Common Ground
Common ground is the sum of the knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, and assumptions that a set of people believe they share. For people to do things together, they must act on information in their common ground. Two people playing tennis must assume they share the rules of the game, the ability to serv
Compositionality
Compositionality is a central concept in cognitive science, with applications in linguistic, visual, and general cognition. In studies on language, the principle says that the meaning of a syntactically complex phrase is a function of the meanings of its constituent parts and the way they are combin
Computational Models of Language Learning
A computational model of language learning is a formal description of how linguistic input can be transformed into either mental representations or (linguistic) behavior. For instance, a model may formally describe how a speech signal directed at a child can be processed to learn word-meaning mappin
Conversation
When people use language together in informal social interactions, whether spoken or signed, researchers often describe it as conversation. While having a conversation can be a social activity in its own right, the term also applies to interactive language that accompanies everyday practical activit
Developmental Language Disorder
Developmental language disorder is diagnosed in the approximately 8% children who would be expected to acquire their first language(s) readily—given their seemingly age-appropriate rate of development in other cognitive domains and their receipt of sufficiently rich language input—but who neverthele
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is widely defined as a severe and persistent difficulty in learning to read (and often spell) words despite receiving instruction that is effective for peers. The causes of dyslexia remain unclear, with multiple candidates proposed (e.g., poor phonological processing, visual and auditory de
Iconicity
Iconicity refers to instances in which the form of a signal (e.g., the sound of a word, the shape of a hand sign) is perceived as resembling its meaning in some way. A notable example in spoken language is onomatopoeia: words whose sounds imitate a sound in the world (e.g., “oink,” “slurp,” “click”)
Infant-Directed Speech
When communicating with infants, we use infant-directed speech, a specialized way of speaking characterized by a higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, short utterances, and frequent repetition. The language tends to be grammatically simpler, and the vocabulary is often tailored to topics relevant to
Inner Speech
Inner speech refers to the silent conversation with the self that many people report. Also termed internal monologue, inner dialogue, inner speaking, verbal thinking, and covert self-talk, inner speech is increasingly researched as an important feature of human conscious experience. New cognitive an
Language
Human language has long provided a crucible for new theories and methods in nearly all areas of cognitive science. Fiery debates have arisen, and critical advances have been made through investigations into how best to characterize relationships between form and function, the extent and implications
Language Acquisition
Child language acquisition is the process by which infants and children come to speak the language of the community around them. Children must acquire a great deal of linguistic knowledge, including the set of speech sounds in the language they are learning, the ways in which their language combines
Language Evolution
The study of language evolution aims to uncover why language is the way it is and how it came to be that way. Answering these questions is difficult because the typical methods for studying the evolution of a trait—by tracing anatomical changes in the fossil record or by comparing the behavior of li
Language Production
Speakers are typically aware of the ideas they want to express but not the steps involved in getting from those ideas to a series of motor movements. Consider describing an image with the sentence, “Bees are stinging a man.” The idea that starts the production processes contains no order between the
Language Socialization
Language socialization concerns the role language plays in a person becoming a member of a social group and how a learner is guided, overtly or covertly, to use language(s) as a cultural competency. Children’s early utterances and gestures are not primarily produced for referential purposes but rath
Large Language Models
A large language model (LLM) is a computational system, typically a deep neural network with a large number of tunable parameters (i.e., weights), that implements a mathematical function called a language model. A language model (LM), in its most general form, is a probability distribution over poss
Linguistic Universals
Linguistic universals are generalizations about language structure hypothesized to hold for all human languages. A common view is that linguistic universals are unrestricted, that is, of the form ‘All languages have X’ (e.g., ‘All languages have nouns and verbs’). However, languages are extremely di
Linguistic Variation
Languages and their users show considerable variability. While crosslinguistic variation amongst the world’s 7,000 or so languages is self-evident, there exists significant variation amongst individuals (i.e., individual differences) and within and across communities of language users (i.e., socioli
Literacy
Literacy refers to the ability to read and write. Literacy is fundamental to many aspects of modern life, but it is not a capacity that humans develop naturally. Instead, children need to be taught to read, and as a result, a large proportion of the world’s population never becomes literate. Yet, re
Meaning
The meaning of an expression is the idea or message it communicates. For example, “tennis balls are yellow” communicates a fact about the color of tennis balls in virtue of the meaning of “yellow.” Language has often been the focus of theories of meaning, but it is not the exclusive object of study.
Morphology
Morphology is the study of the structure of words and their constituent parts. The subparts of words are called morphemes. For example, the English (Indo-European) words cat-s, walk-ed, and un-believ-able can each be analyzed as consisting of two or three morphemes, indicted by hyphens. Plural -s an
Neuroscience of Language
Language is a key faculty for human communication. Across the last few decades, neuroimaging work provided insight into the contribution of distributed areas in the brain to different language operations, including the processing of meaning, sound, structure, and speech melody. These studies emphasi
Neuroscience of Syntax
Syntax is a system of constraints on how words can combine into phrases and sentences to create complex meanings. Languages vary in the precise nature of these constraints: For example, some languages have strict word order rules, whereas other languages allow more flexibility in the ordering of wor
Phonology
Phonology is the study of sound patterns in spoken language. These patterns include contrastive sound inventories, regularities in sound distribution, and alternations of sounds. Components of sound patterns are usually expressed in terms of five basic phonological category types: (1) distinctive fe
Prosody
Prosody refers to the rhythmic and tonal properties of language that transcend individual words or sounds. Core prosodic features include variations in duration (the shortening and stretching of the syllables of a word), stress levels (volume or loudness, often associated with emphasis), and fundame
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that combines principles and methods from both psychology and linguistics and applies them to the study of psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. The field uses a range of methods
Sentence Processing
Sentence processing is the study of how humans understand sentences. The central question is how we recognize and interpret compositional linguistic material—the larger, new expressions built up from smaller, familiar parts. Sentences are a major locus of novel composition, but so are phrases and ev
Sign Language
Sign language refers to a language form expressed in a different modality, using the hands, face, and body, in contrast to spoken language, which principally uses the vocal tract. Natural sign languages are found in communities around the world, ranging from very large Deaf community sign languages
Signaling
In the forests of the Indian subcontinent, a tiger rears up to scratch marks high on a tree trunk, letting other tigers know the individual claiming this territory is a big one. Over in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, a dominant female baboon grunts to a subordinate female as she approaches, assuagi
Sound Symbolism
Sound symbolism is the nonarbitrary association between (speech) sound and meaning. The association may be iconic (i.e., based on resemblance, as with beep for a high electronic noise and zigzag for a repeated Z-shaped line), indexical (i.e., based on a causal relation, as with wow for admiration an
Speech Errors
Speech errors, or slips of the tongue, happen when speakers unintentionally deviate from what they want to say. Errors can involve word exchanges, such as “this spring has a seat in it” instead of “this seat has a spring in it,” moving parts of words while leaving others in place, as in saying “truc
Speech Recognition
For listeners to understand speech, they must recognize the constituent words of spoken utterances. The cognitive science of speech recognition has therefore focused on developing theories of how words are recognized and on constructing computational models instantiating those theories. Researchers
Syntactic Priming
Language allows us to communicate various meanings, including novel messages (e.g., “The engineer airdropped 24GB of prototype designs to his wife’s laptop”). This ability depends on syntactic structures in the language system, but it can be difficult to study these representations, as most people a
Word Learning
One important part of learning a language involves mastering the forms of words and linking these to their meanings. Because words are not only part of language but also delimiters of specific concepts and means for social action, word learning has been a central topic in cognitive science. Although
Word Meaning
A word’s meaning is the set of knowledge associated with a particular spoken, written, or signed word form that captures what the word refers to and how it is used and understood in context. This information is referred to as lexical–semantic knowledge and is typically distinguished from grammatical