Language as shaped by the brain.

By Morten H. Christiansen, N. Chater. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2008

799 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7439e7c902202cab64509eabdcd2dce9fa46b5c7

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Citations in the corpus

The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. (2009, background): “If anything, this question has become more challenging in two vital respects, and here we part company with Christiansen and Chater (2008), who assume a much narrower spectrum of structural possibilities in language than we do: First, because the extraordinary structural variation sketched in this…”
Language Is a Complex Adaptive System: Position Paper (2009, background): “…and why it has the properties we can observe today, we need to look at the combined effect of many interacting constraints, including the structure of thought processes, perceptual and motor biases, cognitive limitations, and socio-pragmatic factors (Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Clark, 1996).”
Current Emotion Research in the Language Sciences (2012, background): “In recent years, there has been a shift away from this perspective and researchers are questioning many of these fundamental assumptions (Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Hagoort & Van Berkum, 2007; Langacker, 1987).”
Zipf's law of abbreviation as a language universal (2016, background): “From this perspective, universals are not only properties of currently attested languages (synchronic universals), but rather universal processing constraints that play out on the evolutionary time scale [6], [17], [18], [5], [2], [7].”
Iterated learning and the evolution of language. (2014, positive): “In this paper we survey simulations, mathematical models and experiments all pointing towards the same underlying hypothesis: that the key structural design features of language have their explanation in the fact that language is culturally transmitted in this way [5, 4, 6, 7].”
The acquisition of tense-aspect: Converging evidence from corpora and telicity ratings (2009, background): “Investigation of the ways in which language usage and language cognition result in learnable language structures is a much larger enterprise, and it is only at the beginning (Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Ellis, 2008a; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006, 2009).”
Direct-fit to nature: an evolutionary perspective on biological (and artificial) neural networks (2019, background): “, not learned) computational modules to support our generative capacity to extrapolate (Chomsky, 1965; cf. Pullum and Scholz, 2002; Ramscar and Yarlett, 2007; Christiansen and Chater, 2008).”
Origins of human communication (2008, background): “…number of works has turned attention to the topic of the human language evolution from several points of view (e.g., Burling, 2005; Corballis, 2002; Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Christiansen & Kirby, 2003; Deacon, 1997; Dunbar, 1996; Fitch, 2010; Knight et al., 2000; Pinker & Bloom, 1990;…”
Words as alleles: connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift (2010, background): “Other models have assumed that the emerging linguistic variant has functional advantages over the replaced one (Yang 2001; Christiansen & Chater 2008; Clark et al. 2008).”
Symbol Interdependency in Symbolic and Embodied Cognition (2011, background): “This means that language provides its users with linguistic cues how to understand the world, and language might in fact not be as arbitrary as the embodied cognition account suggests (see Christiansen & Chater, 2008).”
Usage‐Based Language: Investigating the Latent Structures That Underpin Acquisition (2013, background): “Here a common theme is that language acquisition is simple in Ockham’s sense in that it is cut of the same cloth as the rest of cognition1: we learn language like we learn anything else.”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “But this is the study not of language evolution but of the evolution of the biological precursors of language (Christiansen & Chater 2008; for an opposing perspective, see Pinker & Bloom 1990).”