Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development Emmanuel Dupoux

Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development Emmanuel Dupoux In the early 1960s, the bold project of the emerging field of cognition was to put the human mind under the scrutiny of rational inquiry, through the conjoined efforts of philosophy, linguistics, computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. Forty years later, cognitive science is a flourishing academic field. The contributions to this collection, written in honor of Jacques Mehler, a founder of the field of psycholinguistics, assess the progress of cognitive science. The questions addressed include: What have we learned or not learned about language, brain, and cognition? Where are we now? Where have we failed? Where have we succeeded? The book is organized into four sections in addition to the introduction: thought, language, neuroscience, and brain and biology. Some chapters cut across several sections, attesting to the cross-disciplinary nature of the field. Preface Contributors I Introduction 1 Portrait of a "Classical" Cognitive Scientist: What I have Learned from Jacques Mehler by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini 2 Cognition -- Some Personal Histories (with Pinker's appendix) by Thomas G. Bever, Susan Franck, John Morton and Steven Pinker II Thought Representations, Psychological Reality, and Beyond by Luca L. Bonatti 3 In Defense of Massive Modularity by Dan Sperber 4 Is the Imagery Debate Over? If So, What Was It About? by Zenon Pylyshyn 5 Mental Models and Human Reasoning by Philip N. Johnson-Laird 6 Is the Content of Experience the Same as the Content of Thought? by Ned Block III Language Introduction by Christophe Pallier and Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Lévi 7 About Parameters, Prominence, and Bootstrapping by Marina Nespor 8 Some Sentences on Our Consciousness of Sentences by Thomas G. Bever and David J. Townsend 9 Four Decades of Rules and Associations, or Whatever Happened to the Past Tense Debate? by Steven Pinker 10 The Roll of the Silly Ball by Anne Cutler, James M. McQueen, Dennis Norris and A. Somejuan 11 Phonotactic Constraints Shape Speech Perception: Implications for Sublexical and Lexical Processing by Juan Segui, Ulricht Frauenfelder and Pierre Hallé 12 A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Determiner Production by Alfonso Caranaza, Michele Miozzo, Albert Costa, Neils Schiller and F.-Xavier Alario 13 Now You See It, Now You Don't: Frequency Effects in Language Production by Merrill Garrett 14 Relations between Speech Production and Speech Perception: Some Behavioral and Neurological Observations by Willem J. M. Levelt IV Development How to Study Development by Anne Christophe 15 Why We Need Cognition: Cause and Developmental Disorder by John Morton and Uta Frith 16 Counting in Animals and Humans by Rochel Gelman and Sara Cordes 17 On the Very Possibility of Discontinuities in Conceptual Development by Susan Carey 18 Continuity, Competence, and the Object Concept by Elizabeth Spelke and Susan Hespos 19 Infants' Physical Knowledge: Of Acquired Expectations and Core Principles by Renée Baillargeon 20 Learning Language: What Infants Know about I, and What We Don't Know about That by Peter W. Jusczyk 21 On Becoming and Being Bilingual by Nária Sebastán-Gallés and Laura Bosch V Brain and Biology On Language, Biology, and Reductionism by Stanislaus Dehaene, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz and Laurent Cohen 22 Cognitive Neuroscience: The Synthesis of Mind and Brain by Michael I. Posner 23 What's So Special about Speech? by Marc Hauser 24 The Biological Foundations of Music by Isabelle Peretz 25 Brain and Sounds: Lessons from "Dyslexic" Rodents by Albert M. Galaburda 26 The Literate Mind and the Universal Human Mind by José Morais and Régine Kolinsky 27 Critical Thinking about Critical Periods: Perspectives on a Critical Period for Language Acquisition by Elissa L. Newport, Daphne Bavelier and Helen J. Neville 28 Cognition and Neuroscience: Where Were We? by John C. Marshall Appendix: Short Biography of Jacques Mehler Afterword Index mindwrapper Preface The history of the term “cognition” is rather short, even if the underlying intellectual issues have been with us for quite a while. When I arrived in Jacques Mehler’s Paris laboratory in 1984, “cognition” was either un- known or had pretty bad press among most of my fellow graduate students or professors at the Ecole Normale Supe´rieure. I was advised that there were much more serious matters to be pursued, like, for instance, psychoanalysis or artificial intelligence. Fortunately enough, I was also directed to Jacques’s lab where I discovered that there existed a domain, called cognitive science, which project was boldly to put the human mind under the scrutiny of rational inquiry, and to do so through the conjoined fire of philosophy, linguistics, computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. Further, I discovered that this field of inquiry had started more than twenty years ago in the United States, and that Jacques was one of its prominent protagonists. Jacques’s contribution to this field is uncontested. He made impor- tant discoveries both in adult and infant cognition, some of which are discussed in this book. He created and still is the editor-in-chief of an international journal, Cognition, one of the most innovative and pres- tigious in the field (see the chapter by Bever, Franck, Morton, and Pinker). He started a lab at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences So- ciales in Paris, featuring one of the very few newborn testing units in the world, and trained with enthusiasm, warmth, and rigor several genera- tions of scientists, who now work in some of the most interesting places in Europe. All of this was achieved in the Paris of the sixties and post- sixties, not a small feat considering the quite unreceptive intellectual x Preface milieu predominant then (see the chapter by Piatelli-Palmarini). Of course, cognition is now well known in France; it excites the public’s attention, attracts governmental money. Everybody is doing cognition these days; however, it should be remembered that if this term is to have any substantive meaning, it is in some respectable part due to Jacques’s years of uphill battle to establish it as a contentful field of inquiry. Jacques is now leaving his Paris lab as a legacy to his former students and is starting a new intellectual venture in Italy. His sixty-fifth birthday, which coincides with the opening of his new research center in Trieste, gives us an ideal occasion for both honoring him and reflecting on cognitive science. Why is this interesting? Where are we going with this? What does this tell us? These are some of the often embarrassing questions that Jacques typically asks his students or colleagues during conferences. In this book, these questions were posed to some of Jacques’s close collaborators, friends, and former students. The outcome is a collection of chapters that forms an instantaneous snapshot, a patchwork of what is going on in the active brains of these scientists who are currently studying cognitive science. Some chapters provide critical reviews of where we have gone so far. Others offer bold and provoking hypotheses about where we ought to go. Others point to as yet unresolved paradoxes. If some chapters are in flat disagreement with others, unexpected convergence arises elsewhere in spite of apparently disconnected empirical perspectives. This should not be surprising. It corresponds to a living field which allows for diver- gent views and paradigms, as long as there is a principled way to settle the issue by confronting the facts. Through the selection of contributors, however, this book reflects a certain conception of cognitive science. It is a conception that Jacques has always vehemently advocated, in spite of some resistance both from inside and outside the field. It states that it is both valid and of central importance to build a functional characterization of the mind. Such a characterization considers mentation to be essentially information processing: representations and computations over representations, as in a computer programming language. At the methodological level, information processing provides a common vocabulary that allows us to integrate Preface xi the conceptual tools coming from analyical philosophy and the experi- mental tools of the behavioral sciences and neuroscience. At the explana- tory level, representations and computations over representations enter into a causal chain and are essential to account for how a collection of neurons produce such and such behavior when immersed in a given envi- ronment (see the chapter by Morton for a similar point in the context of developmental disorders). I hope this book illustrates that such a conception has some value and can indeed help bridge the gap between the world of the neurological substrate, the world of observable behavior, and the world of phenomenal experience. Apart from the first section of the book, which is devoted to an intellectual biography of Jacques, the book is divided into four substantive parts: Thought, Language, Development, and Brain and Biology, each one being presented by some of Jacques’s close former students or colleagues. As the reader will quickly notice, many articles could appear in more than one part of the book. Such a flaw in the structure of the book is interesting for two reasons: First, it attests to the degree of cross-disciplinary integra- tion that the field has achieved. Second, it eloquently illustrates one of Jacques’s recurrent lessons, that is, that one should not study thought, language, development, and brain separately. Specifically, he has argued on many occasions that the study of the developing infant is intrinsically linked to that of the adult (see Christophe’s introduction to Develop- ment). Second, although he has actually warned against too premature a link between brain and cognition, he was among the first to take the cognitive neuroscience turn and strongly advised us to take neuroimag- ing seriously (see the introduction to Brain and Biology by Dehaene, Dehaene-Lambertz, and Cohen).

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