Browsing by Author "Pinker, Steven"

Now showing items 1-20 of 35

    • Abstract Grammatical Processing of Nouns and Verbs in Broca's Area: Evidence from FMRI 

      Sahin, Ned T.; Pinker, Steven; Halgren, Eric (Elsevier, 2006)
      The role of Broca's area in grammatical computation is unclear, because syntactic processing is often confounded with working memory, articulation, or semantic selection. Morphological processing potentially circumvents ...

    • Author's Reply to Review of Histories of Violence 

      Pinker, Steven (University of London, 2012)

    • The biological basis of language: insight from developmental grammatical impairments 

      van der Lely, Heather K.J.; Pinker, Steven (Elsevier BV, 2014)
      Specific language impairment (SLI), a genetic developmental disorder, offers insights into the neurobiological and computational organization of language. A subtype, Grammatical-SLI (G-SLI), involves greater impairments ...

    • The Blank Slate 

      Pinker, Steven (Society for General Psychology (Division 1 of American Psychological Association), 2006)

    • Breaking and Entering: Verb Semantics and Event Structure 

      Geojo, Amy Celine (2015-02-25)
      Any event can be construed from a variety of perspectives. While this flexibility is fundamental to human ingenuity, it poses a challenge for language learners who must discern which meanings are encoded in their language ...

    • The Commitment Function of Angry Facial Expressions 

      Reed, Lawrence Ian; DeScioli, Peter; Pinker, Steven (SAGE Publications, 2014)
      What function do facial expressions have? We tested the hypothesis that some expressions serve as honest signals of subjective commitments—in particular, that angry faces increase the effectiveness of threats. In an ultimatum ...

    • Common Genetic Variants Associated With Cognitive Performance Identified Using the Proxy-Phenotype Method 

      Rietveld, C. A.; Esko, Tonu; Davies, G.; Pers, Tune H; Turley, P.; Benyamin, B.; Chabris, C. F.; Emilsson, V.; Johnson, Andrew D.; Lee, James J.; Leeuw, C. d.; Marioni, R. E.; Medland, S. E.; Miller, Michael B.; Rostapshova, Olga; van der Lee, S. J.; Vinkhuyzen, A. A. E.; Amin, N.; Conley, D.; Derringer, J.; van Duijn, C. M.; Fehrmann, R.; Franke, L.; Glaeser, E. L.; Hansell, N. K.; Hayward, C.; Iacono, W. G.; Ibrahim-Verbaas, C.; Jaddoe, V.; Karjalainen, J.; Laibson, D.; Lichtenstein, P.; Liewald, D. C.; Magnusson, P. K. E.; Martin, N. G.; McGue, M.; McMahon, G.; Pedersen, N. L.; Pinker, Steven; Porteous, D. J.; Posthuma, D.; Rivadeneira, F.; Smith, Blair H.; Starr, J. M.; Tiemeier, H.; Timpson, N. J.; Trzaskowski, M.; Uitterlinden, A. G.; Verhulst, F. C.; Ward, M. E.; Wright, M. J.; Davey Smith, G.; Deary, I. J.; Johannesson, M.; Plomin, R.; Visscher, P. M.; Benjamin, D. J.; Cesarini, D.; Koellinger, P. D. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014)
      We identify common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach, which we call the proxy-phenotype method. First, we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment ...

    • Compound formation is constrained by morphology: A reply to Seidenberg, MacDonald & Haskell 

      Berent, Iris; Pinker, Steven (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2008)
      Why do compounds containing regular plurals, such as rats-infested, sound so much worse than corresponding compounds containing irregular plurals, such as mice-infested? Berent and Pinker (2007) reported five experiments ...

    • Computation of Semantic Number from Morphological Information 

      Berent, Iris; Pinker, Steven; Tzelgov, Joseph; Bibi, Uri; Goldfarb, Liat (2005)
      The distinction between singular and plural enters into linguistic phenomena such as morphology, lexical semantics, and agreement and also must interface with perceptual and conceptual systems that assess numerosity in the ...

    • Decline of Violence: Taming the Devil Within Us 

      Pinker, Steven (Nature Publishing Group, 2011)
      We are getting smarter, and as a result the world is becoming a more peaceful place, says Steven Pinker.

    • The Decline of War and Conceptions of Human Nature 

      Pinker, Steven (Wiley, 2013)
      Many observers are skeptical of the evidence that war has declined, because they think that a decline in war requires an unrealistic, romantic theory of human nature. In fact it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human ...

    • The Dislike of Regular Plurals in Compounds: Phonological Familiarity or Morphological Constraint? 

      Berent, Iris; Pinker, Steven (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007)
      English speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the ...

    • The Evolutionary Social Psychology of Off-record Indirect Speech Acts 

      Pinker, Steven (Walter de Gruyter, 2007)
      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 Faculty of Language: What’s Special About It? 

      Pinker, Steven; Jackendoff, Ray (Elsevier, 2005)
      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 ...

    • George A. Miller (1920–2012) 

      Pinker, Steven (American Psychological Association (APA), 2013)
      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 ...

    • Indirect Speech, Politeness, Deniability, and Relationship Negotiation: Comment on Marina Terkourafi's “The Puzzle of Indirect Speech” 

      Pinker, Steven (Elsevier BV, 2011)

    • Lexical Semantics and Irregular Inflection 

      Huang, Yi Ting; Pinker, Steven (Taylor & Francis, 2010)
      Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which ...

    • Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame 

      Ronen, Shahar; Gonçalves, Bruno; Hu, Kevin Z.; Vespignani, Alessandro; Pinker, Steven; Hidalgo, César A. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014)
      Languages vary enormously in global importance because of historical, demographic, political, and technological forces. However, beyond simple measures of population and economic power, there has been no rigorous quantitative ...

    • The logic of indirect speech 

      Pinker, Steven; Nowak, Martin; Lee, James J. (National Academy of Sciences, 2008)
      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 ...

    • A Neural Dissociation Within Language: Evidence that the Mental Dictionary is Part of Declarative Memory, and that Grammatical Rules are Processed by the Procedural System 

      Ullman, Michael T.; Corkin, Suzanne; Coppola, Marie; Hickok, Gregory; Growdon, John Herbert; Koroshetz, Walter J.; Pinker, Steven (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997)
      Language comprises a lexicon for storing words and a grammar for generating rule-governed forms. Evidence is presented that the lexicon is part of a temporal-parietalhnedial-temporal “declarative memory” system and that ...