This proposal fits the facts better than alternatives appealing to ambiguity reduction or semantic similarity to a word's central sense. The results, together with an analysis of adult speech to children, suggest that morphological structure and a distinction between mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection may be inherent to the design of children's language Systems.

ABSTRACT It is often assumed that children go through a stage in which they systematically overapply irregular past tense patterns to inappropriate verbs, as in wipe-wope, bring-brang, trick-truck, walk-has walken . Such errors have been interpreted both as reflecting over-use of minor grammatical rules (e.g. ‘change i to a ’), and as reflecting the operation of a connectionist pattern associator network that superimposes and blends patterns of various degrees of generality. But the actual rate, time course, and nature of these errors have never been documented. We analysed 20,000 past tense and participle usages from nine children in the CHILDES database, looking for overapplications of irregular vowel-change patterns, as in brang , blends, as in branged , productive suffixations of - en , as in walken , gross distortions, as in mail-membled , and double-suffixation, as in walkeded . These errors were collectively quite rare; children made them in about two tenths of one per cent of the opportunities, and with few stable patterns: the errors were not predominantly word-substitutions, did not occur predominantly with irregular stems, showed no consistency across verbs or ages, and showed no clear age trend. Most (though not all) of the errors were based closely on existing irregular verbs; gross distortions never occurred. We suggest that both rule-theories and connectionist theories have tended to overestimate the predominance of such errors. Children master irregular forms quite accurately, presumably because irregular forms are just a special case of the arbitrary sound-meaning pairings that define words, and because children are good at learning words.

ABSTRACT Children between the ages of three and seven occasionally make errors with locative verbs like pour and fill , such as * I filled water into the glass and * I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, 1982). To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called OBJECT AFFECTEDNESS: the direct object corresponds to the argument that is specified as ‘affected’ in some particular way in the semantic representation of a verb. However, children must learn which verbs specify which of their arguments as being affected; specifically, whether it is the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of location, such as the content argument of pour , or the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of state, such as the container argument of fill . This predicts that syntactic errors should be associated with specific kinds of misinterpretations of verb meaning. Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. The results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing fill and empty , encoding the content argument as direct object (e.g. fill the water ). As predicted, children also misinterpreted the meanings of fill and empty as requiring not only that the container be brought into a full or empty state, but also that the content move in some specific manner (by pouring, or by dumping). Furthermore, children who misinterpreted the verbs' meanings were more likely to make syntactic errors with them. These findings support the hypothesis that verb meaning and syntax are linked in precise ways in the lexicons of language learners.

MacWhinney is to be commended for reopening questions about the logical problem of language acquisition in the light of new data and models. Unfortunately his discussion is marred by technical errors, false dichotomies, and inadequate attention to detail.

ABSTRACT Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.

Once a person has observed a three-dimensional scene, how accurately can he or she then imagine the appearance of that scene from different viewing angles? In a series of experiments addressed to this question, subjects formed mental images of a set of objects hanging in a clear cylinder and mentally rotated their images as they physically rotated the cylinder by various amounts. They were asked to perform four tasks, each demanding the ability to "see" the two-dimensional patterns that should emerge in their images if the images depicted the new perspective view accurately--(a) Subjects described the two-dimensional geometric shape that the imagined objects formed in an image rotated 90 degrees; (b) they "scanned" horizontally from one imagined object to another in a rotated image; (c) they physically rotated the empty cylinder together with their image until two of the imagined objects were vertically aligned; and (d) they adjusted a marker to line up with a single object in a rotated image. The experimental results converged to suggest that subjects' images accurately displayed the two-dimensional patterns emerging from a rotation in depth. However, the amount by which they rotated their image differed systematically from the amount specified by the experimenter. Results are discussed in the context of a model of the mental representation of physical space that incorporates two types of structures, one representing the three-dimensional layout of a scene, and the other representing the two-dimensional perspective view of the scene from a given vantage point.

What sort of medium underlies imagery for three-dimensional scenes? In the present investigation, the time subjects took to scan between objects in a mental image was used to infer the sorts of geometric information that images preserve. Subjects studied an open box in which five objects were suspended, and learned to imagine this display with their eyes closed. In the first experiment, subjects scanned by tracking an imaginary point moving in a straight line between the imagined objects. Scanning times increased linearly with increasing distance between objects in three dimensions. Therefore metric 3-D information must be preserved in images, and images cannot simply be 2-D "snapshots." In a second experiment, subjects scanned across the image by "sighting" objects through an imaginary rifle sight. Here scanning times were found to increase linearly with the two-dimensional separations between objects as they appeared from the original viewing angle. Therefore metric 2-D distance information in the original perspective view must be preserved in images, and images cannot simply be 3-D "scale-models" that are assessed from any and all directions at once. In a third experiment, subjects mentally rotated the display 90 degrees and scanned between objects as they appeared in this new perspective view by tracking an imaginary rifle signt, as before. Scanning times increased linearly with the two-dimensional separations between objects as they would appear from the new relative viewing perspective. Therefore images can display metric 2-D distance information in a perspective view never actually experiences, so mental images cannot simply be "snapshot plus scale model" pairs. These results can be explained by a model in which the three-dimensional structure of objects is encoded in long-term memory in 3-D object-centered coordinate systems. When these objects are imagined, this information is then mapped onto a single 2-D "surface display" in which the perspective properties specific to a given viewing angle can be depicted. In a set of perceptual control experiments, subjects scanned a visible display by (a) simply moving their eyes from one object to another, (b) sweeping an imaginary rifle sight over the display, or (c) tracking an imaginary point moving from one object to another. Eye-movement times varied linearly with 2-D interobject distance, as did time to scan with an imaginary rifle sight; time to tract a point varied independently with the 3-D and 2-D interobject distances. These results are compared with the analogous image scanning results to argue that imagery and perception share some representational structures but that mental image scanning is a process distinct from eye movements or eye-movement commands.

We report an experiment that suggests a functional application of mental-image scanning. After subjects inspected a simple dot pattern, the pattern was removed, and they were then shown an arrow at an unexpected location. Their task was to judge as quickly as possible whether the arrow pointed at any of the dots in the previously observed pattern. Although the subjects were never instructed to form or scan mental images, most of them reported having done so in order to make their judgments, and their reaction times were directly proportional to the distances separating the dots and the arrows, as typically found in image-scanning experiments. Imagery scanning may therefore serve a useful function when one must judge spatial relations between the positions of remembered objects and newly specified locations.

We report a set of experiments that helps to define the conditions under which mental image scanning may be used spontaneously for specific, practical purposes. Subjects were shown a dot pattern, followed by an arrow, and their task was to say whether the arrow was pointing at any of the previously seen dots. When no advance information was provided about the arrow's location, reaction time for correctly verifying that an arrow was pointing at a dot increased linearly with increasing arrow-dot distance, and the subjects almost always reported scanning a mental image in order to make their judgments. However, when a cue for the arrow's location was presented 2 sec beforehand, reaction time was uncorrelated with distance, and most of the subjects reported using an alternative strategy based on the determination in advance of correct directions from that location to the dots. When given only 1 sec of advance information about arrow location, most subjects reported using a combined image-scanning and advanced determination strategy, resulting in a reaction time function that increased only for the farthest distances. Because in each of these experiments instructions to form or to scan mental images were never given, these findings address the most common criticisms of the image-scanning paradigm.

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d', where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer's willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness.

Presents an obituary for George A. Miller (1920-2012). Miller ranks among the most important psychologists of the 20th century. In addition to writing one of the best known papers in the history of psychology ("The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," published in Psychological Review in 1956), Miller also fomented the cognitive revolution, invented psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, imported powerful ideas from the theories of information, communication, grammar, semantics, and artificial intelligence, and left us a sparkling oeuvre that proves that a rigorous scientist needn't write in soggy prose. Honors rained down on Miller. APA gave him the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (1963), the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science (1990), the William James Book Award (1992, for The Science of Words), and the Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (2003), and named a prize after him, as did the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Miller was also honored by the Association for Psychological Science and the American Speech and Hearing Association. In 2000, he won the John P. McGovern Award in the Behavioral Sciences from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1991, the National Medal of Science, the country's highest scientific honor.

Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination. Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice. Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcast over a loudspeaker) than when they had only shared knowledge (conveyed to both by a messenger) or private knowledge (revealed to each partner separately). These results support the hypothesis that people represent common knowledge as a distinct cognitive category that licenses them to coordinate with others for mutual gain. We discuss how this hypothesis can provide a unified explanation for diverse phenomena in human social life, including recursive mentalizing, performative speech acts, public protests, hypocrisy, and self-conscious emotional expressions.

The more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation for this bystander effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. We investigate an alternative, which combines the volunteer's dilemma (each bystander is best off if another responds) with recursive theory of mind (each infers what the others know about what he knows) to predict that actors will strategically shirk when they think others feel compelled to help. In 3 experiments, participants responded to a (fictional) person who needed help from at least 1 volunteer. Participants were in groups of 2 or 5 and had varying information about whether other group members knew that help was needed. As predicted, people's decision to help zigzagged with the depth of their asymmetric, recursive knowledge (e.g., "John knows that Michael knows that John knows help is needed"), and replicated the classic bystander effect when they had common knowledge (everyone knowing what everyone knows). The results demonstrate that the bystander effect may result not from a mere diffusion of responsibility but specifically from actors' strategic computations.

Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability (captured in Maimonides' Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of knowledge: whether the identity of the donor or of the beneficiary is revealed to the other. Consistent with the theories, in Experiments 1-2 participants judged a double-blind gift as more charitable than one to a revealed beneficiary, which in turn was judged as more charitable than one from a revealed donor. We also found one exception: Participants judged a donor who revealed only himself as slightly less, rather than more, charitable than one who revealed both identities. Experiment 3 explains the exception as a reaction to the donor's perceived sense of superiority and disinterest in a social relationship. Experiment 4 found that donors were judged as more charitable when the gift was shared knowledge (each aware of the other's identity, but unsure of the other's awareness) than when it was common knowledge (awareness of awareness). Experiment 5, which titrated anonymity against donation size, found that not even a hundredfold larger gift could compensate for the disapproval elicited by a donor revealing his identity. Experiment 6 showed that participants' judgments of charitability flip depending on whose perspective they take: Observers disapprove of donations that they would prefer as beneficiaries. Together, these experiments provide insight into why people care about how a donor gives, not just how much. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people's actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants choose different verbs to describe the major variants of a moral dilemma, the trolley problem, mirroring differences in their wrongness judgments: they described direct harm with a single causative verb (Adam killed the man), and indirect harm with an intransitive verb in a periphrastic construction (Adam caused the man to die). Experiments 1b and 2 separate physical causality from moral valuation by varying whether the victim is a person or animal and whether the harmful action rescues people or inanimate objects. The results show that people's moral judgments lead them to portray a causal event as either more or less direct and intended, which in turn shapes their verb choices. Experiment 3 finds the same basic asymmetry in verb usage in a production task in which participants freely described what happened. (PsycINFO Database Record

Plenty of reaction to the Commentary from transgendered scientist Ben A. Barres in Nature of 13 July. He debunked the claim that differences in innate aptitude, rather than discrimination, were behind the failure of many women to advance in scientific careers. There's more reaction in Correspondence this week. Add your views to the news blog on http://tinyurl.com/kacrg .

We are getting smarter, and as a result the world is becoming a more peaceful place, says Steven Pinker.

When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence.

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens , including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction , which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.

We identify common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach, which we call the proxy-phenotype method. First, we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in a large sample (n = 106,736), which produces a set of 69 education-associated SNPs. Second, using independent samples (n = 24,189), we measure the association of these education-associated SNPs with cognitive performance. Three SNPs (rs1487441, rs7923609, and rs2721173) are significantly associated with cognitive performance after correction for multiple hypothesis testing. In an independent sample of older Americans (n = 8,652), we also show that a polygenic score derived from the education-associated SNPs is associated with memory and absence of dementia. Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory.

Significance People have long debated about the global influence of languages. The speculations that fuel this debate, however, rely on measures of language importance—such as income and population—that lack external validation as measures of a language’s global influence. Here we introduce a metric of a language’s global influence based on its position in the network connecting languages that are co-spoken. We show that the connectivity of a language in this network, after controlling for the number of speakers of a language and their income, remains a strong predictor of a language’s influence when validated against two independent measures of the cultural content produced by a language’s speakers.

We appreciate Biersteker’s comments (1) on our research (2). Moreover, we agree with many of her points so wholeheartedly that our paper addresses them in detail: We devote whole sections in the main text and supporting information to the incompleteness of the Index Translationum, the imperfect quality of the language detector, and the limitations of the Wikipedia dataset, among others.

Significance Humans are an unusually cooperative species, and our cooperation is of 2 kinds: altruistic, when actors benefit others at a cost to themselves, and mutualistic, when actors benefit themselves and others simultaneously. One major form of mutualism is coordination, in which actors align their choices for mutual benefit. Formal examples include meetings, division of labor, and legal and technological standards; informal examples include friendships, authority hierarchies, alliances, and exchange partnerships. Successful coordination is enabled by common knowledge: knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of their knowledge of one’s knowledge, ad infinitum. Uncovering how people acquire and represent the common knowledge needed for coordination is thus essential to understanding human sociality, from large-scale institutions to everyday experiences of civility, hypocrisy, outrage, and taboo.

Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native “behavioral immunity” to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.

English speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the phonological properties of regular plurals. Five experiments test this proposal. Experiment 1 demonstrated that novel regular plurals (e.g., loonks-eater ) are disliked in compounds compared to irregular plurals with illicit (hence less frequent) phonological patterns (e.g., leevk-eater , plural of loovk ). Experiments 2–3 found that people show no dispreference for compounds containing nouns that merely sound like regular plurals (e.g., hose-installer vs. pipe-installer ). Experiments 4–5 showed a robust effect of morphological regularity when phonological familiarity was controlled: Compounds containing regular plural nonwords (e.g., gleeks-hunter , plural of gleek ) were disfavored relative to irregular, phonologically-identical, plurals (e.g., breex-container , plural of broox ). The dispreference for regular plurals inside compounds thus hinges on the morphological distinction between irregular and regular forms and it is irreducible to phonological familiarity.

Why do compounds containing regular plurals, such as rats-infested, sound so much worse than corresponding compounds containing irregular plurals, such as mice-infested? Berent and Pinker (2007) reported five experiments showing that this theoretically important effect hinges on the morphological structure of the plurals, not their phonological properties, as had been claimed by Haskell, MacDonald, and Seidenberg (2003). In this note we reply to a critique by these authors. We show that the connectionist model they invoke to explain the data has nothing to do with compounding but exploits fortuitous properties of adjectives, and that our experimental results disconfirm explicit predictions the authors had made. We also present new analyses which answer the authors’ methodological objections. We conclude that the interaction of compounding with regularity is a robust effect, unconfounded with phonology or semantics.

Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which nonphonological factors are responsible. We test four possibilities: (1) Lexical effects, in which two lemmas differ in whether they specify an irregular form; (2) Semantic effects, in which the semantic features of a word become associated with regular or irregular forms; (3) Morphological structure effects, in which a word with a headless structure (e.g., a verb derived from a noun) blocks access to a stored irregular form; (4) Compositionality effects, in which the stored combination of an irregular word's meaning (e.g., the verb's inherent aspect) with the meaning of the inflection (e.g., pastness) doesn't readily transfer to new senses with different combinations of such meanings. In four experiments, speakers were presented with existing and novel verbs and asked to rate their past-tense forms, semantic similarities, grammatical structure, and aspectual similarities. We found (1) an interaction between semantic and phonological similarity, coinciding with reported strategies of analogizing to known verbs and implicating lexical effects; (2) weak and inconsistent effects of semantic similarity; (3) robust effects of morphological structure, and (4) robust effects of aspectual compositionality. Results are consistent with theories of language that invoke lexical entries and morphological structure, and which differentiate the mode of storage of regular and irregular verbs. They also suggest how psycholinguistic processes have shaped vocabulary structure over history.

Abstract Both regular inflectional patterns (walk-walked) and irregular ones (swing-swung) can be applied productively to novel words (e.g. wug-wugged; spling -splung). Theories of generative phonology attribute both generalisations to rules; connectionist theories attribute both to analogies in a pattern associator network; hybrid theories attribute regular (fully predictable default) generalisations to a rule and irregular generalisations to a rote memory with pattern-associator properties. In three experiments and three simulations, we observe the process of generalising morphological patterns in humans and two-layer connectionist networks. Replicating Bybee and Moder (1983), we find that people's willingness to generalise from existing irregular verbs to novel ones depends on the global similarity between them (e.g. spling is readily inflectable as splung, but nist is not inflectable as nust). In contrast, generalisability of the regular suffix does not appear to depend on similarity to existing regul...

Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (HCF) proposed that recursion is the only thing that distinguishes language (a) from other human capacities, and (b) from the capacities of animals. These factors are independent. The narrow faculty of language might include more than recursion, falsifying (a). Or it might consist only of recursion, although parts of the broad faculty might be uniquely human as well, falsifying (b). This chapter presents a view that is contrasted with HCF's above. It shows that there is considerably more of language that is special, though still a plausible product of the processes of evolution. It assesses the key bodies of evidence, coming to a different reading from HCF's. The chapter organizes the discussion by distinguishing the conceptual, sensorimotor, and specifically linguistic aspects of the broad language faculty in turn.

One theory proposed that the human ability for language is a complex biological adaptation evolved by way of natural selection. This chapter updates the theory in the light of new empirical data and the theoretical alternatives that have emerged since its introduction. It discusses a number of properties of the language system that give the appearance of complex design. By analogy to the visual system, the book argues that the only plausible explanation for the evolution of such complex adaptive design is one that involves natural selection. On this account, language has evolved as an innate specialisation to code propositional information (such as who did what to whom, when, where, and why) for the purpose of social information-gathering and exchange within a humanly distinct ‘cognitive niche’. In further support of this perspective, the chapter concludes with a discussion of recent evidence regarding the possible genetic bases of language and the application of mathematical game theory to language evolution.

Steven Pinker’s books and essays on language, mind, and human nature that have reached a wide global audience. But his articles in the scholarly literature have also been influential and readable. This collection reprints a number of his classic articles which explore his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. They include language development in children, neural network models of language, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature of human concepts, the nature-nurture debate, the logic of innuendo and euphemism, and his responses to the ideas of Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Richard Dawkins.

The acquisition of verbs’ argument structures presents a paradox in language acquisition research. Many verbs alternate between two argument structures, e.g. load hay onto the wagon/load the wagon with hay. Since children have to generalize to learn a language, they should formulate rules that capture these alternations and extend them to new verbs, and there is evidence that they do. But some verbs do not alternate: pour water into the glass/*pour the glass with water. How do children avoid these false generalizations, or recover from them, given that they cannot count on parental corrections? This chapter presents a theory of argument structure alternations that attempts to resolve this paradox. Alternations are not captured in a single rule that directly changes the syntactic properties of a verb, but in two rules: a lexical semantic rule that changes the meaning of a verb and a linking rule that maps meanings onto syntactic forms.

In my book How the Mind Works, I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Jerry Fodor claims that 'the mind doesn't work that way' (in a book with that title) because (1) Turing Machines cannot duplicate humans' ability to perform abduction (inference to the best explanation); (2) though a massively modular system could succeed at abduction, such a system is implausible on other grounds; and (3) evolution adds nothing to our under- standing of the mind. In this review I show that these arguments are flawed. First, my claim that the mind is a computational system is different from the claim Fodor attacks (that the mind has the architecture of a Turing Machine); therefore the practical limitations of Turing Machines are irrelevant. Second, Fodor identifies abduction with the cumulative accomplishments of the scientific community over millennia. This is very different from the accomplishments of human common sense, so the supposed gap between human cognition and computational models may be illusory. Third, my claim about biological specialization, as seen in organ systems, is distinct from Fodor's own notion of encapsulated modules, so the limitations of the latter are irrelevant. Fourth, Fodor's arguments dismissing of the relevance of evolution to psychology are unsound.

How do people recognize an object in different orientations? One theory is that the visual system describes the object relative to a reference frame centered on the object, resulting in a representation that is invariant across orientations. Chronometric data show that this is true only when an object can be identified uniquely by the arrangement of its parts along a single dimension. When an object can only be distinguished by an arrangement of its parts along more than one dimension, people mentally rotate it to a familiar orientation. This finding suggests that the human visual reference frame is tied to egocentric coordinates.

Tarr and Pinker (1989, 1990) delineated the conditions in which the orientation of a shape affects the time subjects take to recognize it. Relatively large effects of orientation were found (1) when misoriented asymmetrical shapes were unfamiliar, and (2) when familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared in unfamiliar orientations. In contrast, relatively small effects or no effect of orientation were found (1) when familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared at familiar orientations, (2) when unfamiliar mirror-reversals of familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared at unfamiliar orientations, (3) for misoriented symmetrical shapes, whether they were unfamiliar or familiar, and (4) for misoriented bilaterally redundant shapes, whether they were unfamiliar or familiar. To account for these data, two questions must be addressed: What mental processes underlie large effects of orientation or their absence; and why do these two patterns of data depend on manipulations of familiarity, handedness, and shape geometry? In Tarr and Pinker (1989, 1990) we proposed a theory that simultaneously answered both of these questions {what processes are used when very small effects of orientation are observed, and when are these processes used). The theory, multiple-views-plus-transformation, suggests that large effects of orientation in shape recognition are due to mental rotation. Crucially, this conclusion is based not only on the presence of an orientation effect, but on the similarity between our rotation rates and the rates observed in experiments by Shepard and Cooper (1982). These experiments used independent evidence to demonstrate the existence of an incremental mental rotation transformation, not confined to the effects of orientation, but depending on converging manipulations such as response time to probes at intermediate orientations and presentation points, effects of advance information and preparation time, and other techniques. We suggested that the absence of such large effects of orientation may result from orientation-invariant mechanisms of three kinds: orientation-specific representations of familiar shapes at familiar orientations; a 180° rotation in depth to align unfamiliar mirror-reversals with their familiar standards; and \Vi D orientation-independent descriptions for symmetrical and bilaterally redundant shapes. Together these hypotheses not only explain the causes of the absence of mental-rotation-size orientation

Standard equipment thinking machines revenge of the nerds the mind's eye good ideas hotheads family values the meaning of life.

The author counters the prevailing pessimism about the environment, which he calls “Romantic Declinism,” with his own “Enlightenment humanism,” which is informed by science and belief in the possibility of progress. While sharing environmentalists’ goal of protecting the air and water, species, and ecosystems, the author begins with the conviction that environmental problems can be solved, given the right knowledge and proper use of it. Economic growth, while no doubt contributing to the problem, is also a major and essential part of the solution. Where Romantic Declinists see modern humans as “vile despoilers of a pristine planet,” the author views human ingenuity and technology as the path not to ecological suicide, but to a more prosperous, and eventually greener, global society. Enlightened environmentalism recognizes the human need to produce energy to lift itself out of poverty, and seeks the means to do so while minimizing the damage to the planet and the living world. As recounted by the author, the 200-year trend of energy decarbonization provides clear evidence that, as the world gets richer and more technologically advanced, it “dematerializes, decarbonizes, and densifies,” thereby sparing land and species. And new technology, notably nuclear power, holds out the promise of generating electricity with little or no carbon emitted, while carbon capture holds out the possibility of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. As the author sums up this approach, Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology.

The debate on the waning of war has recently moved into higher gear. This forum contributes to that debate. Steven Pinker observes that a decline in war does not require a romantic theory of human nature. In fact, it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent inclinations, firmly rooted in evolutionary biology. Homo sapiens evolved with violent tendencies, but they are triggered by particular circumstances rather than a hydraulic urge that must periodically be discharged. And, although our species evolved with motives that can erupt in violence, it also evolved motives that can inhibit violence, including self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, and open-ended cognitive mechanisms that can devise technologies for reducing violence. Bradley Thayer argues that the decline of war thesis is flawed because the positive forces identified by these authors do not rule outside of the West or even fully inside of it. Their analysis also neglects the systemic causes of conflict and its insights for increasingly intense security competition between China and the United States. Jack Levy and William Thompson question some of the theoretical arguments advanced to explain the historical pattern of declining violence. They argue that cultural and ideational explanations for the decline in interstate war underestimate the extent to which those factors are endogenous to material and institutional variables. Arguments about the pacifying effects of the rise of the state and of commerce fail to recognize that in some historical contexts, those factors have contributed to the escalation of warfare. The introduction to the symposium outlines briefly some of the major issues: nature versus nurture, the reliability of the data, how broadly violence should be defined, whether there is more agreement on the phenomenon than on its causes, and finally whether the future will be like the past.

Seeing the Brain's One, Two, Three Taking advantage of the rare opportunity to record neuronal activity in the human brain using intracranial electrodes, Sahin et al. (p. 445 ; see the Perspective by Hagoort and Levelt ) document the spatial and temporal pattern of neuronal populations within Broca's area as patients thought of a single word, changed its tense (for verbs) or number (for nouns), and articulated the word silently. For these three stages, they detected activity at 200, 320, and 450 milliseconds, moving in a caudal to rostral direction. These data fit neatly within the roughly 600 milliseconds required for the onset of speech and map the distinct neural computations within an area of the brain, known for almost a century and a half, as important for the production of language.

Linguistic and cultural changes are revealed through the analyses of words appearing in books.

Language and cognition have been explained as the products of a homogeneous associative memory structure or alternatively, of a set of genetically determined computational modules in which rules manipulate symbolic representations. Intensive study of one phenomenon of English grammar and how it is processed and acquired suggest that both theories are partly right. Regular verbs (walk-walked) are computed by a suffixation rule in a neural system for grammatical processing; irregular verbs (run-ran) are retrieved from an associative memory.

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Charles Darwin. Third edition, with Introduction, Afterword and Commentaries. Paul Ekman. Oxford University Press, New York, and HarperCollins, London, 1998. 509 pp. $30, ISBN 0-19-511271-7. £16.99, ISBN 0-00-255866-1.

How does the brain reason and calculate? In his Perspective Pinker traces the history of this question and its answers. A new study in this issue reveals that 7-month-old infants can use rules to analyze their surroundings, changing the landscape of this debate.

Cross-cultural analysis of song It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity. There is more variation in musical behavior within societies than between societies, and societies show similar levels of within-society variation in musical behavior. At the same time, one-third of societies significantly differ from average for any given dimension, and half of all societies differ from average on at least one dimension, indicating variability across cultures. Science , this issue p. eaax0868 ; see also p. 944

Abstract Language comprises a lexicon for storing words and a grammar for generating rule-governed forms. Evidence is presented that the lexicon is part of a temporal-parietalhnedial-temporal “declarative memory” system and that granlmatical rules are processed by a frontamasal-ganglia “procedural” system. Patients produced past tenses of regular and novel verbs (looked and plagged), which require an -ed-suffixation rule, and irregular verbs (dug), which are retrieved from memory. Word-finding difficulties in posterior aphasia, and the general declarative memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease, led to more errors with irregular than regular and novel verbs. Grammatical difficulties in anterior aphasia, and the general impairment of procedures in Parkinson's disease, led to the opposite pattern. In contrast to the Parkinson's patients, who showed sup pressed motor activity and rule use, Huntington's disease patients showed excess motor activity and rule use, underscoring a role for the basal ganglia in grammatical processing.

They say that ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.1 And so I was not surprised to see my book The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity described as ‘ideological’ by reviewers who strike me as black pots in glass houses casting the first stone. By the same token, it is not easy for an author to defend himself against such an accusation: ‘I am not ideological’ is bound to sound as convincing as ‘I am not a crook’ and ‘I did not have sex with that woman.’ But I will take my chances. The arguments in The Better Angels of Our Nature are in fact not ideological. They are empirical, though the facts on which those arguments are based are bound to gore some oxen of the hard left, critical theory, and various forms of post-X-ism (together with certain livestock of the hard right, libertarianism, and anarchism). As I note in the preface, and as the paper and internet trails of my writing confirm, Better Angels was inspired by my coming across diverse datasets showing historical declines in violence. The existence of these declines (such as homicide since the Middle Ages, corporal and capital punishment since the 18th century, great-power wars since 1945, and autocracies since the 1980s) are well accepted by the scholarly communities who study them, but they surprised me at the time, continue to surprise most readers, and are adamantly denied by those who are unfamiliar with the relevant literatures.

What function do facial expressions have? We tested the hypothesis that some expressions serve as honest signals of subjective commitments—in particular, that angry faces increase the effectiveness of threats. In an ultimatum game, proposers decided how much money to offer a responder while seeing a film clip depicting an angry or a neutral facial expression, together with a written threat that was either inherently credible (a 50-50 split) or less credible (a demand for 70% of the money). Proposers offered greater amounts in response to the less credible threat when it was accompanied by an angry expression than when it was accompanied by a neutral expression, but were unaffected by the expression when dealing with the credible threat. This finding supports the hypothesis that angry expressions are honest signals that enhance the credibility of threats.

In a recent paper, Chambers and Reisberg (1985) showed that people cannot reverse classical ambiguous figures in imagery (such as the Necker cube, duck/rabbit, or Schroeder staircase). In three experiments, we refute one kind of explanation for this difficulty: that visual images do not contain information about the geometry of a shape necessary for reinterpreting it or that people cannot apply shape classification procedures to the information in imagery. We show, that given suitable conditions, people can assign novel interpretations to ambiguous images which have been constructed out of parts or mentally transformed. For example, when asked to imagine the letter “D” on its side, affixed to the top of the letter “J”, subjects spontaneously report “seeing” an umbrella. We also show that these reinterpretations are not the result of guessing strategies, and that they speak directly to the issue of whether or not mental images of ambiguous figures can be reconstrued. Finally, we show that arguments from the philosophy literature on the relation between images and descriptions are not relevant to the issue of whether images can be reinterpreted, and we suggest possible explanations for why classical ambiguous figures do not spontaneously reverse in imagery.

The English past tense system has recently been used to argue that formal grammatical categories (such as root, rule, and lexical item) may not be necessary to explain the acquisition and knowledge of language. Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) devised a connectionist model relying solely on phonological information; it is often suggested that any deficiencies of such a model can be remedied by supplying it with semantic information. These proposals are incorrect: Grammatical categories and abstract morphological structure are indispensable and cannot be replaced with semantics while preserving the patterns of psychological generalization in the system. Linguists have noted that irregular past tense mappings (e.g., fly/flew; stick/stuck) apply only when a verb's root is marked in the lexicon as having an irregular past. Because nouns are never so marked, verbs with noun roots—denominal verbs—are regular even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs, hence: flied out/*flew out to center field; high-sticked/*high-stuck the goalie. Experiment 1 shows that adult subjects are highly sensitive to this principle when rating regular and irregular past tense forms of novel versions of irregular sounding verbs: New verbs formed from nouns were judged as better with a regular past tense (e.g., line-drived was the preferred past of “to hit a line drive”): new verbs formed from verbs were judged as better with an irregular past tense (e.g., line-drove was the preferred past of “to drive along a line”). Experiment 2 replicated the results with noncollege-educated adults, showing that the effect is not due to prescriptive language training. Experiment 3 tested an alternative to the formal grammatical account proposed by Lakoff (1987): When a verb has two meanings, one with an irregular past and one with a regular past, the irregular will belong to the meaning that is more central. Using regression techniques and ratings data, we disconfirm this prediction: In the data from Experiment 1, judgments of regular and irregular forms of a new verb are shown to be affected by whether the verb is derived from a noun or a verb, but not by whether its new sense is near the center or the periphery of the sense of the word it was derived from. Experiments 4 and 5 explain the few apparent counter-examples by gathering independent evidence for a short-circuiting process: When a denominal verb appears to have an irregular past tense form, it is because speakers sometimes interpret such verbs as having been derived directly from a related irregular verb root, bypassing the relevant noun. The experiments serve as a straightforward demonstration that representations of formal grammatical categories and structures are powerful determinants of linguistic behavior, and are not reducible to semantics, phonology, or prescriptive training.

This paper proposes a new analysis of indirect speech in the framework of game theory, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It builds on the theory of Grice, which tries to ground indirect speech in pure rationality (the demands of efficient communication between two cooperating agents) and on the Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson, who proposed that people cooperate not just in exchanging data but in saving face (both the speaker's and the hearer's). I suggest that these theories need to be supplemented because they assume that people in conversation always cooperate. A reflection on how a pair of talkers may have goals that conflict as well as coincide requires an examination of the game-theoretic logic of plausible denial, both in legal contexts, where people's words may be held against them, and in everyday life, where the sanctions are social rather than judicial. This in turn requires a theory of the distinct kinds of relationships that make up human social life, a consideration of a new role for common knowledge in the use of indirect speech, and ultimately the paradox of rational ignorance, where we choose not to know something relevant to our interests.

Objectives. We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes. Methods. We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical and behavioral traits with a sample size typical of candidate gene studies. We evaluated predictions that alleles with large effect sizes would be rare and most traits of interest to social science are likely characterized by a lack of strong directional selection. We also carried out a theoretical analysis of the genetic architecture of traits based on R.A. Fisher’s geometric model of natural selection and empirical analyses of the effects of selection bias and phenotype measurement stability on the results of genetic association studies. Results. Although we replicated several known genetic associations with physical traits, we found only 2 associations with behavioral traits that met the nominal genome-wide significance threshold, indicating that physical and behavioral traits are mainly affected by numerous genes with small effects. Conclusions. The challenge for social science genomics is the likelihood that genes are connected to behavioral variation by lengthy, nonlinear, interactive causal chains, and unraveling these chains requires allying with personal genomics to take advantage of the potential for large sample sizes as well as continuing with traditional epidemiological studies.

Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance ("U-shaped development"). The errors seem paradigmatic of rule use, hence bear on central issues in the psychology of rules: how creative rule application interacts with memorized exceptions in development, how overgeneral rules are unlearned in the absence of parental feedback, and whether cognitive processes involve explicit rules or parallel distributed processing (connectionist) networks. We remedy the lack of quantitative data on overregularization by analyzing 11,521 irregular past tense utterances in the spontaneous speech of 83 children. Our findings are as follows. (1) Overregularization errors are relatively rare (median 2.5% of irregular past tense forms), suggesting that there is no qualitative defect in children's grammars that must be unlearned. (2) Overregularization occurs at a roughly constant low rate from the 2s into the school-age years, affecting most irregular verbs. (3) Although overregularization errors never predominate, one aspect of their purported U-shaped development was confirmed quantitatively: an extended period of correct performance precedes the first error. (4) Overregularization does not correlate with increases in the number or proportion of regular verbs in parental speech, children's speech, or children's vocabularies. Thus, the traditional account in which memory operates before rules cannot be replaced by a connectionist alternative in which a single network displays rotelike or rulelike behavior in response to changes in input statistics. (5) Overregularizations first appear when children begin to mark regular verbs for tense reliably (i.e., when they stop saying Yesterday I walk). (6) The more often a parent uses an irregular form, the less often the child overregularizes it. (7) Verbs are protected from overregularization by similar-sounding irregulars, but they are not attracted to overregularization by similar-sounding regulars, suggesting that irregular patterns are stored in an associative memory with connectionist properties, but that regulars are not. We propose a simple explanation. Children, like adults, mark tense using memory (for irregulars) and an affixation rule that can generate a regular past tense form for any verb. Retrieval of an irregular blocks the rule, but children's memory traces are not strong enough to guarantee perfect retrieval. When retrieval fails, the rule is applied, and overregularization results.

Language learnability and language devlopment revisited the acquisition theory - assumptions and postulates phrase structure rules phrase stucture rules - developmental considerations inflection complementation and control auxiliaries lexical entries and lexical rules.

In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

Parts and boundaries, Ray Jackendoff the syntax of event structure, James Pustejovsky learning to express motion events in English and Korean - the influence of language-specific lexicanization patterns, Soonja Choi and Melissa Bowerman wiping the slate clean - a lexical semantic exploration, Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Horav affectedness and direct objects - the role of lexical semantics in the acquisition of Vero argument structure, Jean Gropen, Steven Pinker, Michelle Hollander and Richard Goldberg.

Abstract The vast expressive power of language is made possible by two principles: the arbitrary sound-meaning pairing underlying words, and the discrete combinatorial system underlying grammar. These principles implicate distinct cognitive mechanisms: associative memory and symbol-manipulating rules. The distinction may be seen in the difference between regular inflection (e.g., walk-walked ), which is productive and open-ended and hence implicates a rule, and irregular inflection (e.g., come-came , which is idiosyncratic and closed and hence implicates individually memorized words. Nonetheless, two very different theories have attempted to collapse the distinction; generative phonology invokes minor rules to generate irregular as well as regular forms, and connectionism invokes a pattern associator memory to store and retrieve regular as well as irregular forms. I present evidence from three disciplines that supports the traditional word/rule distinction, though with an enriched conception of lexical memory with some of the properties of a pattern-associator. Rules, nonetheless, are distinct from pattern-association, because a rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs or their sound patterns, but applies as the ‘default’, whenever memory access fails. I present a dozen such circumstances, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words, in which people inflect the words regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, low-lifes , and Walkmans ). A comparison of English to other languages shows that contrary to the connectionist account, default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory, but to a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.

Examines the ability of three individuals with aphasia to read aloud regular and irregular past tense verb forms. All three were more impaired in reading regular than irregular forms. These findings support a dual mechanism model of past tense formation in production.

Finke and Pinker (1982, 1983) showed subjects an array of dots followed by an arrow in a blank field, and asked them to determine whether the arrow pointed to any of the previously seen dots. Response times were linearly related to the distance between the arrow and the nearest dot, suggesting that subjects spontaneously used an internal scanning or extrapolation process to perform the task. We replicate and extend this finding by varying the retention interval, and by employing a paradigm in which subjects’ eyes are closed and the arrows are described to them using a coordinate scheme. We also show that subjects are unable to predict the form of the data when the task simply is described to them. Results suggest that mental scanning along a straight path can be performed on images reconstructed from memory, and that it does not depend on the ongoing perception of a continuous surface, on physical eye movements, or on demand characteristics.

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 230-251

Languages are infinite, childhoods finite. The same ambiguity that bedevils language parsing in the adult bedevils language acquisition in the child. In all languages, words for objects and people are nouns or noun phrases, words for actions and change of state are verbs. This chapter certainly knows that there is something in the sperm and egg that affects the language abilities of the child that grows out of their union. Most of the language-impaired family members were average in intelligence, and there are sufferers in other families who are way above average; one boy studied by Gopnik was tops in his math class. Pinker says that ‘actually saying something aloud, as opposed to listening to what other people say, does not provide the child with information about the language’. Part of Sampson’s counterblast to innateness explanations of language acquisition focuses on Pinker’s reasoning and evidence, as exemplified.

Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on websites, and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and neurobiological foundations. Many of these moralizations, such as the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. People don't engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification. The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. The science of the moral sense alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions.

La pandemia ha disminuido algunos tipos de delitos y ha aumentado otros. Pero el mundo es mucho más seguro de lo que solía ser, y sabemos cómo hacerlo aún más seguro.

Steven Pinker, the bestselling author of The Language Instinct, deploys his gift for explaining big ideas in The Sense of Style - an entertaining writing guide for the 21st century. What is the secret of good prose? Does writing well even matter in an age of instant communication? Should we care? In this funny, thoughtful book about the modern art of writing, Steven Pinker shows us why we all need a sense of style. More than ever before, the currency of our social and cultural lives is the written word, from Twitter and texting to blogs, e-readers and old-fashioned books. But most style guides fail to prepare people for the challenges of writing in the 21st century, portraying it as a minefield of grievous errors rather than a form of pleasurable mastery. They fail to deal with an inescapable fact about language: it changes over time, adapted by millions of writers and speakers to their needs. Confusing changes in the world with moral decline, every generation believes the kids today are degrading society and taking language with it. A guide for the new millennium, writes Steven Pinker, has to be different. Drawing on the latest research in linguistics and cognitive science, Steven Pinker replaces the recycled dogma of previous style guides with reason and evidence. This thinking person's guide to good writing shows why style still matters: in communicating effectively, in enhancing the spread of ideas, in earning a reader's trust and, not least, in adding beauty to the world. Eye-opening, mind-expanding and cheerful, The Sense of Style shows that good style is part of what it means to be human. An award-winning cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker is also Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and the lauded author of bestsellers such as The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Stuff of Thought. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard and lives in Boston & Truro, MA.

One of the world's science superstars presents a brilliantly illuminating, entertaining and cutting-edge account of how language actually works. How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Steven Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. That phenomenon - the existence of regular and irregular verbs - connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; the sources of the major themes in the history of Western philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the living brain. Pinker makes sense of all of this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules.

The blank slate, the noble savage and the ghost in the machine: the official theory silly putty the last wall to fall culture vultures the slate's last stand. Fear and loathing: political scientists the Holy Trinity. Human nature with a human face: the fear of inequality the fear of imperfectability the fear of determinism the fear of nihilism. Know thyself: in touch with reality out of our depths the many roots of our suffering the sanctimonious animal. Hot buttons: politics violence gender children the arts. The voice of the species. Appendix: Donald E. Brown's list of human universals.

Steven Pinker analyses what words actually mean and how we use them, and he reveals what this can tell us about ourselves. He shows how we use space and motion as metaphors for more abstracted ideas, and uncovers the deeper structures of human thought that have been shaped by evolutionary history.

Selected by New York Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year The author of New York Times bestseller Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence. Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened? This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.

Introduction 1. Formal models of language learning 2. A computational theory of the mental imagery medium 3. Rules and connections in human language 4. When does human object recognition use a viewer-centered reference frame? 5. Natural language and natural selection 6. The acquisition of argument structure 7. The nature of human concepts: evidence from an unusual source 8. Why nature and nurture won't go away 9. The faculty of language: What's special about it? 10. So how does the mind work? 11. Deep commonalities between life and mind 12. Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker 13. The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language Author Biography

Does intelligence result from the manipulation of structured symbolic expressions? Or is it the result of the activation of large networks of densely interconnected simple units? Connections and Symbols provides the first systematic analysis of the explosive new field of Connectionism that is challenging the basic tenets of cognitive science. These lively discussions by Jerry A. Fodor, Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, Joel Lechter, and Thomas G. Bever raise issues that lie at the core of our understanding of how the mind works: Does connectionism offer it truly new scientific model or does it merely cloak the old notion of associationism as a central doctrine of learning and mental functioning? Which of the new empirical generalizations are sound and which are false? And which of the many ideas such as massively parallel processing, distributed representation, constraint satisfaction, and subsymbolic or microfeatural analyses belong together, and which are logically independent? Now that connectionism has arrived with full-blown models of psychological processes as diverse as Pavlovian conditioning, visual recognition, and language acquisition, the debate is on. Common themes emerge from all the contributors to Connections and Symbols: criticism of connectionist models applied to language or the parts of cognition employing language like operations; and a focus on what it is about human cognition that supports the traditional physical symbol system hypothesis. While criticizing many aspects of connectionist models, the authors also identify aspects of cognition that could he explained by the connectionist models. Connections and Symbols is included in the Cognition Special Issue series, edited by Jacques Mehler.

Part 1 A learnability paradox: argument structure and the lexicon the logical problem of language acquisition Baker's paradox attempted solutions to Baker's paradox. Part 2 Constraints on lexical rules: morphological and phonological constraints semantic constraints how semantic and morphological constraints might resolve Baker's paradox evidence for criteria-governed productivity problems for the criteria-governed productivity theory. Part 3 Constraints and the nature of argument structure: overview - why lexical rules carry semantic constraints constraints of lexical rules as manifestations of more general phenomena a theory of argument structure on universality. Part 4 Possible and actual forms: the problem of negative exceptions transitive action verbs as evidence for narrow subclasses the nature of narrow conflation classes defining and motivating subclasses of verbs licensing the four alterations the relation between narrow-range and broad-range rules. Part 5 Representation: the need for a theory of lexicosemantic representation is a theory of lexical semantics feasible? evidence for a semantic subsystem underlying verb meanings a cross-linguistic inventory of components of verb meaning a theory of the representation of grammatically relevant semantic structures explicit representations of lexical rules an lexicosemantic structures summary. Part 6 Learning: linking rules lexical semantic structures broad conflation classes (thematic cores) and broad range lexical rules summary of learning mechanisms. Part 7 Development: developmental sequence for argument structure alterations the unlearning problem children's argument structure changing rules are always semantically conditioned do children's errors have the same cause as adults? acquisition of verb meaning and errors in argument structure some predictions about the acquisition of narrow-range rules summary of development. Part 8 Conclusions: a brief summary of the resolution of the paradox argument structure as a pointer between syntactic structure and propositions the autonomy of semantic representation implications for the semantic bootstrapping hyposthesis conservatism, listedness and the lexicon spatial schemas and abstract thought.

This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called therapeutic cloning that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs. Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So what's not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council?

Twenty years ago, I began a collaboration with Alan Prince that has dominated the course of my research ever since. Alan sent me a list of comments on a paper by James McClelland and David Rumelhart. Not only had Alan identified some important flaws in their model, but pinpointed the rationale for the mechanisms that linguists and cognitive scientists had always taken for granted and that McClelland and Rumelhart were challenging -- the armamentarium of lexical entries, structured representations, grammatical categories, symbol-manipulating rules, and modular organization that defined the symbol-manipulation approach to language and cognition. By pointing out the work that each of these assumptions did in explaining aspects of a single construction of language -- the English past tense -- Alan outlined a research program that could test the foundational assumptions of the dominant paradigm in cognitive science. My graduate advisor Roger Brown once decried the lack of progress in much of psychology owing to the phenomenon in which a large quantity of frequently conflicting theory and data can become cognitively ugly and so repellent as to be swiftly deserted, its issues unresolved. I like to think that the past-tense debate, now in its third decade, is a more hopeful case, despite the impression in some observers that it has reached a stalemate. In this paper I summarize my view of the current state of the art.

第７章 タブー語はなぜ存在するのか—人間感情の考察から（テレビでは口にできない七つの言葉；タブー語と脳—生物学的ルーツ；悪態はなぜ人を不快にするのか—タブー語の意味論 ほか） 第８章 「ほのめかし」による駆け引き—ことばと人間関係（人はなぜ間接表現を使うのか—「会話の推意」の考察から；「こちらには塩がないのですが…」—依頼表現の戦略；いかに賄賂をほのめかすか—曖昧表現の効用と弊害 ほか） 第９章 「洞窟」から抜け出せ—言語の無限の可能性（言語から見た人間の本性；事物の概略的な認識；心のズームレンズによる空間把握 ほか）

This title is shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2012. This acclaimed book by Steven Pinker, author of Language Instinct and Blank argues that, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent, over millenia and decades. Can violence really have declined? The images of conflict we see daily on our screens from around the world suggest this is an almost obscene claim to be making. Extraordinarily, however, Steven Pinker shows violence within and between societies - both murder and warfare - really has declined from prehistory to today. We are much less likely to die at someone else's hands than ever before. Even the horrific carnage of the last century, when compared to the dangers of pre-state societies, is part of this trend. Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage' and an over-simplistic Hobbesian notion of a 'nasty, brutish and short' life, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people. One of the most important books I've read - not just this year, but ever...For me, what's most important about Better Angels of Our Nature are its insights into how to help achieve positive outcomes. can we encourage a less violent, more just society, particularly for the poor? Steven Pinker shows us ways we can make those positive trajectories a little more likely. That's a contribution, not just to historical scholarship, but to the world. (Bill Gates). Brilliant, mind-altering...Everyone should read this astonishing (David Runciman, Guardian). A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline. (Peter Singer, York Times). [A] sweeping new review of the history of human violence...[Pinker has] the kind of academic superbrain that can translate otherwise impenetrable statistics into a meaningful narrative of human behaviour ...impeccable scholarship. (Tony Allen-Mills, Sunday Times). Written in distinctively entertaining and clear personal style...a marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling. (Clive Cookson, Financial Times). Pinker's scholarhsip is astounding ...flawless ...masterful. (Joanna Bourke, Times). Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as New York Times, Time and Slate, and is the author of six books, including Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Blank Slate and Stuff of Thought.

５ 五つのホットな問題—人間の本性から見る（政治—イデオロギー的対立の背景；暴力の機嫌—「高貴な野蛮人」神話を超えて；ジェンダー—なぜ男はレイプするのか；子育て—「生まれか育ちか」論争の終焉 ほか） ６ 種の声—五つの文学作品から（文学作品から人間本性を理解する；脳という物質の驚異；「結果の平等」が招くディストピア；ポストモダン教義の暗黒面 ほか）

Why are some words rude and others aren't? Why can launching into expletives be so shocking - and sometimes so amusing? In this hilarious extract from his bestselling The Stuff of Thought Steven Pinker takes us on a fascinating journey through the world of profanities, to show us why we swear, how taboos change and how we use obscenities in different ways. Why do so many swear words involve sex, bodily functions and religion? What are the biological roots of swearing? Why would a democracy deter the use of words for two activities - sex and excretion - that harm no one and are inescapable parts of the human condition?Taboo language enters into a startling array of human concerns from capital crimes in the Bible to the future of electronic media. You'll discover that in Quebecois French the expression 'Tabernacle' is outrageous, that 'scumbag' has a very unsavoury origin and that in a certain Aboriginal language every word is filthy when spoken in front of your mother-in-law. Covering everything from free speech to Tourette's, from pottymouthed celebrities to poetry, this book reveals what swearing tells us about how our minds work. (It's also a bloody good read).

Do we really care about each other less than we did in the past? This myth-destroying book shows that, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less, not more, violent from prehistory to today. Even the twentieth century, commonly perceived as the most brutal, is part of this trend. Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage', and the Hobbesian notion of a 'nasty, brutish and short' life, and ranging over everything from the Enlightenment to warfare, art to religion, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions is actually making us better people.

Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds. The ability comes so naturally that we are apt to forget what a miracle it is. Pursuing the ideas of Darwin and Chomsky, Steven Pinker offers a look at why we use language and where this ability comes from. Rather than being an acquired cultural artefact, it is vigorously argued that language is a biological adaptation to communicate information and as such is a system of great richness and beauty. Using examples of the way language is used in daily life from the mouths of children to the pontifications of politicians, Pinker explores this system and our instinct to use it.

O debate genetica-cultura tem sido uma preocupacao para a Psicologia e para as Ciencias Sociais ha seculos. Muitos escritores tem expressado uma esperanca que se chegue a um meio termo que faca o debate desaparecer. Neste meio termo, todo comportamento vem de uma interacao intrincada entre a hereditariedade e o meio ambiente, e seria um erro tentar separa-los. Eu contesto este ponto de vista, o qual denominei interacionismo holistico, por varias razoes, entre as quais o fato de que e simplesmente falso que todos os aspectos da funcao cerebral envolvem uma mistura de hereditariedade e meio ambiente, e esse interacionismo holistico obscurece nossa compreensao de como a mente trabalha. Como ilustracao, eu discuto o caso dos efeitos da educacao dada pelos pais, no qual o interacionismo holistico tem conduzido a conclusoes falsas e enganosas.

In this extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written (Noam Chomsky), one of the greatest thinkers in the field of linguistics explains how language works--how people, ny making noises with their mouths, can cause ideas to arise in other people's minds.

Human nature is a topic of perennial interest because everyone has a theory about it. All of us have to anticipate how people will react to their surroundings, and that means that we all need theories, implicit or explicit, about what makes people tick. Much depends on our theory of human nature. In our private lives we use it to win friends and influence people, to manage our relationships, to bring up our children, to control our own behavior. Its assumptions about learning guide our policies in education; its assumptions about motivation guide our policies in law and politics. And because the theory of human nature delineates what we can achieve easily, what we can achieve only with effort and sacrifice, and what we cannot achieve at all, it’s tied to our values: what we think we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a society. Because of this tie to values, it should come as no surprise that for millennia, the main theory of human nature in our in-

Objectives. We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes. Methods. We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical and behavioral traits with a sample size typical of candidate gene studies. We evaluated predictions that alleles with large effect sizes would be rare and most traits of interest to social science are likely characterized by a lack of strong directional selection. We also carried out a theoretical analysis of the genetic architecture of traits based on R.A. Fisher’s geometric model of natural selection and empirical analyses of the effects of selection bias and phenotype measurement stability on the results of genetic association studies. Results. Although we replicated several known genetic associations with physical traits, we found only 2 associations with behavioral traits that met the nominal genome-wide significance threshold, indicating that physical and behavioral traits are mainly affected by numerous genes with small effects. Conclusions. The challenge for social science genomics is the likelihood that genes are connected to behavioral variation by lengthy, nonlinear, interactive causal chains, and unraveling these chains requires allying with personal genomics to take advantage of the potential for large sample sizes as well as continuing with traditional epidemiological studies. (Am J Public Health. 2013;

grammatical processing broca s area convergent evidence from fmri and intracranial electrophysiology

In the past 10 years, hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion have provided crucial insights into pathological and normal cognitive functions. On pages 264–270, David A Oakley and Peter W Halligan discuss recent research that elucidates the functional anatomy of hypnosis and review recent evidence on how hypnotic suggestion provides a powerful tool for exploring normal and pathological psychological processes. On the cover, cognitive science and hypnosis come together, with Chevreul’s pendulum in the foreground and a ‘variant’ of the Stroop task (a commonly used task in conjunction with hypnosis in order to investigate a range of cognitive processes) in the background. Cover design by Sam Oakley.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind o MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the part involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.

第１部 脳を発見する（科学に飛び込む；分離された心を発見する；脳のモールス信号を探し求めて） 第２部 近くて遠い二つの半球（モジュールの正体を明らかにする；脳の画像化で分離脳手術を検証する；やはり分離していた） 第３部 進化と統合（右脳には言いたいことがある；豪奢な暮らしと奉仕への誘い） 第４部 脳の階層（階層と力学 新しい展望を求めて）

1. The evolutionary social psychology of indirect speech actsIndirect speech is the phenomenon in which a speaker says something doesn't literally mean, knowing that the hearer will interpret it as intended:Would you like to come up and see my etchings? [a sexual comeon].If you could pass the salt, that would be great [a polite request].Nice house you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it [a threat].We're counting on you to show leadership in our Campaign for the Future [a solicitation of a donation].Gee, officer, I was wondering whether there might be some way we could take care of the ticket here [a bribe].These off-record indirect speech acts have long been a major topic in pragmatics, and they have considerable practical importance as well, including an understanding rhetoric, negotiation and diplomacy, and the prosecution of extortion, bribery, and sexual harassment. They also pose important questions about our nature as social beings. This paper, adapted from a book which uses semantics and pragmatics as a window into human nature (Pinker 2007), uses indirect speech as a window into human social relationships. In doing so it seeks to augments the current understanding of indirect speech with ideas from game theory, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology.Intuitively, the explanation for indirect speech seems obvious: we use it to escape embarrassment, avoid awkwardness, save face, or reduce social tension. But as with many aspects of the mind, the danger with commonsense explanations is that we are trying to explain a puzzle by appealing to intuitions that themselves need an explanation. In this case, we need to know what face is, and why we have emotions like embarrassment, tension, and shame that trade in it. Ideally, those enigmas will be explained in terms of the inherent problems faced by social agents who exchange information.2. Background: Conversational maxims and the theory of politenessAny analysis of indirect speech must begin with Grice's Cooperative Principle and the theory of conversational maxims and conversational implicature that flows from it (Grice 1975). Grice proposed that conversation has a rationality of its own, rooted in the needs of partners to cooperate to get their messages across. Speakers tacitly adhere to a Cooperative Principle, tailoring their utterances to the momentary purpose and direction of the conversation. That requires monitoring the knowledge and expectations of one's interlocutor and anticipating her reaction to one's words. (Keeping with convention, I will refer to the generic speaker as a he and the generic hearer as a she.) Grice famously fleshed out the principle in his four conversational maxims, quantity (say no more or less than is required), quality (be truthful), manner (be clear and orderly), and relevance (be relevant), which are commandments that people tacitly follow to further the conversation efficiently. Indirect speech may be explained by the way the maxims are observed in the breach. Speakers often flout them, counting on their listeners to interpret their intent in a way that would make it consistent with the Cooperative Principle after all. That's why, Grice noted, we would interpret a review that described a singer as producing a series of notes as negative rather than factual. The reviewer intentionally violated the maxim of Manner (he was not succinct); readers assume was providing the kind of information they seek in a review; the readers conclude that the reviewer was implicating that the performance was substandard. Grice called this line of reasoning a conversational implicature.Grice came to conversation from the bloodless world of logic and said little about why people bother to implicate their meanings rather than just blurting them out. We discover the answer when we remember that people are not just in the business of downloading information into each other's heads but are social animals concerned with the impressions they make. …

Semantic, Phonological, and Lexical Influences on Regular and Irregular Inflection Yi Ting Huang (huang@wjh.harvard.edu) Department of Psychology, 33 Kirkland Street Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Steven Pinker (pinker@wjh.harvard.edu) Department of Psychology, 33 Kirkland Street Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Abstract Regular and irregular inflections have become an important tool for understanding mechanisms underlying human language and cognition. Regular-irregular homophones such as rang the bell/ringed the city challenge connectionist models in which phonological information is the only input to the inflection process. Models of language that differentiate between lexicon and grammar attribute these inflectional differences to distinct lexical or morphological representations while connectionist models distinguish them by semantic features. Ramscar (2002) argued for the semantic account by showing that people extend irregular inflection to novel words similar in sound and meaning to existing irregulars, however generalizations may have been based on analogy to those exact words rather than overlap of semantic features. We presented people with novel words that independently varied in phonological and semantic similarity to existing irregulars and found that semantics only had an effect when the level of similarity was high and when it was accompanied by high phonological similarity—the combination that evokes a particular existing verb. Results are problematic for a model that appeals both to semantic and phonological similarity and supports theories that posit distinct lexical representations. Introduction The English past tense has become a battleground for the nature of cognitive representations and processes. The Words and Rules (WR) theory (Pinker & Ullman, 2002; Ulman, 1999; Pinker, 1991) holds that irregular past tense forms (sing-sung) are stored in associative memory, whereas most regular past tense forms (walk-walked) are generated by an operation concatenating a suffix with a stem. The Single Pattern Associator (SPA) theory (Ramscar, 2002; MacWhinney & Leinbach, 1991; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) holds both regular and irregular forms are generated in a pattern associator network in which weighted connections associate phonological and semantic features of stems with phonological and semantic features of their past-tense forms. The stakes of this debate encompass not only linguistic theory but also cognition in general. The WR account asserts that the distinction between regular and irregular verbs reflects the two ways language is represented and processed in the mind. Irregular past tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a subdivision of associative memory, and as a result, demonstrate strong effects of word frequency and phonological similarity. Regular past tense forms, in general, are relatively insensitive to these variables because they may be assembled by a productive suffixing rule, which in this case adds –ed to the stem. The rule applies when memory fails to retrieve an irregular form, such as in the case of novel or low-frequency verbs. These rules belong to a grammatical system responsible for the construction of complex words and sentences. This theory contrasts with an account where both kinds of past tense forms are generated by weighted connections in a connectionist pattern associator (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986). All processing is accounted for using weighted phonological units (e.g. –ing to –ung for sing, –k to –kt for walk) that are strengthened with exposure and shared across phonologically similar stems, resulting in automatic generalization by similarity. This model contains no lexical entries or grammatical representations. Empirically, these two theories make different predictions in the case of homophonous verbs (e.g. rang the bell versus ringed the city, broke the vase versus braked the car). Since phonological input units remain identical, these cases are problematic for an SPA model that incorporates only phonological features (e.g. Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986), because two items with identical input representations must be systematically mapped onto distinct output representations. In WR and other theories in which words have representations apart from their sounds, homophones with distinct past-tense forms are unproblematic because the irregular past tense form is associated with a word and not simply a set of sounds. Moreover, novel verbs that are homophonous with irregular forms can receive a regular form as well whenever they are derived from a noun (e.g., ringed the city) or adjective (e.g., righted the boat), because every irregular verb form is stored with a verb root, not with a set of verb sounds, and a verb based on a noun is not represented as having the same root as its homophonous pure verb (Pinker & Prince, 1988; Kim et al, 1991; Marcus et al., 1995). Modifications of the SPA theory have attempted to overcome the homophone problem by adding features for meaning to the input representation. For example, break and brake mean different things, and thus are represented by

We identify common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach, which we call the proxyphenotype method. First, we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in a large sample (n = 106,736), which produces a set of 69 education-associated SNPs. Second, using independent samples (n = 24,189), we measure the association of these education-associated SNPs with cognitive performance. Three SNPs (rs1487441, rs7923609, and rs2721173) are significantly associated with cognitive performance after correction for multiple hypothesis testing. In an independent sample of older Americans (n = 8,652), we also show that a polygenic score derived from the education-associated SNPs is associated with memory and absence of dementia. Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory.

'My new favourite book of all time' Bill Gates TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred, and irrationality. Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion - a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies. If you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, Pinker shows how we can use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe. We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one.

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design.Wallace’s apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition.One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche”. This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people’s beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.

In this extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written (Noam Chomsky), one of the greatest thinkers in the field of linguistics explains how language works--how people, ny making noises with their mouths, can cause ideas to arise in other people's minds.

OBJECTIVES: We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes. METHODS: We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical and behavioral traits with a sample size typical of candidate gene studies. We evaluated predictions that alleles with large effect sizes would be rare and most traits of interest to social science are likely characterized by a lack of strong directional selection. We also carried out a theoretical analysis of the genetic architecture of traits based on R.A. Fisher's geometric model of natural selection and empirical analyses of the effects of selection bias and phenotype measurement stability on the results of genetic association studies. RESULTS: Although we replicated several known genetic associations with physical traits, we found only 2 associations with behavioral traits that met the nominal genome-wide significance threshold, indicating that physical and behavioral traits are mainly affected by numerous genes with small effects. CONCLUSIONS: The challenge for social science genomics is the likelihood that genes are connected to behavioral variation by lengthy, nonlinear, interactive causal chains, and unraveling these chains requires allying with personal genomics to take advantage of the potential for large sample sizes as well as continuing with traditional epidemiological studies.

La linguistica ha lanzado al mundo un caudal de grandes ideas: la evolucion del lenguaje inspirada en la evolucion de las especies de Darwin; el analisis del contraste de sonidos inspirados en el estructuralismo de la teoria literaria y en la antropologia: la hipotesis whorfiana de que el lenguaje modela el pensamiento; o la teoria de Noam Chomsky sobre la estructura profunda de una gramatica universal.

The blank slate, the noble savage and the ghost in the machine: the official theory silly putty the last wall to fall culture vultures the slate's last stand. Fear and loathing: political scientists the Holy Trinity. Human nature with a human face: the fear of inequality the fear of imperfectability the fear of determinism the fear of nihilism. Know thyself: in touch with reality out of our depths the many roots of our suffering the sanctimonious animal. Hot buttons: politics violence gender children the arts. The voice of the species. Appendix: Donald E. Brown's list of human universals.