32.1541, Review: Cognitive Science: Ibbotson (2020)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1541. Tue May 04 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1541, Review: Cognitive Science: Ibbotson (2020)

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Date: Tue, 04 May 2021 00:14:53
From: Yufei Ren [ryffei at 163.com]
Subject: What it Takes to Talk

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36642037


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-2360.html

AUTHOR: Paul  Ibbotson
TITLE: What it Takes to Talk
SUBTITLE: Exploring Developmental Cognitive Linguistics
SERIES TITLE: Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Yufei Ren, Tsinghua University

SUMMARY

The book “What it Takes to Talk: Exploring Developmental Cognitive
Linguistics” written by Dr. Paul Ibbotson is aimed to investigate the role of
cognition in the language learning process and address the developmental
mechanism in balance between creativity and conformity in language acquisition
and use. In so doing, conceptual, analytical and methodological innovations
are provided in the book. In the beginning, the book first outlines the
reasons to explore the relationship between language and cognition in human
development for better understanding the developmental trajectory of language
itself. The reasons come from illustrations of the (re)unification of language
and cognition, the necessity to integrate language and cognition, and
arguments from genetics, atypical populations and neuroscience. Arguments from
other relevant disciplines, that is human evolution, comparative psychology
and typology, computational modelling, artificial intelligence and robotics,
can also support the exploration. Then the book explores how the cognitive and
social world interacts with, constrains, and predicts language use from
developmental perspective. The cognitive perspective can be seen from detailed
explanation and/or analysis of the role of memory in language development, the
ability to make categories and form analogies, as well as the allocation of
attention and inhibition in language acquisition. It is followed by the
perspective of social cognition in language development, which can be clearly
seen from the role of social cognition, cooperative action in language
development, as well as driving mechanism in normative reasoning, discourse
and narrative. Based on the exploration, the book finally offers an
integrative approach (i.e. developmental cognitive linguistic approach) to
reveal the dynamic nature of language development. 

The book is divided into three parts. The first part includes Chapter 1
entitled with “Talking of Cognition” consisting of 6 sections, which briefly
reviews the relationship between language and cognition in human development
and gives rationales to the reasons for reunification of language and
cognition from the evidence of neurobiological, evolutionary and computational
processing. Ever since Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) language faculty and Fodor’s
(1983) modularity of mind, language has been traditionally taken as
domain-specific. But this traditional view of language has its limitation in
explaining the complex picture of linguistic phenomena and/or related
behaviors. General cognition lies almost everywhere in language, so it is
necessary to review the encapsulated language model. From the perspective of
developmental psychology, genetics study shows that double dissociation of
human brain existed in Williams syndrome and developmental language disorder.
Anatomy of Broca’s and Wernicke’s area, and arcuate fasciculus fiber pathway
which was regarded to support language as domain-specific, have underestimated
the distribution and interconnectivity of language in the brain. From the
evolutionary and comparative approach, cognitive capacities should be
intertwined with cultural learning. Evidence from computational modelling,
artificial intelligence and robotics also supports the close relationship
between language and cognition. For example, computational accuracies have
been improved when dovetailing (supplemented) with other cognitive functions
such as memory. Cognitive cues supplement natural language to deal with rather
messy and complicated natural language processing.  

The second or the middle part of the book consists of 4 chapters (Chapters
2-5), mainly delving into the driving mechanism of language development from a
psychology perspective. To be specific, domain-general capacities, that is,
memory, attention inhibition, categorization, analogy and social cognition are
taken as function inquiry in language development. Chapter 2 focuses on the
role of memory in language learning, which can be seen from the evidence of
how working memory and long-term memory influence, predict, and make a
detailed explanation of the development of language. Computer modelling of
memory in language can give further support to the interaction of memory in
language. Chapter 3 examines how cognition and language mutually function,
namely, observation of categorization and analogy in language can help to
understand the interactional function. For instance, the concept of
prototypicality and basic categorization had been shown early in infants,
correlating with their later language ability, and thus, may serve as the
basis of language segmentation, especially in event cognition and verb
mapping. Chapter 4 describes two specific cognitive abilities in language
information processing, that is, attention and inhibition available for
language development and the degree of freedom available for linguistic
generalizations. Attention and inhibition are important cognitive abilities
that constrain the information available for language. This can be exemplified
from eye-gaze which is regarded as the primary cue to how attention is
attributed, eye-gaze is definitely directed by linguistic subjects as more
focus is paid to the subjects of sentences. While inhibition is a robust
predictor of language ability, which can be observed from the performance in
verb-tense marking. The above-mentioned four chapters examine the
interrelation between non-social aspects of cognition and language
development. Chapter 5 comes to the role of social cognition in language
development, which is focused on how social cognition constrains language
meaning and maps the ways for language development. Cooperative action
distinguishes humans from animals, and therefore normative reasoning is
conventional to cooperation including language. Among which, degree of freedom
should be taken into account for language to happen. 

The third or the last part (Chapter 6 entitled Talking of cognition) concludes
with the integrative approach to tackle the complex issues in language and
cognition. The dynamic system theory (DST) to study developmental cognitive
linguistics is proposed, and the rationale to view language as a dynamic
system shaped by culture is also considered. The basic logic of developmental
cognitive linguistics is that the developmental trajectory of language is
contingent on that of cognition and language relies on basic cognition
abilities while interacting with cognition. This chapter summarizes evidence
and elaboration from previous chapters to reinforce its primary argument that
human language is developed with its deep integration with cognition and the
necessity to explain language phenomenon from cognitive perspectives. Further
questions that remain to be solved are listed at the end of this chapter.

EVALUATION

This book offers a new insight into the study of language development and
cognition, putting cognition at the heart of the language learning process.
Its aim to explore the contribution of cognition to language development and
their interrelationship is explicitly stated in the book, challenging the idea
that language acquisition can be meaningfully understood as a purely
linguistic phenomenon. The book begins with an introduction of the primary
controversies in linguistics, that is, the modularity of mind and the language
evolution issues. For the modularity issue, the book evaluates Fodor’s (1983)
theory and then initiates a discussion which is focused on whether language is
domain-specific or domain-general. In this context, the book clarifies
language is domain-general, which is fresh in the study of language learning,
since learners may not be concentrated only on the domain of language aspect
in the course of learning. As for the language evolution issue, two major
theoretical approaches are described respectively in terms of language
development: universal grammar approach (Chomsky, 1957, 1965) and the
usage-based approach (Tomasello, 2003; Croft, 2001). This book emphasizes
language as domain general with relevance to cognitive abilities and supports
the usage-based approach, extending to child language acquisition and language
development for inquiry into the nature of language and the fundamental role
of cognition in language development. Based on the exploration of each domain
(i.e. memory, attention, inhibition, categorization, analogy and social
cognition) shaping the development of sounds, words and grammar, the book
offers the developmental cognitive linguistic approach to explain the complex
picture of language acquisition and use, making a conclusion that language is
special because it could be nature’s finest example of cognitive recycling and
reuse, which is beneficial for further study from an interdisciplinary
perspective. 

The book is glamourous in investigating language development from an
interdisciplinary perspective such as cognitive science, thus making readers
interested in exploring the nature of language encouraging and inspiring from
a multi-perspective investigation, rather than only from one linguistic school
such as the rule-based principle. As pointed out early by Geoffrey (1980), the
biggest danger in linguistics is that people are totally governed by one
school;      how to integrate ideas in relevance to other approaches is
essential in linguistics studies. What’s more, this book makes its arguments
in a rather convincing manner. Theoretically speaking, as we could see from
the content evaluation, there is a strong logic in the arguments, the book
elaborates its main arguments and makes comparison to what the different
approach (mainly from      innatism) claims, which definitely helps readers
understand the clear theoretical framework of the argument concerned.
Empirically speaking, related experiment schemas are selected precisely and
carefully described in the book. For example, the code used in R-Package is
made available in the book to welcome opening contributions to it, whether it
is technical advancement or necessary details confirmed through experiments.
As written in the book, “this (Frequency Filter) could be as exploratory
research with no a priori assumptions about the nature of over and
underrepresented categories to generate hypothesis for further corpus or
experimental investigations (p154)”. Not only can readers find theoretical and
empirical inspirations in linguistic related studies, they could also be
motivated to have more interest than ever before in investigating
developmental cognitive linguistics. Furthermore, in the closing chapter, the
book puts forward a problem with the robustness of correlations between
language and cognition related to publication bias. This is thought-provoking
for future study, as stated in the book “understanding this pattern will
require tackling the ‘file-drawer’ problem whereby any statistically
significant association found between language and cognition is much more
likely to be published than those who fail to find an association (p129)”.
Data collected in the experiments are well designed with a solid foundation,
which guarantees the strong arguments claimed in the book. 

The attraction of this book is especially manifested in its creativity and
space for future studies. Since the view of language interacting with
development is established on the basis of cognition, further investigations
of how the interaction is achieved and what the mechanism underlying this
interaction should be of great significance for better and deeper
understanding of human language. In this regard, Dynamic System Theory (DST)
exemplifies how language, as a dynamic system, is modified according to
various factors. Degree of freedom is emphasized in the book, illustrating how
cognition and social cues constrain language boundaries of what can/should be
defined. Detailed and complex interaction in terms of cognitive capabilities
included in the book under the framework of dynamic network analysis is a
fertile area, which needs to be examined in the future. 

One flaw of the book is that many details concerning language as adaptive
system and the mechanisms or algorithms related to degree of freedom have not
been provided. The flaw, to some extent, may leave spaces for readers to have
their own perspectives and/or judgements. However, it is no doubt that the
book offers a fresh insight into the area of language and cognition, leading
readers to be interested in further exploring the nature of the language
learning process from the cognitive perspective. 

REFERENCES

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Geoffrey, Sampson. 1980. Schools of Linguistics: Competition and Evolution.
London: Hutchinson.

Paul, Ibbotson. 2020. What it Takes to Talk: Exploring Developmental Cognitive
Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton

Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of
Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Yufei Ren is currently a PhD student in Linguistics at Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China. She would like to find out the algorithm functioning in mind
when people are making categorization and judgments especially related to
words and language. Her main research interests include psycholinguistics,
language acquisition, and neurolinguistics.<br />Gang Cui is a Professor at
the Department of Foreign Language, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His
research interests are cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics.





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