Full Description
Thomas G. Bever's now iconic sentence, The horse raced past the barn fell, first appeared in his 1970 paper "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". This 'garden path sentence', so-called because of the way it leads the reader or listener down the wrong parsing path, helped spawn the entire subfield of sentence processing. It has become the most often quoted element of a paper which spanned a wealth of research into the relationship between the grammatical system and language processing.
Language Down the garden Path traces the lines of research that grew out of Bever's classic paper. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition (the role of prediction, grammar, working memory, prosody, abstractness, syntax, and semantics mapping); the current status of universals and narrow syntax; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book will appeal to all those interested in understanding the questions that shaped, and are still shaping, this field and the ways in which linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are seeking to answer them.
Contents
Reprint of 'The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures' ; 1. Sentence Comprehension Before and After 1970: Topics, debates, and techniques ; 2. Anticipating the Garden Path: The horse raced past the barn ate the cake ; 3. Inviting Production to the Cognitive Basis Party ; 4. Thematic Templates and the Comprehension of Relative Clauses ; 5. The Processing Complexity of English Relative Clauses ; 6. Prediction, Production, Priming, and imPlicit Learning: A framework for psycholinguistics ; 7. Enduring Themes in Sentence Comprehension: Projecting linguistic structures ; 8. The Multiple Bases for Linguistic Structures ; 9. Pronouncing and Comprehending Center-embedded Sentences ; 10. Beyond Capacity: The role of memory processes in building linguistic structure in real-time ; 11. Neurotypology: Modelling cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the neurocognition of language comprehension ; 12. The Path From Certain Events to Linguistic Uncertainties ; 13. On Abstraction and Language Universals ; 14. Determiners: An empirical argument for innateness ; 15. Anchoring Agreement ; 16. Parser-grammar Relations: We don't understand everything twice ; 17. The Epicenter of Linguistic Behaviour ; 18. From Action to Language: Evidence and speculations ; 19. The Mirror Theory of Language: A neuro-linguist's perspective ; 20. Some Issues in Current Language Acquisition Research ; 21. A Bayesian Evaluation of the Cost of Abstractness ; 22. The Biolinguistics of Language Universals - the next years ; Afterword: The Impact of The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures: A retrospective reflection, reconstruction, and appreciation ; References ; Index
