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Presents an obituary for George A. Miller (1920-2012). Miller ranks among the most important psychologists of the 20th century. In addition to writing one of the best known papers in the history of psychology ("The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," published in Psychological Review in 1956), Miller also fomented the cognitive revolution, invented psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, imported powerful ideas from the theories of information, communication, grammar, semantics, and artificial intelligence, and left us a sparkling oeuvre that proves that a rigorous scientist needn't write in soggy prose. Honors rained down on Miller. APA gave him the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (1963), the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science (1990), the William James Book Award (1992, for The Science of Words), and the Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (2003), and named a prize after him, as did the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Miller was also honored by the Association for Psychological Science and the American Speech and Hearing Association. In 2000, he won the John P. McGovern Award in the Behavioral Sciences from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1991, the National Medal of Science, the country's highest scientific honor.

I examine Gleitman's (1990) arguments that children rely on a verb's syntactic subcategorization frames to learn its meaning (e.g., they learn that see means ‘perceive visually’ because it can appear with a direct object, a clausal complement, or a directional phrase). First, Gleitman argues that the verbs cannot be learned byb observing then situations in which they are used , because many verbs refer to overlapping situations, and because parents do not invariably use a verb when its perceptual correlates are present. I suggest that these arguments speak only against a narrow associationist view in which the child is sensitive to the temporal contiguity of sensory features and spoken verb, If the child can hyppthesize semantic representations corresponding to what parents are likely to be referring to, and can refine such representations across multiple situations, the objections are blunted;, indeed, Gleitman's theory requires such a learning process despite her objections to it. Second, Gleitmans suggests that there is enough information in a verb's subcategorization frames to predict its meaning ‘quite closely’ . Evaluating this argument requires distinguishing a verb's root plus its semantic content (what She boiled the water shares with The water boiled and does not share with She broke the glass ), and a verb frame plus its semantic perspective (what She boiled the water shares with She broke the glass and does not share with The water boiled ). I show that learning a verb in a single frame only gives a learner coarse information about its semanic perspective in that frame (e.g., number of arguments, type of arguments); it tells the learner nothing about the verb root's content across frames (e.g., hot bubbling liquid). Moreover, hearing a verb across all its frames also reveals little about the verb root's content. Finally, I show that Gleitman's empirical arguments all involve experiments where children are exposed to a single verb frame, and therefore all involve learning the frame's perpective meaning, not the root's content meaning, which in all the experiments was acquired by observing the accompanying scene. I conclude that attention to a verb's syntactic frame can help narrow down the child's interpretation of the perspective meaning of the verb in that frame, but disagree with the claim that there is some in-principle limitation in learning a verb's content.

What is the input to the mental System that computes inflected forms likewalked, came, dogs, andmen? Recent connectionist models feed a word's phonological features into a single network, allowing it to generalize both regular and irregular phonological patterns, likestop-stopped, step-steppedandfling-flung, cling-clung. But for adults, phonological input is insufficient: verbs derived from nouns likering the cityalways have regular past tense forms (ringed), even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs (ring the bell). Similarly, nouns based on names, liketwo Mickey Mouses, and compounds based on possessing rather than being their root morpheme, such astwo sabertooths, take regular plurals, even when they are homophonous with irregular nouns likemiceandteeth. In four experiments, testing 70 three- to ten-year-old children, we found that children are sensitive to such nonphonological information: they were more likely to produce regular inflected forms for forms liketo ring(‘to put a ring on’) andsnaggletooth(a kind of animal doll with big teeth) than for their homophonous irregular counterparts, even when these counterparts were also extended in meaning. Children's inflectional Systems thus seem to be like adults': irregular forms are tied to the lexicon but regular forms are computed by a default rule, and words are represented as morphological tree structures reflecting their derivation from basic word roots. Such structures, which determine how novel complex words are derived and interpreted, also govern whether words with irregular sound patterns will be regularized: a word can be irregular only if its structure contains an irregular root in ‘head’ position, allowing the lexically stored irregular information to percolate up to apply to the word as a whole. In all other cases, the inflected form is computed by a default regular rule. This proposal fits the facts better than alternatives appealing to ambiguity reduction or semantic similarity to a word's central sense. The results, together with an analysis of adult speech to children, suggest that morphological structure and a distinction between mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection may be inherent to the design of children's language Systems.

Steven Pinker is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and in 1994 will become director of its McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He received his B.K from McGill University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979, both in experimental psychology, and taught at Harvard and Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1982. He has done research in visual cognition and the psychology of language, and is the author of Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) and Learnability and Cognition (1989) and the editor of Visual Cognition (1985), Connections and Symbol (1988, with Jacques Mehler), and Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992, with Beth Levin). He was the recipient of the Early Career Award in 1984 and the Boyd McCandless Award in 1986 from the American Psychological Association, a Graduate Teaching Award from MIT in 1986, and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. His newest book, The Language Instinct, will be published by William Morrow & Company in January 1994.

This is the first of a series of three interviews featuring Steven Pinker, Kenneth Wexler, and Noam Chornsky, three giant figures in the fields of Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Cognitive Science. The three scientists teach at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States. The fiTst interview is with Professor Steven Pinker, The other two interviews will appear in subsequent issues of this Journal. The contents of the interviews bear on issues related with the evolution of psycholinguistics (past and present), the very notion of language and its acquisition and development in children, the contribution of recent linguistic theories to psycholinguistics and particularly developmental psycholinguistics. Some more personal questions and answers concern the personal contributions of Pinker, Wexler, and Chomsky to the movement of ideas in linguistics and psycholinguistics as they see it, as well as their own professional formation and development. Steven Pinker, ...

Both regular inflectional patterns (walk-walked) and irregular ones (swing-swung) can be applied productively to novel words (e.g. wug-wugged; spling -splung). Theories of generative phonology attribute both generalisations to rules; connectionist theories attribute both to analogies in a pattern associator network; hybrid theories attribute regular (fully predictable default) generalisations to a rule and irregular generalisations to a rote memory with pattern-associator properties. In three experiments and three simulations, we observe the process of generalising morphological patterns in humans and two-layer connectionist networks. Replicating Bybee and Moder (1983), we find that people's willingness to generalise from existing irregular verbs to novel ones depends on the global similarity between them (e.g. spling is readily inflectable as splung, but nist is not inflectable as nust). In contrast, generalisability of the regular suffix does not appear to depend on similarity to existing regul...

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics’, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. ‘Culturomics’ extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d', where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer's willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness.

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.

Seeing the Brain's One, Two, Three Taking advantage of the rare opportunity to record neuronal activity in the human brain using intracranial electrodes, Sahin et al. (p. 445 ; see the Perspective by Hagoort and Levelt ) document the spatial and temporal pattern of neuronal populations within Broca's area as patients thought of a single word, changed its tense (for verbs) or number (for nouns), and articulated the word silently. For these three stages, they detected activity at 200, 320, and 450 milliseconds, moving in a caudal to rostral direction. These data fit neatly within the roughly 600 milliseconds required for the onset of speech and map the distinct neural computations within an area of the brain, known for almost a century and a half, as important for the production of language.

It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries ... (Preface, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, 1755).

Children between the ages of three and seven occasionally make errors with locative verbs like pour and fill, such as * I filled water into the glass and * I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, 1982). To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called OBJECT AFFECTEDNESS: the direct object corresponds to the argument that is specified as ‘affected’ in some particular way in the semantic representation of a verb. However, children must learn which verbs specify which of their arguments as being affected; specifically, whether it is the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of location, such as the content argument of pour, or the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of state, such as the container argument of fill. This predicts that syntactic errors should be associated with specific kinds of misinterpretations of verb meaning. Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. The results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing fill and empty, encoding the content argument as direct object (e.g. fill the water). As predicted, children also misinterpreted the meanings of fill and empty as requiring not only that the container be brought into a full or empty state, but also that the content move in some specific manner (by pouring, or by dumping). Furthermore, children who misinterpreted the verbs' meanings were more likely to make syntactic errors with them. These findings support the hypothesis that verb meaning and syntax are linked in precise ways in the lexicons of language learners.

When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence.

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

How do people recognize an object in different orientations? One theory is that the visual system describes the object relative to a reference frame centered on the object, resulting in a representation that is invariant across orientations. Chronometric data show that this is true only when an object can be identified uniquely by the arrangement of its parts along a single dimension. When an object can only be distinguished by an arrangement of its parts along more than one dimension, people mentally rotate it to a familiar orientation. This finding suggests that the human visual reference frame is tied to egocentric coordinates.

Language is the remarkable faculty by which humans convey thoughts to one another by means of a highly structured signal. Language works by two principles: a dictionary of memorized symbols, that is, words, and a set of generative rules organized into several subsystems, that is, grammar. The machinery of language appears to have been designed to encode and decode propositional information for the purpose of sharing it with others. Language is universally complex and develops reliably throughout the species, partly independently of general intelligence. I suggest that language is an adaptation for sharing information. It fits with many other features of our zoologically distinctive 'informavore' niche, in which people acquire, share and apply knowledge of how the world works to outsmart plants, animals and each other.

This paper proposes a new analysis of indirect speech in the framework of game theory, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It builds on the theory of Grice, which tries to ground indirect speech in pure rationality (the demands of e‰cient communication between two cooperating agents) and on the Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson, who proposed that people cooperate not just in exchanging data but in saving face (both the speaker’s and the hearer’s). I suggest that these theories need to be supplemented because they assume that people in conversation always cooperate. A reflection on how a pair of talkers may have goals that conflict as well as coincide requires an examination of the game-theoretic logic of plausible denial, both in legal contexts, where people’s words may be held against them, and in everyday life, where the sanctions are social rather than judicial. This in turn requires a theory of the distinct kinds of relationships that make up human social life, a consideration of a new role for common knowledge in the use of indirect speech, and ultimately the paradox of rational ignorance, where we choose not to know something relevant to our interests.

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is "perfect," non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base's phonology (e.g., rat-rats), whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it (e.g., mouse-mice). The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that do not resemble existing nouns and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names (e.g., the Barak-Barakim), they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns (e.g., barak-brakim "lightning"), replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as "regular" or "irregular"; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.

We agree that connectionist networks are not always analogy mechanisms. Our point (based on explications by McClelland and other connectionists) is that pattern associators (the most common connectionist model of the past tense) tend towards analogy when learning competing patterns under standard training regimes. This is what gives such models their predictive power with irregular forms. The claim that some connectionist model can, given a specific architecture, training schedule and input features, approximate any linguistic phenomenon might be true, but it is in danger of reducing connectionism to a universal statistical approximation technique rather than a source of empirical predictions. Language cannot be treated as just a collection of ‘regularities in the input’ that can be approximated by some mechanism; those regularities are themselves the products of human minds and need to be explained.

While endorsing Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) call for rigorous documentation of variation, we defend the idea of Universal Grammar as a toolkit of language acquisition mechanisms. The authors exaggerate diversity by ignoring the space of conceivable but nonexistent languages, trivializing major design universals, conflating quantitative with qualitative variation, and assuming that the utility of a linguistic feature suffices to explain how children acquire it.

Tarr and Pinker (1989, 1990) delineated the conditions in which the orientation of a shape affects the time subjects take to recognize it. Relatively large effects of orientation were found (1) when misoriented asymmetrical shapes were unfamiliar, and (2) when familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared in unfamiliar orientations. In contrast, relatively small effects or no effect of orientation were found (1) when familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared at familiar orientations, (2) when unfamiliar mirror-reversals of familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared at unfamiliar orientations, (3) for misoriented symmetrical shapes, whether they were unfamiliar or familiar, and (4) for misoriented bilaterally redundant shapes, whether they were unfamiliar or familiar. To account for these data, two questions must be addressed: What mental processes underlie large effects of orientation or their absence; and why do these two patterns of data depend on manipulations of familiarity, handedness, and shape geometry? In Tarr and Pinker (1989, 1990) we proposed a theory that simultaneously answered both of these questions {what processes are used when very small effects of orientation are observed, and when are these processes used). The theory, multiple-views-plus-transformation, suggests that large effects of orientation in shape recognition are due to mental rotation. Crucially, this conclusion is based not only on the presence of an orientation effect, but on the similarity between our rotation rates and the rates observed in experiments by Shepard and Cooper (1982). These experiments used independent evidence to demonstrate the existence of an incremental mental rotation transformation, not confined to the effects of orientation, but depending on converging manipulations such as response time to probes at intermediate orientations and presentation points, effects of advance information and preparation time, and other techniques. We suggested that the absence of such large effects of orientation may result from orientation-invariant mechanisms of three kinds: orientation-specific representations of familiar shapes at familiar orientations; a 180° rotation in depth to align unfamiliar mirror-reversals with their familiar standards; and \Vi D orientation-independent descriptions for symmetrical and bilaterally redundant shapes. Together these hypotheses not only explain the causes of the absence of mental-rotation-size orientation

According to the ‘word/rule’ account, regular inflection is computed by a default, symbolic process, whereas irregular inflection is achieved by associative memory. Conversely, patternassociator accounts attribute both regular and irregular inflection to an associative process. The acquisition of the default is ascribed to the asymmetry in the distribution of regular and irregular tokens. Irregular tokens tend to form tight, well-defined phonological clusters (e.g. sing-sang, ring-rang), whereas regular forms are diffusely distributed throughout the phonological space. This distributional asymmetry is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of a regular default. Hebrew nominal inflection challenges this account. We demonstrate that Hebrew speakers use the regular masculine inflection as a default despite the overlap in the distribution of regular and irregular Hebrew masculine nouns. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrates that regular inflection is productively applied to novel nouns regardless of their similarity to existing regular nouns. In contrast, the inflection of irregular sounding nouns is strongly sensitive to their similarity to stored irregular tokens. Experiment 2 establishes the generality of the regular default for novel words that are phonologically idiosyncratic. Experiment 3 demonstrates that Hebrew speakers assign the default regular inflection to borrowings and names that are identical to existing irregular nouns. The existence of default inflection in Hebrew is incompatible with the distributional asymmetry hypothesis. Our findings also lend no support for a type-frequency account. The convergence of the circumstances triggering default inflection in Hebrew, German and English suggests that the capacity for default inflection may be general. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved