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Pinker, Steven

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Pinker

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Pinker, Steven

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1994 - 19972

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.59343daf-d04f-4d30-842f-c5bc2fe1a5b3Start date: 1994End date: 1999

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    On Language

    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1994) Pinker, Steven

    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.

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    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

    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997) Ullman, Michael T.; Corkin, Suzanne; Coppola, Marie; Hickok, Gregory; Growdon, John; Koroshetz, Walter J.; Pinker, Steven

    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 granlmatical rules are processed by a frontamasal-ganglia “procedural” system. Patients produced past tenses of regular and novel verbs (looked and plagged), which require an -ed-suffixation rule, and irregular verbs (dug), which are retrieved from memory. Word-finding difficulties in posterior aphasia, and the general declarative memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease, led to more errors with irregular than regular and novel verbs. Grammatical difficulties in anterior aphasia, and the general impairment of procedures in Parkinson's disease, led to the opposite pattern. In contrast to the Parkinson's patients, who showed suppressed motor activity and rule use, Huntington's disease patients showed excess motor activity and rule use, underscoring a role for the basal ganglia in grammatical processing.