The Language Instinct

By Steven Pinker. 1994

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology, Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

Breaking the Softmax Bottleneck: A High-Rank RNN Language Model (2017, background): “Though one might argue that a natural language allows an inﬁnite number of contexts due to its compositionality (Pinker, 1994), we proceed with our analysis by considering a ﬁnite set of possible contexts.”
Head-Driven Statistical Models for Natural Language Parsing (2003, background): “As evidence that structural preferences can even override semantic plausibility, take the following example (from Pinker 1994): (5) Flip said that Squeaky will do the work yesterday.”
Cognitive Science in the era of Artificial Intelligence: A roadmap for reverse-engineering the infant language-learner (2016, positive): “As in other cases of animal communication, infants spontaneously acquire the language(s) of their community by merely being immersed in that community (Pinker, 1994).”
The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology (2015, background): “…psychological, behavioral, and social phenomena that its circuits generate or regulate (e.g., the existence of and the patterns found in human language; Pinker, 1994; the existence of and patterns found in incest aversion and kin-directed altruism; Lieberman, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2007).”
Brains and brands: Developing mutually informative research in neuroscience and marketing (2008, background): “Individuals who are not exposed to language early in life demonstrate serious impediments in its acquisition later (Pinker, 1994), which partially contributes to why it is so difficult to learn a foreign language as an adult.”
Vocabulary: A Critical Component of Comprehension (2005, background): “Interestingly, this number is almost three times the nearly 18,000 words Shakespeare used in all of his writings (Pinker, 1994).”
A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging (2017, background): “…variety, is reinforced through traditional prescriptivism, the view that one language or language variety has an inherently higher value than others and that it ought to be imposed on an entire nation-state to maintain standards of communication (Crystal, 1986; MacSwan, 2000b; Pinker, 1994).”
The Executive Functions and Self-Regulation: An Evolutionary Neuropsychological Perspective (2001, background): “We may draw this inference as well from the fact that virtually every population studied for their language employs a past and future tense in their language (Pinker, 1994).”
Can the Simple View Deal with the Complexities of Reading (2008, methodology): “Kintsch (1998) has developed his Construction–Integration model, and Pinker (1994, 2002) has analysed the roles of nature and nurture in language competence.”
Grounded spoken language acquisition: experiments in word learning (2003, background): “Infants learn their first words by associating speech patterns with objects, actions, and people [5].”
Evolution of human music through sexual selection. (2000, background): “Music, like language (Pinker, 1994), fulfils many of the classic criteria for being a complex biological adaptation in our species.”
Long-range fractal correlations in literary corpora (2002, background): “The human language faculty reveals as a phenomenon of remarkable complexity, intimately interwoven with all our superior mental functions [1].”
Media richness or media naturalness? The evolution of our biological communication apparatus and its influence on our behavior toward E-communication tools (2005, background): “The morphology of the human ear also suggests a specialized design to decode speech [41], [42].”