Two leading behavioral scientists argue we should reject “nudge” policies and stop blaming personal failure for society’s failures"Excellent. A master class on how to blend individual psychology with institutions, so that people are encouraged to get involved and develop solutions to our urgent problems via the democratic process." —Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and author of Power and ProgressTwo decades ago, behavioral economics...

The definitive introduction to Bayesian cognitive science, written by pioneers of the field.How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? How do our minds get so much from so little? Bayesian models of cognition provide a powerful framework for answering these questions by reverse-engineering the mind. This textbook offers an authoritative introduction to Bayesian cognitive science and a unifying theoretical perspective on how the mind works. Part I provi...

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we goLanguage is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the o...

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences.Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: mo...

This interdisciplinary new work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. The authors, from different backgrounds---linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology and cognitive science-explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be unfeasible on practical a...

This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human inference is central to much cognitive science, although the commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means ...

Two leading behavioral scientists argue we should reject “nudge” policies and stop blaming personal failure for society’s failures"Excellent. A master class on how to blend individual psychology with institutions, so that people are encouraged to get involved and develop solutions to our urgent problems via the democratic process." --Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and author of Power and ProgressTwo decades ago, behavioral economic...

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we goLanguage is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the o...

Cognitive science is a cross-disciplinary enterprise devoted to understanding the nature of the mind. In recent years, investigators in philosophy, psychology, the neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and a host of other disciplines have come to appreciate how much they can learn from one another about the various dimensions of cognition. The result has been the emergence of one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of inter-disciplinary research in the history of science. This volume...

What is language and how can we investigate its acquisition by children or adults? What perspectives exist from which to view acquisition? What internal constraints and external factors shape acquisition? What are the properties of interlanguage systems? This comprehensive 31-chapter handbook is an authoritative survey of second language acquisition (SLA). Its multi-perspective synopsis on recent developments in SLA research provides significant contributions by established experts and wid...

The Natural Origin Of Language

Infants and very young children develop almost miraculously the ability of speech, without apparent effort, without even being taught - as opposed to the teenager or the adult struggling without, it seems, ever being able to reach the same level of proficiency as five year olds in their first language. This useful textbook serves as a guide to different types of language acquisition: monolingual and bilingual first language development and child and adult second language acquisition. Unlik...