Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar

by Ewa Dąbrowska

This book explores the psychology of language and its neural substrate and shows how linguistics could benefit by incorporating insights from research on language acquisition, language processing, neurolinguistics and other disciplines concerned with human linguistic abilities.

Genres: Linguistics, Brain

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Lusha Petrunina]

pretty good, went over a lot. I like that the first half was very broad and the second was very specific.

(notes for myself:
- prefabs vs syntactic composition
- learn more about theory of mind
- high frequency words/chunks become more entrenched in brain neurologically (?)
- too many neural connections to be encoded genetically
- read Deacon about trans-species neural transplants
- read Pinker semantic bootstrapping hypothesis
- broad: where do concepts come from, how are they formed?
- regular vs irregular --> people with Alzheimer's have problems with irregular forms (problem with memory) while people with SLI have problems with regular forms (problem with syntactic composition)
- syntactic rules for specific categories of words, not all (like French adjs, some before some after)
- learn about cognitive grammar)