Royal Jon Skousen (; born August 5, 1945) is a professor of linguistics and English at Brigham Young University (BYU), where he is editor of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. He is "the leading expert on the textual history of the Book of Mormon" and the founder of the analogical modeling approach to language modeling.


Skousen was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Leroy Bentley Skousen and Helen Louise Skousen, a Latter-day Saint family and was one of eleven children. Royal is a nephew to W. Cleon Skousen. Royal graduated from Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon.


After his father unexpectedly died from lung cancer in 1964 despite having never smoked, Skousen served as a missionary in Finland from 1965 to 1967. He is fluent in Finnish.


Skousen received his B.A. degree from BYU, with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. Skousen went on to study linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his Ph.D. degree there in 1972.


He was then an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin until 1979, when he joined the faculty of BYU. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1981, a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tampere in Finland in 1982, and a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2001. In 1999, BYU presented him the Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Research and Creative Arts Awards.


Since 1999, Skousen has served as the president of the Utah Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. He has also been associate editor of the "Journal of Quantitative Linguistics" since 2003.


Skousen married Sirkku Unelma Härkönen in 1968. They had seven children and lived in Orem, Utah. They now live in Spanish Fork, Utah.


Lera Boroditsky (born c.1976) is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is currently one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford.


Boroditsky was born in Belarus to a Jewish family. When she was 12 years old, her family emigrated to the United States, where she learned to speak English as her fourth language. As a teenager she began thinking about the degree to which language differences could shape an argument and exaggerate the differences between people. She received her B.A. degree in cognitive science at Northwestern University in 1996. She went to graduate school at Stanford University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology in 2001. She worked under Gordon Bower who was her thesis advisor at Stanford. Boroditsky also conducted research at Stanford University.


She became an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT before she was hired by Stanford in 2004. Gordon Bower says: "It's exceedingly rare for us to hire back our own graduate students.. [s]he brought a very high IQ and a tremendous ability for penetrating analysis." At Stanford, she was an assistant professor of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.


Boroditsky is currently professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She studies language and cognition, focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception. Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology.


Her work has provided new insights into the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (Linguistic relativity). She uses powerful examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. Her papers and lectures have influenced the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in providing evidence and research against the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.


She was named a Searle Scholar and has received several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER award, the Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and the McDonnell Scholar Award.


In addition to scholarly work, Boroditsky also gives popular science lectures to the general public, and her work has been covered in news and media outlets. Boroditsky talks about how all the languages differ from one another, whether in grammatical differences or contain different sounds, vocabulary, or patterns. Boroditsky studies how the languages we speak shape the way we think.


Boroditsky is known for her research relating to cognitive science, how language affects the way we think, and other linguistic related topics. One of her main research topics focuses on how people with different linguistic backgrounds act or have different behaviors when exposed to certain events. On the individual level, Boroditsky is interested in how the languages we speak influence and shape the way we think.


She has done studies comparing English to other native speakers of a different language and seeing the differences in the way they think and act given a certain scenario. For example, English and Russian differentiate between cups and glasses. In Russian, the difference between a cup and a glass is based on its shape instead of its material as in English.


A study published in 2000, observed that "the processing of the concrete domain of space could modulate the processing of the abstract domain of time, but not the other way around." The frequent use of a mental metaphor connects it to the abstract concept and helps the mind to store non-concrete informations in the long-term memory. Boroditsky has also done research on metaphors and their relation to crime. Her work has suggested that some conventional and systematic metaphors influence the way people reason about the issues they describe. For instance, previous work has found that people were more likely to want to fight back against a crime "beast" by increasing the police force but more likely to want to diagnose and treat a crime "virus" through social reform.


(From over 200 books, chapters, journal articles, and technical reports; see footnote 8 for a complete bibliography).


Wallace E. Lambert (December 31, 1922 – August 23, 2009) was a Canadian psychologist and a professor in the psychology department at McGill University (1954–1990). Among the founders of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, he is known for his contributions to social and cross-cultural psychology (intergroup attitudes, child-rearing values, and psychological consequences of living in multicultural societies), language education (the French immersion program), and bilingualism (measurement of language dominance, attitudes and motivation in second-language learning, and social, cognitive, and neuropsychological consequences of bilingualism).


Wallace ("Wally") Lambert was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada, on December 31, 1922. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to Taunton, Massachusetts, where he was raised. Lambert received his undergraduate education at Brown University (1940–1947), where his studies were interrupted for 3 years of U.S. military service in the European Theatre of Operations. While on release from the army, he studied psychology, philosophy, and economics at Cambridge University, and French language and literature at the Université de Paris and the Université d'Aix-en-Provence. Lambert received his master's degree in psychology from Colgate University in 1950, and his doctorate in 1953 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Lambert met his future wife Janine in France after the second world war. They had two children, Philippe and Sylvie. Watching his children grow up to be fluently bilingual in a household in Montreal with an English-speaking father and a French-speaking mother is said to have sparked his interest in bilingualism-biculturalism.


In 1954, Lambert took up a position in the Psychology Department at McGill University in Montreal, where he published nearly 200 journal articles, monographs, and books on the topic of bilingualism. Among Lambert's former graduate students are: Allan Paivio, Robert C. Gardner, Leon Jakobovits, Malcolm Preston, Moshe Anisfeld, Elizabeth Peal Anisfeld, G. Richard Tucker, Josiane Hamers, Allan Reynolds, Gary Cziko, and Jyotsna Vaid. Lambert remained at McGill University as an emeritus professor from 1990 until his death in 2009. Over the course of his career, Lambert further served as an editor for five academic journals, and as a consultant for the United States Office of Education.


Lambert's many contributions led to multiple honours, including Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1964–1965), Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1973), Fellow of the National Academy of Education (1976), the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (1978), Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association (1982–1983), Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina (1983), Canadian Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology (1984), American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology (1990), James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award of the Association for Psychological Science (1992), Visiting Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar (1987), and five honorary doctorates.


Jean E. Fox Tree is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.


Fox Tree studies collateral signals that people use in spontaneous speech, such as fillers (e.g. ‘you know’), prosodic information (e.g. pauses between words, the melody of a sentence), fillers (e.g. ‘uh’ and ‘um’), and speech disfluencies.


Traditionally, such phenomena were given little attention by scholars, either because they were viewed as flaws in speech to be avoided or ignored, or because many psycholinguistic studies focused on speech that was prepared in advance rather than spontaneous speech. Rather than unwanted errors, Fox Tree's research has shown that collateral signals are actually meaningful and relevant to both speaker and listener, and that removing them from speech can negatively effect comprehension.


This view counters that proposed by Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist from MIT who regarded such utterances as errors in performance and not part of proper language. Fox Tree showed, however, collateral signals are essential to successful communication in everyday situations and are beneficial to listeners.


Fox Tree studied the use of ‘oh’ in several experiments. They found that ‘oh’ can be used by speakers to signal to that the information they are providing is not connected to the information that just preceded it. That is, while an utterance that follows another is usually connected to the one that preceded it, ‘oh’ can be used to signal that the utterance is not connected to the one that directly before it, but rather to something further back (for example “I went to the market and bought some fruit. I got apples, pears, grapes, and oranges. It was really crowded there today. Oh, and kiwis.”) (1999).


Other topics that Fox Tree has researched include the use of expressions such as ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’, the effects of false starts and repetitions in the comprehension of spontaneous speech, the use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation, the interpretation of pauses in spontaneous speaking, and the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech.


Fox Tree's work contributes both theory and data to many disciplines, such as computer technology and artificial intelligence (how machines can recognize and reproduce collateral signals), psychology (the role that collateral signals have in speech production and recognition), sociology (how various groups use collateral signals), linguistics (the structure and the function of collateral signals), and communication/media studies (the effect that the frequent editing of collateral signals from spontaneous radio talk might have on meaning).


Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American Psycholinguist, Cognitive Scientist, and Psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the Principal Investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in Psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.


At the University of Alaska, Marian studied with Alaska's only cognitive psychologist at the time, Dr. Robert Madigan. At Emory, she was influenced by psychologists Philippe Rochat, Robyn Fivush, Eugene Winograd, Carolyn Mervis, John Pani, Michael Tomasello, Frans de Waal, and others. At Cornell, Marian was trained in eye-tracking by Michael Spivey, and in functional neuroimaging by Joy Hirsch, and was also influenced by Stephen Ceci, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Frank Keil, Joan Sereno, Daryl Bem, David Field, Carol Krumhansl, Thomas Gilovich, Shimon Edelman, James Cutting, and others.


Viorica Marian's research areas include Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Cognitive Science, Language and Cognition, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Bilingualism, and Multilingualism. She studies language processing, language and memory, language learning, language development, audio-visual integration, bilingual assessment, neurolinguistics of bilingualism, and computational models of bilingual language processing. Marian uses multiple approaches, including eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, mouse-tracking, computational modeling, and cognitive tests to understand how bilingualism and multilingualism change human function. Funding for her research comes from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and Northwestern University.


Parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals.


Marian's research has contributed to demonstrating a bilingual advantage in novel language learning. She and her students showed that bilinguals outperform monolinguals at learning a new language and used eye tracking and mouse tracking trajectories to demonstrate that bilinguals were better at controlling interference from the native language when using a newly learned language.


Marian's neuroimaging work examined overlap and differences in language networks across bilinguals’ two languages during language processing. She showed that bilingual experience changes not only linguistic and cognitive processing, but also neural organization and function.


Marian's lab has developed various research tools that are widely used by the language science community and are freely available from Marian's Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group website. The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire has been translated into over thirty languages and used in hundreds of studies worldwide; the Cross-Linguistics Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities database is currently the most extensive multilingual database of lexical neighborhoods available online; and the Bilingual Language Interaction Network for Comprehension of Speech provides the only existing dynamic self-organizing computational model of bilingual spoken language comprehension.


Marian teaches courses on linguistic and cultural diversity at Northwestern University and is an advocate for increased representation of individuals from linguistically, culturally, racially, and otherwise diverse backgrounds in science and education.


Marian is a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society, a recipient of the Clarence Simon Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring, the University of Alaska Alumni of Achievement Award, and the Editor’s Award for best paper from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.


Marian graduated college and started her PhD studies at the age of 19.


In 2008, she was featured in the Get-Out-the-Vote episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show.


In 2018, one of her tweets went viral and was viewed by over thirty million people across platforms: "I once taught an 8 am college class. So many grandparents died that semester. I then moved my class to 3 pm. No more deaths. And that, my friends, is how I save lives."


In 1996, she worked as interpreter and envoy during the Olympic Games in Atlanta.


George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.


Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the now defunct Rockridge Institute. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundación IDEAS (IDEAS Foundation), Spain's Socialist Party's think tank.


The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known as embodied mind. Lakoff served as a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1972 until his retirement in 2016.


Although some of Lakoff's research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is best known for his reappraisal of the role that metaphors play in the socio-political life of humans.


Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as a purely linguistic construction. The essential thrust of Lakoff's work has been the argument that metaphors are a primarily conceptual construction and are in fact central to the development of thought.


According to Lakoff, non-metaphorical thought is possible only when we talk about purely physical reality; the greater the level of abstraction, the more layers of metaphor are required to express it. People do not notice these metaphors for various reasons, including that some metaphors become 'dead' in the sense that we no longer recognize their origin. Another reason is that we just don't "see" what is "going on".


In intellectual debate, for instance, the underlying metaphor according to Lakoff is usually that argument is war (later revised to "argument is struggle"):


According to Lakoff, the development of thought has been the process of developing better metaphors. He also points out that the application of one domain of knowledge to another offers new perceptions and understandings.


Lakoff began his career as a student and later a teacher of the theory of transformational grammar developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky. In the late 1960s, however, he joined with others to promote generative semantics as an alternative to Chomsky's generative syntax. In an interview he stated:


Lakoff's claim that Chomsky asserts independence between syntax and semantics has been rejected by Chomsky, who holds the following view:


In response to Lakoff's making the above claim about Chomsky's view, Chomsky claimed that Lakoff has "virtually no comprehension of the work he is discussing". Despite Lakoff's mischaracterization of Chomsky's view on the matter, their linguistic positions diverge significantly; this rift between Generative Grammar and Generative Semantics led to fierce, acrimonious debates among linguists that have come to be known as the "linguistics wars".


When Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore, embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying "implementation details".


Lakoff offers three complementary but distinct sorts of arguments in favor of embodiment. First, using evidence from neuroscience and neural network simulations, he argues that certain concepts, such as color and spatial relation concepts (e.g. "red" or "over"; see also "qualia"), can be almost entirely understood through the examination of how processes of perception or motor control work.


Second, based on cognitive linguistics' analysis of figurative language, he argues that the reasoning we use for such abstract topics as warfare, economics, or morality is somehow rooted in the reasoning we use for such mundane topics as spatial relationships. (See conceptual metaphor.)


Finally, based on research in cognitive psychology and some investigations in the philosophy of language, he argues that very few of the categories used by humans are actually of the black-and-white type amenable to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On the contrary, most categories are supposed to be much more complicated and messy, just like our bodies.


"We are neural beings", Lakoff states, "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit."


Lakoff believes consciousness to be neurally embodied, however he explicitly states that the mechanism is not just neural computation alone. Using the concept of disembodiment, Lakoff supports the physicalist approach to the afterlife. If the soul can not have any of the properties of the body, then Lakoff claims it can not feel, perceive, think, be conscious, or have a personality. If this is true, then Lakoff asks what would be the point of the afterlife?


Many scientists share the belief that there are problems with falsifiability and foundation ontologies purporting to describe "what exists", to a sufficient degree of rigor to establish a reasonable method of empirical validation. But Lakoff takes this further to explain why hypotheses built with complex metaphors cannot be directly falsified. Instead, they can only be rejected based on interpretations of empirical observations guided by other complex metaphors. This is what he means when he says that falsifiability itself can never be established by any reasonable method that would not rely ultimately on a shared human bias. The bias he's referring to is the set of conceptual metaphors governing how people interpret observations.


Mathematical reviewers have generally been critical of Lakoff and Núñez, pointing to mathematical errors. Lakoff claims that these errors have been corrected in subsequent printings. Although their book attempts a refutation of some of the most widely accepted viewpoints in philosophy of mathematics and advice for how the field might proceed, they have yet to elicit much of a reaction from philosophers of mathematics themselves. The small community specializing in the psychology of mathematical learning, to which Núñez belongs, is paying attention.


Lakoff has publicly expressed some of his political views and his ideas about the conceptual structures that he views as central to understanding the political process. He almost always discusses the former in terms of the latter.


"Moral Politics" (1996, revisited in 2002) gives book-length consideration to the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff sees as present in the minds of American "liberals" and "conservatives". The book is a blend of cognitive science and political analysis. Lakoff makes an attempt to keep his personal views confined to the last third of the book, where he explicitly argues for the superiority of the liberal vision.


Between 2003 and 2008, Lakoff was involved with a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute, an involvement that follows in part from his recommendations in "Moral Politics". Among his activities with the Institute, which concentrates in part on helping liberal candidates and politicians with re-framing political metaphors, Lakoff has given numerous public lectures and written accounts of his message from "Moral Politics." In 2008, Lakoff joined Fenton Communications, the nation's largest public interest communications firm, as a Senior Consultant.


One of his political works, "Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate", self-labeled as "the Essential Guide for Progressives", was published in September 2004 and features a foreword by former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.


Paul van Geert is a Dutch linguist. He is currently a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is renowned for his work on developmental psychology and the application of dynamical systems theory in social science.


He is one of the members of the "Dutch School of Dynamic Systems" who proposed to apply time series data to study second language development along with de Bot, Lowie, and Verspoor.


Between 1967 and 1971 van Geert studied psychology and educational sciences at the Ghent University, Belgium. In 1975 he was awarded with a PhD in Developmental psychology. In 1976 he became a lecturer at the University of Groningen.


In 1976 he was appointed as a Lecturer and in 1978 he became a Senior Lecturer at the University of Groningen. Between 1978 and 1979 he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 1985 he was appointed as a Professor of Psychology and a Chair of Developmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. Between 1990 and 1992 he was the Dean of the Department of Psychology at the University of Groningen. Between 1992 and 1993 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in California.


Paul van Geert was the first to apply the logistic function to model first language development in 1991.


He developed a Microsoft Excel VBA code to model developmental data in 2003.


In 2002 he created new techniques and methods to measure the degree of variability by applying min-max graphs, resampling techniques, and Monte Carlo method along with Marijn van Dijk.


He supervised his future colleague at the University of Groningen, Marijn van Dijk, who obtained her PhD Degree in 2004. The title of her Phd Thesis was "Child Language Cuts Capers: Variability and Ambiguity in Early Child Development".


Michael Tanenhaus is an American psycholinguist, author, and lecturer. He is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. From 1996–2000 and 2003–2009 he served as Director of the Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester.


Tanenhaus’s research focuses on processes which underlie real-time spoken language and reading comprehension. He is also interested in the relationship between linguistic and various non-linguistic contexts.


Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension


In this study Tanenhaus looked at visual context and its effects on language comprehension. Tanenhaus wanted to investigate whether comprehension of language is informationally encapsulated or modular, as thought by many theorists and researchers including Jerry Fodor.


When the subject is presented with the first scene, in Figure A, they become confused. We see this by the many eye movements of the subjects who are not quite sure which items to manipulate. In the second scene the subject clearly understands the sentence more easily. In this scene the pencil is replaced by another apple on a napkin. This disambiguates the phrase because the subject understands that on the towel is modifying the apple, and is not referring to a destination.


The results strongly support the hypothesis that language comprehension, specifically at the syntactic level, is informed by visual information. This is a clearly non-modular result. These results also seem to support Just and Carpenter’s “Strong Eye Mind Hypothesis” that rapid mental processes which make up the comprehension of spoken language can be observed by eye movements.


Actions and Affordances in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution


The results suggest that referents were assessed in terms of how compatible they were with the instructions. This supports the hypothesis that non-linguistic domain restrictions can influence syntactic ambiguity resolution. The participants applied situation specific, contextual properties to the way in which they followed these instructions. The results show that language is processed incrementally, as an utterance unfolds, and that visual information and context play a role in the processing.


Tanenhaus has collaborated with others to edit two books. His first book “Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspective from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence” was published in 1988. This book contains eighteen original papers which look at the concept of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution. His most recent work “Approaches to Studying World- Situated Language Use: Bridging the Language and Product and Language as Action Traditions” was published in 2004. This book was published to show the importance of looking at both social and cognitive aspects when studying language processing. The book is made up of papers and reports of relevant experimental findings.


Many organizations and academic institutions, including the International Association for the Study of Child Language, National Research Council, and Brain Map Advisory Board, have honored MacWhinney for the quality of his research and scholarship. MacWhinney's professional service activities include active participation on the governing boards of several professional associations, academic journals, and grant agencies, and he has also served as a university program reviewer and as an ad hoc reviewer for several prestigious journals including "Science", "Nature", and "Psychological Bulletin and Review". He holds membership and fellowship in many prominent professional societies, including the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Society, Association for Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science Society, International Association for Child Language, Linguistic Society of America, Psychonomic Society, and Society for Research in Child Development.


MacWhinney is married and has two sons. He is fluent in six languages, including English, Hungarian, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and has presented his research in many countries around the world.


MacWhinney has developed a model of first and second language acquisition as well as language processing called the competition model. This model views language acquisition as an emergentist phenomenon that results from competition between lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic patterns, accounting for language processing on the synchronic, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic time scales. Empirical studies based on the competition model have shown that learning of language forms is based on the accurate recording of many exposures to words and patterns in different contexts. The predictions of the competition model have been supported by research in the realms of psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive development.


MacWhinney developed and directs the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora, two widely used databases for language acquisition research. He manages FluencyBank, a TalkBank project, together with Nan Bernstein Ratner.


The CHILDES system provides tools for studying conversational interactions. These tools include a database of transcripts, programs for computer analysis of transcripts, methods for linguistic coding, and systems for linking transcripts to digitized audio and video. The CHILDES database includes a rich variety of computerized transcripts from language learners. Most of these transcripts record spontaneous conversational interactions. There are also transcripts from bilingual children, older school-aged children, adult second-language learners, children with various types of language disabilities, and aphasics who are trying to recover from language loss. The transcripts include data on the learning of 26 different languages.


TalkBank contains CHILDES as well as additional linguistic data from older children and adults, including people with aphasia, second language learners, adult conversation, and classroom language learning data.


Support for the construction and maintenance of the databases comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH-NICHD) and the National Science Foundation Linguistics Program.


James Earle Deese (1921–1999) was an American psychologist. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1970 after having taught for many years (since 1950) at Johns Hopkins University. During his tenure at Johns Hopkins, Deese became Chairman of the Psychology Department and also served a term as Chairman of the American Psychological Association. Deese later became the Chairman of the Psychology Department at University of Virginia until his partial retirement, later remaining as professor emeritus. He received the Hugh Scott Hamilton award for his distinguished service.


Deese, a 1/2 Lumbee Indian was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on December 14, 1921. James Deese's father was Thomas D. Deese, a full-blooded Lumbee Indian whose parents, James M. Deese and Sarah Jane Chavis were from Burnt Swamp N.C. Deese's mother, Serene Jane Johnson was from Wisconsin. Deese was first cousin of American aerospace engineer and scientist James Henry Deese. Deese was raised in Southern California and during his early college years, he worked as a page at the early television studios. Deese retained a love for Southern California—its geography, its culture and history his entire life. Deese married Ellin Ruth Krauss in 1948.


Deese died at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1999, just three months before his wife also died. The couple had just celebrated their 50th anniversary on Christmas Eve of 1998.


Deese attended Chapman College in Orange, CA, where he earned his B.A. degree in psychology. Deese later earned his doctorate at Indiana University. Later in his career, Deese was honored with an honorary Doctorate from Chapman. While attending Indiana University, Deese became fascinated by animal behavior and how it related to human behavior, particularly in the area of communication. He studied under B.F. Skinner and W. N. Kellogg. Later, Deese moved more into the area of Psycho-Linguistics and worked with other early pioneers in that field such as Noam Chomsky. Deese became mentor to many doctoral students who went on further to develop the field of learning, cognition, and language, such as Leonard M. Horowitz, William P. Banks, Allyssa McCabe, and Herbert H. Clark.


Deese was revered by his students and highly respected by his peers. He has authored or partnered in 14 books addressing various aspects of the Psychology of Learning (several books authored by Deese or co-authored with Stewart Hulse) and later, Psycholinguistics. A popular book from 1965 was called The Structure of Associations in Language and Thought (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). Later, having branched out more into the area of Social Psychology, Deese wrote, American Freedom and the Social Sciences (Columbia University Press, 1985). Deese and his wife Ellin Krauss Deese co-authored the popular student manual, How to Study, which remains in print and regularly used by Freshman College Students into the 21st Century.


Nick C. Ellis is a Welsh psycholinguist. He is currently a Professor of Psychology and a Research Scientist at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan. His research focuses on applied linguistics more broadly with a special focus on second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, emergentism, complex dynamic systems approaches to language, reading and spelling acquisition in different languages, computational modeling and cognitive linguistics.


Ellis received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology at the University of Oxford in 1974. He obtained a PhD degree in Psychology at the University College of North Wales in 1978.


Between 1976 and 1991 he was a part-time Tutor at the Open University and between 1978 and 1990 a lecturer in Psychology at the University College of North Wales. In 1990 he became a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University College of North Wales until 1994. In 1992 he was a Visiting Professor at the Temple University of Japan. Between 1994 and 1998 he was a Reader in Psychology at the University College of North Wales and between 1998 and 2004 a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wales Bangor.


He was the Editor, Language Learning between 1998 and 2002 and since 2006 he has been a General Editor of Language Learning.


Ellis conducts research on several topics relating to second language acquisition, including the connection between explicit and implicit learning, reading, vocabulary and phraseology, applications of psychological theory in language testing and instruction, and the role of the brain. Ellis currently serves as General Editor of the journal "Language Learning".


Ellis has published in prestigious journals such as Language Learning, Applied Linguistics, The Modern Language Journal, Memory and Cognition, , and Studies in Second Language Acquisition.


Ellis has published articles with Diane Larsen-Freeman, Alister Cumming, Lourdes Ortega and Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig.


Most cited articles based on Google Scholar (in chronological order):


Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of "You Just Don't Understand", she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.


Tannen is the author of thirteen books, including "That's Not What I Meant!" and "You Just Don't Understand", the latter of which spent four years on the "New York Times" Best Sellers List, including eight consecutive months at number one. She is also a frequent contributor to "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "The Atlantic", and "TIME" magazine, among other publications.


Tannen graduated from Hunter College High School and completed her undergraduate studies at Harpur College (now part of Binghamton University) with a B.A. in English Literature. Tannen went on to earn a Masters in English Literature at Wayne State University. Later, she continued her academic studies at UC Berkeley, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics.


Tannen has written and edited numerous academic publications on linguistics, discourse analysis, and interpersonal communication. She has published many books including "Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends"; "Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse"; "Gender and Discourse"; and "The Handbook of Discourse Analysis". Her major theoretical contribution, presented in "Talking Voices", is a poetics of conversation. She demonstrates that everyday conversation is made up of linguistic features that are traditionally regarded as literary, such as repetition, dialogue, and imagery.


Tannen has also written nine general-audience books on interpersonal communication and public discourse as well as a memoir. She became well known in the United States after her book "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation" was published in 1990. It remained on the "New York Times" Best Seller list for nearly four years, and was subsequently translated into 30 other languages. She has written several other general-audience books and mainstream articles between 1983 and 2017.


Two of her other books, "You Were Always Mom's Favorite!: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives" and "You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation" were also "New York Times" best-sellers. "The Argument Culture" received the Common Ground Book Award, and "I Only Say This Because I Love You" received a Books for a Better Life Award.


Deborah Tannen's main research has focused on the expression of interpersonal relationships in conversational interaction. Tannen has explored conversational interaction and style differences at a number of different levels and as related to different situations, including differences in conversational style as connected to the gender and cultural background, as well as speech that is tailored for specific listeners based on the speaker's social role. In particular, Tannen has done extensive gender-linked research and writing that focused on miscommunications between men and women; however, some linguists have argued against Tannen's claims from a feminist standpoint.


Tannen's research began when she analyzed her friends while working on her Ph.D. Since then, she has collected several naturally occurring conversations on tape and conducted interviews as forms of data for later analysis. She has also compiled and analyzed information from other researchers in order to draw out notable trends in various types of conversations, sometimes borrowing and expanding on their terminology to emphasize new points of interest.


Interplay of connection maneuvers and power maneuvers in family conversations.


Tannen once described family discourse as "a prime example…of the nexus of needs for both power and connection in human relationships. She coined the term "connection maneuvers" to describe interactions that take place in the closeness dimension of the traditional model of power and connection; this term is meant to contrast with the "control maneuvers," which, according to psychologists Millar, Rogers, and Bavelas, take place in the power dimension of the same model.


Tannen challenged the conventional view of power (hierarchy) and connection (solidarity) as "unidimensional and mutually exclusive" and offered her own kind of model for mapping the interplay of these two aspects of communication, which takes the form of a two-dimensional grid (Figure 1).


Tannen also highlights ventriloquizing – which she explains as a "phenomenon by which a person speaks not only for another but also as another" – as a strategy for integrating connection maneuvers into other types of interactions. As an example of this, she cites an exchange recorded by her research team in which a mother attempts to convince her son to pick up his toys by ventriloquizing the family's dogs: "[extra high pitch] We're naughty, but we're not as naughty as Jared".


Deborah Tannen describes the notion of conversational style as "a semantic process" and "the way meaning is encoded in and derived from speech". She cites the work of R. Lakoff and J. Gumperz as the inspiration behind her thinking. According to Tannen, some features of conversational style are topic (which includes type of topics and how transitions occur), genre (storytelling style), pace (which includes rate of speech, occurrence or lack of pauses, and overlap), and expressive paralinguistics (pitch/amplitude shifts and other changes in voice quality).


Tannen has expressed her stance against taking indirect speech as a sign of weakness or as a lack of confidence; she also set out to debunk the idea that American women are generally more indirect than men. She reached this conclusion by looking through transcripts of conversations and interviews, as well as through correspondence with her readers. One example she uses against the second idea comes from a letter from a reader, who mentioned how his Navy superior trained his unit to respond to the indirect request "It's hot in this room" as a direct request to open the window. A different letter mentions the tendency of men to be more indirect when it comes to expressing feelings than women.


Tannen also mentions exchanges where both participants are male, but the two participants are not of equal social status. As a specific example, she mentions a "black box" recording between a plane captain and a co-pilot in which the captain's failure to understand the co-pilot's indirect conversational style (which was likely a result of his relatively inferior rank) caused a crash.


During a trip to Greece, Tannen observed that comments she had made to her hosts about foods she had not seen yet in Greece (specifically, scrambled eggs and grapes) had been interpreted as indirect requests for the foods. This was surprising to her, since she had just made the comments in the spirit of small talk. Tannen observed this same tendency of Greeks and Greek-Americans to interpret statements indirectly in a study that involved interpreting the following conversation between a husband and a wife:


The participants – some Greeks, some Greek-Americans, and some non-Greek Americans – had to choose between the following two paraphrases of the second line in the exchange:


Tannen's findings showed that 48% of Greeks chose the first (more indirect) paraphrase, while only 32% of non-Greek Americans chose the same one, with the Greek-Americans scoring closer to the Greeks than the other Americans at 43%. These percentages, combined with other elements of the study, suggest that the degree of indirectness a listener generally expects may be affected through sociocultural norms.


Tannen analyzed the agonistic framing of academic texts, which are characterized by their "ritualized adversativeness". She argued that expectations for academic papers in the US place the highest importance on presenting the weaknesses of an existing, opposing, argument as a basis for bolstering the author's replacement argument. According to her, agonism limits the depth of arguments and learning, since authors who follow the convention pass up opportunities to acknowledge strengths in the texts they are arguing against; in addition, this places the newest, attention-grabbing works in prime positions to be torn apart.


Gary F. Marcus (born February 8, 1970) is an American scientist, author, and entrepreneur who is a professor in the Department of Psychology at New York University and was founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.


His books include "Guitar Zero", which appeared on the "New York Times" Best Seller list and "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind", a "New York Times" Editors' Choice. With Jeremy Freeman, he was co-editor of "The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists".


Marcus attended Hampshire College, where he designed his own major, cognitive science, working on human reasoning. He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his advisor was the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. He received his Ph.D. in 1993.


His books include "The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought," "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind", a New York Times Editors' Choice, and "Guitar Zero", which appeared on the New York Times Bestseller list. He edited "The Norton Psychology Reader," and was co-editor with Jeremy Freeman of The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientist, which included Nobel Laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.


In 2014, he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company. It was acquired by Uber in 2016.


Marcus' research and theories focus on the intersection between biology and psychology. How do the brain and mind relate when it comes to understanding language? Marcus takes an innatism stance on this debate and through his psychological evidence has given many answers to open questions such as, "If there is something built in at birth, how does it get there?" He challenged connectionist theories which posit that the mind is only made up of randomly arranged neurons. Marcus argues that neurons can be put together to build circuits in order to do things such as process rules or process structured representations.


Marcus’ early work focused on why children produce overregularizations, such as "breaked" and "goed", as a test case for the nature of mental rules.


In his first book, "The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science", Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation.


In his second book, published in 2004, "The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought", Marcus goes into a more detailed explanation of the genetic support systems of human thought. He explains how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they may cause for the future of genetic engineering.


In 2005, Marcus was editor of "The Norton Psychology Reader", including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind.


Marcus' 2012 book, "Guitar Zero", explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult.


Frieda Goldman-Eisler (born Frymet Leib, also known as Frieda Eisler) (1907–1982) was a psychologist and pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics. She is known for her research on speech disfluencies; a volume dedicated in her honor calls her "the modern pioneer of the science of pausology".


Goldman-Eisler was born in Tarnów, Galicia. She was German-Jewish, and a communist. After her marriage to the writer Willy Goldman in 1934, due to the growing threat of Nazi Germany, she moved from Austria to London, where she lived the rest of her life. In the early 1950s, she began pausological experiments, and continued doing research in this area for the rest of her career. She cancelled presenting at a workshop in Kassel in 1978 due to illness, and died in 1982.


She earned a PhD in German studies from the University of Vienna in 1931, while also studying psychology under Karl Bühler.


During World War II, Goldman-Eisler briefly worked for Mass Observation.


She was a member of the Medical Research Council’s scientific staff at the Maudsley Hospital.


Goldman-Eisler refers to being offered and accepting a "home" in the Department of Phonetics at University College London in 1955, though it is not clear what her position was at that time. In 1965 Goldman-Eisler was appointed a Reader at University College London, where she continued her career. She became the UK's first Professor of Psycholinguistics in 1970. She was eventually given the titles Emeritus Professor of Psycholinguistics and honorary Research Fellow at University College London.


Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is a psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions.


Gleason created the Wug Test, in which a child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them, and used it to demonstrate that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology. Menn and Ratner have written that "Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research", the "wug" (one of the imaginary creatures Gleason drew in creating the Wug Test) being "so basic to what [psycholinguists] know and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins."


Jean Berko was born to Hungarian immigrant parents in Cleveland, Ohio. As a child, she has said, "I was under the impression that whatever you said meant something in some language." Her older brother's cerebral palsy made it difficult for most people to understand his speech, but


After graduating from Cleveland Heights High School in 1949, Gleason earned a B.A. in history and literature from Radcliffe College, then an M.A. in linguistics, and a combined Ph.D. in linguistics and psychology, at Harvard; from 1958 to 1959 she was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. In graduate school she was advised by Roger Brown, a founder in the field of child language acquisition. In January 1959 she married Harvard mathematician Andrew Gleason; they had three daughters.


Most of Gleason's professional career has been at Boston University, where she served as Psychology Department chair and director of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics; Lise Menn and Harold Goodglass were among her collaborators there.


She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Stanford University, and at the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Although officially retired and no longer teaching, she to be involved in research.


Gleason is the author or co-author of some 125 papers on language development in children, language attrition, aphasia, and gender and cultural aspects of language acquisition and use; and is editor/coeditor of two widely used textbooks, "The Development of Language" (first edition 1985, ninth edition 2016) and "Psycholinguistics" (1993). She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Psychological Association, and was president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language from 1990 to 1993, and of the Gypsy Lore Society 1996 to 1999.


She has also served on the editorial boards of numerous academic and professional journals and was associate editor of "Language" from 1997 to 1999.


Gleason was profiled in "Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Forty Women Whose Ideas Shape the Modern World" (1996).


A festschrift in her honor, "Methods for Studying Language Production", was published in 2000.


In 2016 she received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Washington & Jefferson College for her work as "a pioneer in the field of psycholinguistics",


and in 2017 the Roger Brown Award (recognizing "outstanding contribution to the international child language community") from the International Association for the Study of Child Language.


Since 2007 she has delivered the "Welcome, welcome" and "Goodbye, goodbye" speeches at the annual Ig Nobel Awards ceremonies.


Children's learning of English morphologythe Wug Test.


Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children's acquisition of morphological rulesfor example, the "default" rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an , or sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., " "


A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity,


with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:


Each "target" word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before.


A child who knows that the plural of "witch" is "witches" may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of "wug" (which the child presumably has never heard) is "wugs" (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since "wug" ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.


The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive "-er" (e.g. "A man who 'zibs' is a ________?"),


and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. "Why is a birthday called a birthday?"


Gleason's major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endingsto produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other formsto nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them.


However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense wordsimplying that children start by memorizing singularplural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.


The Wug Test's fundamental role in the development of psycholinguistics as a discipline has been mapped by studying references to Gleason's work in "seminal journals" in the field, many of which carried articles referencing it in their founding issues:


According to Ratner and Menn, "As an enduring concept in psycholinguistic research, the wug has become generic, like ["kleenex"] or ["xerox"], a concept so basic to what we know and do that increasingly it appears in the popular literature without attribution to its origins... Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research."


It has been proposed that Wug Testlike instruments be used in the diagnosis of learning disabilities, but in practice success in this direction has been limited.


Another of Gleason's early papers "Fathers and Other Strangers: Men's Speech to Young Children" (1975) explored differences between mothers' and fathers' spoken interaction with their children, primarily using data produced by two female and two male daycare teachers at a large university, and by three mothers and three fathers, mostly during family dinners.


Among other conclusions, this study found that:


In contrast, both male and female daycare teachers used language that was similar both quantitatively and qualitatively, with both focusing on a dialogue based in the present and on the immediate needs of the children.


Differences included that the male teachers tended to address the children by name more often than did the female teachers and that the male teachers issued more imperatives than did the female teachers.


Gleason's research eventually extended into the study of children's acquisition of routinesthat is, standardized chunks of language (or language-plus-gesture) that the culture expects of everyone, such as greetings, farewells, and expressions of thanks. Gleason was one of the first to study the acquisition of politeness, examining English-speaking children's use of routines such as "thank you", "please", and "I'm sorry". Researchers in this area have since studied both verbal and non-verbal routinization, and the development of politeness routines in a variety of cultures and languages.


Gleason's 1976 paper with Weintraub, "The Acquisition of Routines in Child Language",


analyzed performance on the culturally standardized Halloween Trick-or-treat routine in 115 children aged two to sixteen years.


Alterations in ability and the function of parental contribution were analyzed concerning cognitive and social components.


They discovered that in the acquisition of routines


(in contrast to the acquisition of much of the rest of language) parents' major interest is for their children to achieve accurate performance, with little stress on children's understanding of what they are expected to say.


Gleason and Weintraub found that the parents rarely if ever explain to children the meaning of such routines as "Bye-bye" or "Trick or treat"there was no concern with the child's thoughts or intentions as long as the routine was performed as expected at the appropriate times.


Thus, parents' role in the acquisition of routines is very different from their role in most of the rest of language development.


Gleason and Greif analyzed children's acquisition of three ubiquitous routines in "Hi, Thanks, and Goodbye: More Routine Information" (1980).


The subjects were eleven boys and eleven girls and their parents.


At the conclusion of a parent-child play period, an assistant entered the playroom bearing a present, in order to evoke routines from the children.


The study's purpose was to analyze how parents communicate these routines to their children; major questions proposed included whether or not some routines were more obligatory than others, and whether mothers and fathers provide different models of politeness behavior for their children. The results suggest that children's "spontaneous" construction of the three routines was low, with "Thank you" the rarest.


However, parents strongly encouraged their children to generate routines and, typically, the children complied.


In addition, parents were more likely to prompt the "Thank you" routine than the "Hi" and "Goodbye" routines.


Parents practiced the routines themselves, though mothers were more likely than fathers to speak "Thank you" and "Goodbye" to the assistant.


Gleason and Ely made an in-depth study of apologies in children's dialogue in their paper, "I'm sorry I said that: apologies in young children's discourse" (2006),


which analyzed apology term usage (in parent–child dialogue) of five boys and four girls, aged one to six years.


Their research suggested that apologies appear later in children than do other politeness routines, and that as the children grew older they developed a progressively refined expertise with this routine, gradually requiring fewer direct prompts and producing more elaborate apologies instead of just saying "I'm sorry".


They also found that parents and other adults play an important role in fostering growth of apologetic abilities through the setting of examples, by encouraging the children to apologize, and by speaking specifically and purposefully to them about apologies.


With Ely, MacGibbon, and Zaretsky, Gleason also explored the discourse of middle-class parents and their children at the dinner table in, "Attention to Language: Lessons Learned at the Dinner Table" (2001),


finding that the everyday language of these parents involves a remarkable portion of attention to language.


The dinner-table conversation of twentytwo middle-class families, each with a child between two years and five and onehalf years old, were recorded,


then analyzed for the existence and activity of languagecentered terms, including words like "ask", "tell", "say", and "speak".


Mothers spoke more about language than did fathers, and fathers spoke more about it than did children:


roughly eleven percent of mothers' sentences contained one or more languagecentered terms, and the corresponding proportions for fathers and children were seven percent and four percent.


Uses that were metalinguistic (for example, accounting for and remarking on speech) exceeded uses that were pragmatic (for example, managing how and when speech appears).


The more that mothers used language-centered terms, the more the children did as wellbut this was not true for fathers.


The results imply that in routine family conversations, parents supply children with considerable information on the way language is used to communicate information.


Gleason has carried out significant research involving the learning and maintenance of second languages by sequential bilinguals. She has studied the acquisition of a second language while retaining the first (additive bilingualism),


examining discourse behaviors of parents who follow the one person-one language principle by using different languages with their child


She has also studied language attrition, the loss of a known language through lack of use,


and suggests that the order in which a language is learned is less important in predicting its retention than the thoroughness with which it is learned.


An unusual study carried out with Harris and Aycicegi, "Taboo words and reprimands elicit greater autonomic reactivity in a first language than in a second language" (2003), investigated the involuntary psychophysiological reactions of bilingual speakers to taboo words.


Thirtytwo TurkishEnglish bilinguals judged an array of words and phrases for "pleasantness" in Turkish (their first language), and in English (their second), while their skin conductance was monitored via fingertip electrodes.


Participants manifested greater autonomic arousal in response to taboo words and childhood reprimands in their first language than to those in their second language, confirming the commonplace claim that speakers of two languages are less uncomfortable speaking taboo words and phrases in their second language than in their native language.


In "Maintaining Foreign Language Skills", which discusses "the personal, cultural, and instructional factors involved with keeping up foreign language skills" (1988), Gleason and Pan consider both humans' remarkable capacity for language acquisition and their ability to lose it.


In addition to brain damage, strokes, trauma and other physical causes of language loss, individuals may lose language skills due to the absence of a linguistically supportive social environment in which to maintain such skills, such as when a speaker of a given language relocates to a place where that language is not spoken. Culture also factors in. More often than not, individuals speaking two or more languages come into contact with one another, for reasons ranging from emigration and interrelationships to alterations in political borders. The result of such contact is typically that the community of speakers undergoes a progressive shift in usage from one language to the other.


Gleason has also done significant research on aphasia,


a condition (usually due to brain injury) in which a person's ability to understand and/or to produce language, including their ability to find the words they need and their use of basic morphology and syntax, is impaired in a variety of ways.


In "Some Linguistic Structures in the Speech of a Broca's Aphasic" (1972) Gleason, Goodglass, Bernholtz, and Hyde discuss an experiment carried out with a man who, after a stroke, had been left with Broca's aphasia/agrammatism,


a specific form of aphasia typically impairing the production of morphology and syntax more than it impairs comprehension.


This experiment employed the Story Completion Test (often used to probe a subject's capacity for producing various common grammatical forms)


as well as free conversation and repetition to elicit speech from the subject;


this speech was then analyzed to evaluate how well he used inflectional morphology


(e.g. plural and past tense word endings) and basic syntax (the formation of, for example, simple declarative, imperative, and interrogative sentences).


To do this the investigator, in a few sentences, began a simple story about a pictured situation, then asked the subject to conclude the narrative.


The stories were so designed that a nonlanguageimpaired person's response would typically employ particular structures, for example, the plural of a noun, the past tense of a verb, or a simple but complete yesno question (e.g. "Did you take my shoes?").


Gleason, Goodglass, Bernholtz, and Hyde concluded that the transition from verb to object was easier for this subject than was the transition from subject to verb and that auxiliary verbs and verb inflections were the parts of speech most likely to be omitted by the subject. There was considerable variation among consecutive repeat trials of the same test item, although responses on successive attempts usually came closer to those a normal speaker would have produced. The study concluded that the subject's speech was not the product of a stable abnormal grammar, and could not be accounted for by assuming that he was simply omitting words to minimize his effort in producing themquestions


of significant theoretical controversy at the time.


Brian Lewis Butterworth FBA (born 3 January 1944) is emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. His research has ranged from speech errors and pauses, short-term memory deficits, dyslexia, reading both in alphabetic scripts and Chinese, and mathematics and dyscalculia. His book "The Mathematical Brain" has been translated into four languages. He was Editor-in-Chief of "Linguistics" (1978–1983) and a founding editor of the journals "Language and Cognitive Processes" and "Mathematical Cognition". He is a Fellow of the British Academy.


In 1984 he diagnosed President Ronald Reagan on the basis of speech errors in his presidential re-election speeches in an article in the Sunday Times as having Alzheimer's disease ten years before this was formally identified. He was a coauthor in 1971 of a pamphlet, "Marked for life", critical of university examinations.


He designed the world's largest mathematical experiment involving over 18,000 people at Explore-At-Bristol. In the serious game for elementary school children with dyscalculia, "Meister Cody", he lends his voice to Quoun, the Guardian of the Trees.


Published in the same year in the US as "What Counts" New York: Simon & Schuster.


Powell A. Butterworth B. (1971). "Marked for life: a criticism of assessment at universities". London, Anarchist Group


Butterworth B. (1980). "Language Production Volume 1: Speech and talk" Academic Pr


Butterworth B. (1983). "Language Production Volume 2: Development, Writing and Other Language Processes" Academic Pr


Butterworth B. Comrie B. Dahl O. (1984). "Explanations for Language" Universals Mouton De Gruyter


Butterworth, B. (2004). "Dyscalculia Guidance Helping Pupils with Specific Learning Difficulties in Maths". David Fulton


Judit Kormos () (born 1970) is a Hungarian-born British linguist. She is a professor and the Director of Studies for the MA TESOL Distance programme at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. She is renowned for her work on motivation in second language learning, and self-regulation in second language writing. Her current interest is in dyslexia in second language learning.


Along with Rosa Manchón she has been noted for her work on the cognitive dimension of the acquisition and use of second languages, with emphasis on the psycholinguistic dimension of textual production and along with Cumming, Hyland, Manchón, Matsuda, Ortega, Polio, Storch and Verspoor she has been considered as one of the most influential researchers on second language writing.


Kormos graduated at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary in 1994. Kormos gained her PhD at the Eötvös Loránd University in 1999. Her PhD was supervised by Zoltán Dörnyei. Kormos took up a lecturer position at the Lancaster University in 2008. and was promoted to a Readership in 2012. She chose to be called "Reader in Second Language Acquisition". On 8 January 2015, Kormos was awarded a personal chair. Her title became "Professor of Second Language Acquisition".


She is the coordinator of the Dyslexia For Teachers Of English Foreign Language Project, funded by the European Commission. Since 2011, she has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Second Language Writing. She has been an Editor of Special Thematic Issues and Associate Journal Editor of the Language Learning.


In 2012, Kormos was interviewed by the Hungarian television channel ATV on recent changes in foreign language teaching policies in Hungary. She emphasised the important role of teaching students to learn foreign languages independently and autonomously with the help of modern technological tools. On 21 May 2014, Pearson Education released a new video lecture series on dyslexia and foreign language learning on YouTube. Kormos features in the first video of the series and discusses the psychological effects of dyslexia on the processes of foreign language learning.


In 2014, Kormos together with a European team from five partner countries won the ELTons award of the British Council in the Excellence in Course Innovation category.


On 20 June 2014, she was cited in the Education webpage of the "Guardian" in a recent article on teaching languages to students with disabilities. She said that teaching methods and materials need to be adapted for dyslexic students, instead of taking them out of second language classes. Dyslexic students are able to acquire another language successfully and they have to be provided a chance. The teacher should be aware of the dyslexia and teach a bit differently. For example, teachers should include more visual materials, act things out and explain things slightly more explicitly than they would to other students. Some learners are more receptive to audio channels of learning, others to visual. Therefore using a combination of the two may be really effective.


Top 5 articles and chapters based on Google Scholar.


David Green is a professorial research fellow in the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual & Brain Sciences, an honorary senior research associate, an emeritus professor of psychology in the Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, and on the faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London. He has researched widely on subjects such as mental models, both construction and manipulation, the lexical organisation, and modelling control processes in speech production, language control particularly biliginual and the imaging of language and object recognition in the neurologically damaged. He is one of the four chief editors of the academic journal .


Lyn Frazier (born October 15, 1952, in Madison, Wisconsin) is an experimental linguist, focusing on psycholinguistic research of adult sentence comprehension.


Frazier received her PhD in 1978 from the University of Connecticut under the supervision of Janet Dean Fodor, on the subject of parsing strategies in syntax. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was named the first Distinguished Graduate Mentor at University of Massachusetts and received an award from the University of Massachusetts system for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity.


Frazier's work has examined how listeners approach the task of processing the incoming language stream. She has proposed and refined syntactic parsing models, including a two-tier parsing system, the garden path model, and the Active Filler Hypothesis. Her recent work has focused on how listeners parse ellipsis.


She is co-editor of the book series "Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics", published by Springer.


In linguistics, comparative illusions (CIs) or Escher sentences are certain comparative sentences which initially seem to be acceptable but upon closer reflection have no well-formed meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is "More people have been to Russia than I have". The effect has also been observed in other languages. Some studies have suggested that, at least in English, the effect is stronger for sentences whose predicate is repeatable. The effect has also been found to be stronger in some cases when there is a plural subject in the second clause.


Escher sentences are ungrammatical because a matrix clause subject like "more people" is making a comparison between two sets of individuals, but there is no such set of individuals in the second clause. For the sentence to be grammatical, the subject of the second clause must be a bare plural. Linguists have marked that it is "striking" that, despite the grammar of these sentences not possibly having a meaningful interpretation, people so often report that they sound acceptable, and that it is "remarkable" that people seldom notice any error.


Mario Montalbetti's 1984 Massachusetts Institute of Technology dissertation has been credited as being the first to note these sorts of sentences; in his prologue he gives acknowledgements to Hermann Schultze "for uttering the most amazing */? sentence I've ever heard: "More people have been to Berlin than I have"", although the dissertation itself does not discuss such sentences. Parallel examples with "Russia" instead of "Berlin" were briefly discussed in psycholinguistic work in the 1990s and 2000s by Thomas Bever and colleagues.


Geoffrey K. Pullum wrote about this phenomenon in a 2004 post on "Language Log" after Jim McCloskey brought it to his attention. In a post the following day, Mark Liberman gave the name "Escher sentences" to such sentences in reference to M. C. Escher's 1960 lithograph "Ascending and Descending". He wrote:


Although rare, actual attestations of this construction have appeared in natural speech. "Language Log" has noted examples such as:


Another attested example is the following tweet from Dan Rather:


Experiments on the acceptability of comparative illusion sentences has found results which are "highly variable both within and across studies". While the illusion of acceptability for comparative illusions has also been informally reported for speakers of Faroese, German, Icelandic, Polish, and Swedish, systematic investigation has mostly centered on English, although Aarhus University neurolinguist Ken Ramshøj Christensen has run several experiments on comparative illusions in Danish.


When Danish and Swedish speakers were asked what (1) means, their responses fell into one of the following categories:


Paraphrase (d) is in fact the only possible interpretation of (1); this is possible due to the lexical ambiguity of "have" between an auxiliary verb and a lexical verb just as the English "have"; however the majority of participants (da: 78.9%; sv: 56%) gave a paraphrase which does not follow from the grammar. Another study where Danish participants had to pick from a set of paraphrases, say it meant something else, or say it was meaningless found that people selected "It does not make sense" for comparative illusions 63% of the time and selected it meant something 37% of the time.


The first study examining what affects acceptability of these sentences was presented at the 2004 CUNY Conference on Human Sentencing Processing. Scott Fults and Collin Phillips found that Escher sentences with ellipsis (a) were found to be more acceptable than the same sentences without ellipsis (b).


Responses to this study noted that it only compared elided material to nothing, and that even in grammatical comparatives, ellipsis of repeated phrases is preferred. In order to control for the awkwardness of identical predicates, Alexis Wellwood and colleagues compared comparative illusions with ellipsis to those with a different predicate.


They found that both CI-type and control sentences were found to be slightly more acceptable with ellipsis, which led them to reject the hypothesis that ellipsis was responsible for the acceptability of CIs. Rather, it is possible people just prefer shorter sentences in general. Patrick Kelley's Michigan State University dissertation found similar results.


Alexis Wellwood and colleagues have found in experiments that the illusion of grammaticality is greater when the sentence's predicate is repeatable. For instance, (a) is experimentally found to be more acceptable than (b).


The comparative must be in the subject position for the illusion to work; sentences like (a) which also have verb phrase ellipsis are viewed as unacceptable without any illusion of acceptability:


A pilot study by Iria de Dios-Flores also found that repeatability of the predicate had an effect on the acceptability of CIs in English. However, Christensen's study on comparative illusions in Danish did not find a significant difference in acceptability for sentences with repeatable predicates (a) and those without (b).


The lexical ambiguity of the English quantifier "more" has led to a hypothesis where the acceptability of CIs is due to people reinterpreting a "comparative" "more" as an "additive" "more". As "fewer" does not have such an ambiguity, Wellwood and colleagues tested to see if there was any difference in acceptability judgements depending on whether the sentences used "fewer" or "more". In general, their study found significantly higher acceptability for sentences with "more" than with "fewer" but the difference did not disproportionately affect the comparative illusion sentences compared to the controls.


Christensen found no significant difference in acceptability for Danish CIs with ("more") compared to those with ("fewer").


De Dios-Flores examined if there was an effect depending on whether or not the "than"-clause subject could be a subset of the matrix subject as in (a) compared to those where it could not be due to a gender mismatch as in (b). No significant differences were found.


In a study of Danish speakers, CIs with prepositional sentential adverbials like "in the evening" were found to be less acceptable than those without.


Comparatives in Bulgarian can optionally have the degree operator (); sentences with this morpheme (a) are immediately found unacceptable but those without it (b) produce the same illusion of acceptability.


A neuroimaging study of Danish speakers found less activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus, left premotor cortex (BA 4, 6), and left posterior temporal cortex (BA 21, 22) when processing CIs like (a) than when processing grammatical clausal comparatives like (b). Christensen has suggested this shows CIs are easy to process but as they are nonsensical, processing is "shallow". Low LIFG activation levels also suggest that people do not perceive CIs as being semantically anomalous.


Townsend and Bever have posited that Escher sentences get perceived as acceptable because they are an apparent blend of two grammatical templates.


Wellwood and colleagues have noted in response that the possibility of each clause being grammatical in a different sentence (a, b) does not guarantee a blend (c) would be acceptable.


Wellwood and colleagues also interpret Townsend and Bever's theory as requiring a shared lexical element in each template. If this version is right, they predict (c) would be viewed as less acceptable due to the ungrammaticality of (b):


Wellwood and colleagues, based on their experimental results, have rejected Townsend and Bever's hypothesis and instead support their event comparison hypothesis, which states that comparative illusions are due to speakers reinterpreting these sentences as discussing a comparison of events.


The term "comparative illusion" has sometimes been used as an umbrella term which also encompasses "depth charge" sentences like "No head injury is too trivial to be ignored." This example, first discussed by Peter Cathcart Wason and Shuli Reich in 1979, is very often initially perceived as having the meaning "No head injury should be ignored—even if it's trivial", even though upon careful consideration the sentence actually says "All head injuries should be ignored—even trivial ones."


Phillips and colleagues have discussed other "grammatical illusions" with respect to attraction, case in German, binding, and negative polarity items; speakers initially find such sentences acceptable, but later realize they are ungrammatical.


The conversational model of psychotherapy was devised by the English psychiatrist Robert Hobson, and developed by the Australian psychiatrist Russell Meares. Hobson listened to recordings of his own psychotherapeutic practice with more disturbed clients, and became aware of the ways in which a patient's self—their unique sense of personal being—can come alive and develop, or be destroyed, in the flux of the conversation in the consulting room.


The conversational model views the aim of therapy as allowing the growth of the patient's self through encouraging a form of conversational relating called 'aloneness-togetherness'. This phrase is reminiscent of Winnicott's idea of the importance of being able to be 'alone in the presence of another'. The client comes to eventually feel recognised, accepted and understood as who they are; their sense of personal being, or self, is fostered; and they can start to drop the destructive defenses which disrupt their sense of personal being.


The development of the self implies a capacity to embody and span the dialectic of 'aloneness-togetherness'—rather than being disposed toward either schizoid isolation (aloneness) or merging identification with the other (togetherness). Although the therapy is described as psychodynamic, and is accordingly concerned to identify activity and personal meaning in the midst of apparent passivity, it relies more on careful empathic listening and the development of a common 'feeling language' than it does on psychoanalytic interpretation.


In its manualised form ('PIT'), the conversational model is presented as having seven interconnected components. These are:


The conversational model, which has been manualised as Psychodynamic-Interpersonal Therapy, has been subject to outcome research, and has demonstrated effectiveness in the treatment of depression, psychosomatic disorders, self-harm, and borderline personality disorder.


Language processing refers to the way humans use words to communicate ideas and feelings, and how such communications are processed and understood. Language processing is considered to be a uniquely human ability that is not produced with the same grammatical understanding or systematicity in even human's closest primate relatives.


The division of the two streams first occurs in the auditory nerve where the anterior branch enters the anterior cochlear nucleus in the brainstem which gives rise to the auditory ventral stream. The posterior branch enters the dorsal and posteroventral cochlear nucleus to give rise to the auditory dorsal stream.


Language processing can also occur in relation to signed languages or written content.


The auditory ventral stream (AVS) connects the auditory cortex with the middle temporal gyrus and temporal pole, which in turn connects with the inferior frontal gyrus. This pathway is responsible for sound recognition, and is accordingly known as the auditory 'what' pathway. The functions of the AVS include the following.


The auditory dorsal stream connects the auditory cortex with the parietal lobe, which in turn connects with inferior frontal gyrus. In both humans and non-human primates, the auditory dorsal stream is responsible for sound localization, and is accordingly known as the auditory 'where' pathway. In humans, this pathway (especially in the left hemisphere) is also responsible for speech production, speech repetition, lip-reading, and phonological working memory and long-term memory.


The auditory dorsal stream also has non-language related functions, such as sound localization and guidance of eye movements. Recent studies also indicate a role of the ADS in localization of family/tribe members, as a study that recorded from the cortex of an epileptic patient reported that the pSTG, but not aSTG, is selective for the presence of new speakers. An fMRI study of fetuses at their third trimester also demonstrated that area Spt is more selective to female speech than pure tones, and a sub-section of Spt is selective to the speech of their mother in contrast to unfamiliar female voices.


Neuroscientific research has provided a scientific understanding of how sign language is processed in the brain. There are over 135 discrete sign languages around the world- making use of different accents formed by separate areas of a country.


By resorting to lesion analyses and neuroimaging, neuroscientists have discovered that whether it be spoken or sign language, human brains process language in general, in a similar manner regarding which area of the brain is being used. Lesion analyses are used to examine the consequences of damage to specific brain regions involved in language while neuroimaging explore regions that are engaged in the processing of language.


Previous hypotheses have been made that damage to Broca's area or Wernicke’s area does not affect sign language being perceived; however, it is not the case. Studies have shown that damage to these areas are similar in results in spoken language where sign errors are present and/or repeated. In both types of languages, they are affected by damage to the left hemisphere of the brain rather than the right -usually dealing with the arts.


There are obvious patterns for utilizing and processing language. In sign language, Broca’s area is activated while processing sign language employs Wernicke’s area similar to that of spoken language


There have been other hypotheses about the lateralization of the two hemispheres. Specifically, the right hemisphere was thought to contribute to the overall communication of a language globally whereas the left hemisphere would be dominant in generating the language locally. Through research in aphasias, RHD signers were found to have a problem maintaining the spatial portion of their signs, confusing similar signs at different locations necessary to communicate with another properly. LHD signers, on the other hand, had similar results to those of hearing patients. Furthermore, other studies have emphasized that sign language is present bilaterally but will need to continue researching to reach a conclusion.


There is a comparatively small body of research on the neurology of reading and writing. Most of the studies performed deal with reading rather than writing or spelling, and the majority of both kinds focus solely on the English language. English orthography is less transparent than that of other languages using a Latin script. Another difficulty is that some studies focus on spelling words of English and omit the few logographic characters found in the script.


In terms of spelling, English words can be divided into three categories – regular, irregular, and “novel words” or “nonwords.” Regular words are those in which there is a regular, one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme in spelling. Irregular words are those in which no such correspondence exists. Nonwords are those that exhibit the expected orthography of regular words but do not carry meaning, such as nonce words and onomatopoeia.


An issue in the cognitive and neurological study of reading and spelling in English is whether a single-route or dual-route model best describes how literate speakers are able to read and write all three categories of English words according to accepted standards of orthographic correctness. Single-route models posit that lexical memory is used to store all spellings of words for retrieval in a single process. Dual-route models posit that lexical memory is employed to process irregular and high-frequency regular words, while low-frequency regular words and nonwords are processed using a sub-lexical set of phonological rules.


The single-route model for reading has found support in computer modelling studies, which suggest that readers identify words by their orthographic similarities to phonologically alike words. However, cognitive and lesion studies lean towards the dual-route model. Cognitive spelling studies on children and adults suggest that spellers employ phonological rules in spelling regular words and nonwords, while lexical memory is accessed to spell irregular words and high-frequency words of all types. Similarly, lesion studies indicate that lexical memory is used to store irregular words and certain regular words, while phonological rules are used to spell nonwords.


Far less information exists on the cognition and neurology of non-alphabetic and non-English scripts. Every language has a morphological and a phonological component, either of which can be recorded by a writing system. Scripts recording words and morphemes are considered logographic, while those recording phonological segments, such as syllabaries and alphabets, are phonographic. Most systems combine the two and have both logographic and phonographic characters.


In terms of complexity, writing systems can be characterized as “transparent” or “opaque” and as “shallow” or “deep.” A “transparent” system exhibits an obvious correspondence between grapheme and sound, while in an “opaque” system this relationship is less obvious. The terms “shallow” and “deep” refer to the extent that a system’s orthography represents morphemes as opposed to phonological segments. Systems that record larger morphosyntactic or phonological segments, such as logographic systems and syllabaries put greater demand on the memory of users. It would thus be expected that an opaque or deep writing system would put greater demand on areas of the brain used for lexical memory than would a system with transparent or shallow orthography.


A Growth Point is a technical term in cognitive linguistics and gesture research. It refers to the earliest beginnings of a spoken utterance in the mind of a speaker, combining the beginnings of a mimetic gesture with the preliminary verbal expression of the person's thought.


An alternate theory of deriving the meaning of newly learned words by young children during language acquisition stems from John Locke's "associative proposal theory". Compared to the "intentional proposal theory", associative proposal theory refers to the deduction of meaning by comparing the novel object to environmental stimuli. A study conducted by Yu & Ballard (2007), introduced cross-situational learning, a method based on Locke's theory. Cross-situtational learning theory is a mechanism in which the child learns meaning of words over multiple exposures in varying contexts in an attempt to eliminate uncertainty of the word's true meaning on an exposure-by-exposure basis.


Some researchers are concerned that experiments testing for fast mapping are produced in artificial settings. They feel that fast mapping doesn't occur as often in more real life, natural situations. They believe that testing for fast mapping should focus more on the actual understanding of a word instead of just its reproduction. For some, testing to see if the child can use the new word in a different situation constitutes true knowledge of a word, rather than simply identifying the new word.


Variables affecting an individual's fast mapping ability.


When learning novel words, it is believed that early exposure to multiple linguistic systems facilitates the acquisition of new words later in life. This effect was referred to by Kaushanskaya and Marian (2009) as the bilingual advantage. That being said, a bilingual individual's ability to fast map can vary greatly throughout their life.


During the language acquisition process, a child may require a greater amount of time to determine a correct referent than a child who is a monolingual speaker. By the time a bilingual child is of school age, they perform equally on naming tasks when compared to monolingual children. By the age of adulthood, bilingual individuals have acquired word-learning strategies believed to be of assistance on fast mapping tasks. One example is speech practice, a strategy where the participant listens and reproduces the word in order to assist in remembering and decrease the likelihood of forgetting .


Bilingualism can increase an individual's cognitive abilities and contribute to their success in fast mapping words, even when they are using a nonnative language.


Children growing up in a low-socioeconomic status environment receive less attention than those in high-socioeconomic status environments. As a result, these children may be exposed to fewer words and therefore their language development may suffer. On norm-references vocabulary tests, children from low- socioeconomic homes tend to score lower than same-age children from a high-socioeconomic environment. However, when examining their fast mapping abilities there were no significant differences observed in their ability to learn and remember novel words. Children from low SES families were able to use multiple sources of information in order to fast map novel words. When working with children from low SES homes, providing a context of the word that attributes meaning, is a linguistic strategy that can benefit the child's word knowledge development.


Three learning supports that have been proven to help with the fast mapping of words are saliency, repetition and generation of information. The amount of face-to-face interaction a child has with their parent affects his or her ability to fast map novel words. Interaction with a parent leads to greater exposure to words in different contexts, which in turn promotes language acquisition. Face to face interaction cannot be replaced by educational shows because although repetition is used, children do not receive the same level of correction or trial and error from simply watching. When a child is asked to generate the word it promotes the transition to long-term memory to a larger extent.


Evidence of fast mapping in other animals.


It appears that fast mapping is not only limited to humans, but can occur in dogs as well.


The first example of fast mapping in dogs was published in 2004. In it, a dog named Rico was able to learn the labels of over 200 various items. He was also able to identify novel objects simply by exclusion learning. Exclusion learning occurs when one learns the name of a novel object because one is already familiar with the names of other objects belonging to the same group. The researchers, who conducted the experiment, mention the possibility that a language acquisition device specific to humans does not control fast mapping. They believe that fast mapping is possibly directed by simple memory mechanisms.


In 2010, a second example was published. This time, a dog named Chaser demonstrated, in a controlled research environment, that she had learned over 1000 object names. She also demonstrated that she could attribute these objects to named categories through fast mapping inferential reasoning. It's important to note that, at the time of publication, Chaser was still learning object names at the same pace as before. Thus, her 1000 words, or lexicals, should not be regarded as an upper limit, but a benchmark. While there are many components of language that were not demonstrated in this study, the 1000 word benchmark is remarkable because many studies on language learning correlate a 1000 lexical vocabulary with, roughly, 75% spoken language comprehension.