http://psych.colorado.edu/~kimlab/Gibson.1998.pdf

Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies

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.

http://www.biolinguagem.com/ling_cog_cult/pinker_bloom_1990_naturallanguage_naturalselection.pdf

Natural language and natural selection

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.

The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution

http://psych.colorado.edu/~kimlab/Ullman_Cognition_04.pdf

Contributions of memory circuits to language: the declarative/procedural model

In this article it is argued that language can be seen as a dynamic system, i.e. a set of variables that interact over time, and that language development can be seen as a dynamic process. Language development shows some of the core characteristics of dynamic systems: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, complete interconnectedness of subsystems, the emergence of attractor states in development over time and variation both in and among individuals. The application of tools and instruments developed for the study of dynamic systems in other disciplines calls for different approaches to research, which allow for the inclusion of both the social and the cognitive, and the interaction between systems. There is also a need for dense data bases on first and second language development to enhance our understanding of the fine-grained patterns of change over time. Dynamic Systems Theory is proposed as a candidate for an overall theory of language development.

/pdf/a-dynamic-systems-theory-approach-to-second-language-4ismjciiqt.pdf

A Dynamic Systems Theory approach to second language acquisition

Functionalism and the Competition Model ELIZABETH BATES and BRIAN MACWHINNEY The development of sentence interpretation in Hungarian CSABA PLEH and BRIAN MACWHINNEY The development of role assignment in Hebrew, JEFFREY L.SOKOLOV Cue validity, cue cost and processing types in sentence comprehension in French and Spanish, MICHELE KAIL Cues to sentence interpretation in Warlpiri, EDITH L.BAVIN and TIM SHOPEN Cognitive structures in language production: a cross-linguistic study SHIKARIPUR N.SRIDHAR Cross-linguistic studies of sentence production, ELIZABETH BATES and ANTONELLA DEVESCOVI Sentence processing strategies in adult bilinguals, KERRY KILBORN and TAKEHIKO ITO The learner's problem of arranging words, WOLFGANG KLEIN and CLIVE PERDUE Cross-linguistic studies of aphasia, ELIZABETH BATES and BEVERLY WULFECK The acquisition of cue-category mappings, JANET McDONALD Maximum likelihood models for sentence processing JANET McDONALD and BRIAN MACWHINNEY.

The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing

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The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing