Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structures(4 Oxford Studies in Biolinguistics)

Thomas G. Bever's now iconic sentence, The horse raced past the barn fell, first appeared in his 1970 paper "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". This 'garden path sentence', so-called because of the way it leads the reader or listener down the wrong parsing path, helped spawn the entire subfield of sentence processing. It has become the most often quoted element of a paper which spanned a wealth of research into the relationship between the grammatical system and language processing. Language Down the Garden Path traces the lines of research that grew out of Bever's classic paper. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition (the role of prediction, grammar, working memory, prosody, abstractness, syntax and semantics mapping); the current status of universals and narrow syntax; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book will appeal to all those interested in understanding the questions that shaped, and are still shaping, this field and the ways in which linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are seeking to answer them.

Table of Contents:
Thomas G. Bever: Reprint of 'The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures' 1: Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, and Michael K. Tanenhaus: Sentence Comprehension Before and After 1970: Topics, debates, and techniques 2: Gerry T. M. Altmann: Anticipating the Garden Path: The horse raced past the barn ate the cake 3: Maryellen MacDonald: Inviting Production to the Cognitive Basis party 4: Chien-Jer Charles Lin: Thematic Templates and the Comprehension of Relative Clauses 5: Edward Gibson, Harry Tily, and Evelina Fedorenko: The Processing Complexity of English Relative Clauses 6: Gary S. Dell and Audrey K. Kittredge: Prediction, Production, Priming, and Implicit Learning: A framework for psycholinguistics 7: David J. Townsend: Enduring Themes in Sentence Comprehension: Projecting linguistic structures 8: Robert Berwick: The Multiple Bases for Linguistic Structures 9: Janet Dean Fodor: Pronouncing and Comprehending Center-embedded Sentences 10: Brian McElree and Lisbeth Dyer: Beyond Capacity: The role of memory processes in building linguistic structure in real-time 11: Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Matthias Schlesewsky: Neurotypology: Modelling cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the neurocognition of language comprehension 12: Montserrat Sanz: The Path From Certain Events to Linguistic Uncertainties 13: Massimo Piatteli-Palmarini: On Abstraction and Language Universals 14: Virginia Valian: Determiners: An empirical argument for innateness 15: Simona Mancini, Nicola Molinaro, and Manuel Carreiras: Anchoring Agreement 16: Colin Phillips: Parser-grammar Relations: We don't understand everything twice 17: Edward Stabler: The Epicenter of Linguistic Behaviour 18: Luciano Fadiga and Alessandro D'Ausilio: From Action to Language: Evidence and speculations 19: Yosef Grodzinsky: The Mirror Theory of Language: A neuro-linguist's perspective 20: Jacques Mehler: Some Issues in Current Language Acquisition Research 21: Ewan Dunbar, Brian Dillon, and William J. Idsardi: A Bayesian Evaluation of the Cost of Abstractness 22: Thomas G. Bever: The Biolinguistics of Language Universals - the next years Michael K. Tanenhaus: Afterword: The Impact of The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures: A retrospective reflection, reconstruction, and appreciation References Index

About the Author :
Montserrat Sanz Yagüe received her PhD in Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She is currently Professor in the Department of Spanish at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies (Japan). She leads a research team that explores the process of acquisition of Spanish by native speakers of Japanese. Her previous research on the syntax/semantics interface under Minimalist premises culminated in the book Events and Predication: A New Approach to Syntactic Processing in English and Spanish (John Benjamins, 2000). Recently she has published a book with José Manuel Igoa entitled Applying Language Science to Language Pedagogy: Contributions of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics to Language Teaching (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Itziar Laka received her PhD in Linguistics at MIT. She is Professor at the University of the Basque Country and Director of The Bilingual Mind research group. She is the author of Negation in Syntax (Garland, 1994), and A Brief Grammar of Euskara (1996). Her current research combines linguistics and psycholinguistics to explore the neural representation of linguistic structure in bilinguals. Michael K. Tanenhaus received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1978. He taught at Wayne State University until 1983 when he moved to the University of Rochester. His research spans a wide range of topics in psycholinguistics, with a primary focus on real-time spoken language processing. In 2011, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Review :
The variety of views there expressed, and the focus on interdisciplinary work make this book a very important tool for scholars related to any of the aforementioned disciplines, or curious about how we got here with respect to learning, processing, using, and analyzing language. The structure of the book, in terms of internal coherence, dynamic organization, and multiple recurrent motifs, is in itself a welcomed change with respect to other volumes on the topic. Structure and content thus combine to make an excellent state-of-the-art volume. Diego Gabriel Krivochen, Biolinguistics This is an exceptional book, animated by its exploration of ideas in T.G. Bever's foundational paper "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". It's a grand design that stirs the echoes of four decades of intense debate in the sciences of language. The contributors are highly accomplished scientists, and we are thus treated to an authoritative as well as a lively and stimulating range of views on ways in which human cognition shapes and is shaped by our linguistic capacity. Merrill Garrett, University of Arizona