2000 — 2004 |
Pinker, Steven |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Development and Neural Bases of Words and Rules
This project studies how language works, how it develops in the child, and how it is computed by the brain. The key idea is that language is an interaction between words, which are pairings between a sound and a meaning stored in memory, and rules, which combine words into larger words and sentences. It uses irregular (bring-brought) and regular (walk-walked) inflection to study this interaction, because irregular forms are memorized, like words, whereas regular forms are generated by a rule ("add -ed"), like sentences, but they are matched in meaning, grammar, and complexity. The pacing of language development will be studied in twins: if a part of language develops in closer synchrony in identical twins (who share all their genes) than fraternal twins (who share half their genes), genes may affect the acquisition of that part; if the pattern is the same in the two kinds of twins, acquisition would be paced instead by environmental input. By measuring the development of vocabulary, word combinations, and past tense forms (especially errors like breaked, which could only be produced by rule), one can determine whether word-memory and rule-combination are differently influenced by biological maturation and by information in the environment. Processing of language in the brain will be studied using magnetoencephalography (MEG), the measurement of rapid magnetic signals from the cortex, which can map brain activation as a person assembles (regular) or retrieves (irregular) past tense forms. These studies will be complemented with event-related functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of past tense generation, and by measuring lesion-symptom correlations in neurological patients asked to provide past tense forms for regular, irregular, and novel verbs. The benefits of documenting the development and neural bases of words and rules include better understanding of children with delayed and disordered language, and of the abilities of patients with lesions or degeneration of the brain.
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2015 — 2017 |
Niemi, Laura Snedeker, Jesse (co-PI) [⬀] Pinker, Steven |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
The Psycholinguistics of Morality
The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship trains an interdisciplinary scientist exploring the Psycholinguistics of Morality, which is a fascinating subject at the intersection of social psychology and linguistics.
Research in cognitive science and social-moral psychology indicates that people make lightning fast causal and moral judgments when they encounter information communicating harmful interpersonal events, and that social attitudes factor into judgments of blameworthiness. However, other research in linguistics suggests that representations of causation may be primarily rooted in basic properties of language including verb meaning, and, thus, are largely impervious to social category information and motivation. This research examines the extent to which causal attribution for morally-relevant events -- including violence and coercion -- is determined by a social-cognitive architecture revealed in patterns of language processing. Thus, it bridges a gap between these disciplines and represents the launch of a new interdisciplinary area of concentration: the psycholinguistics of morality. Specifically, this project investigates whether implied gender and race in minimal language sets up implicit causal representations of an event to be biased toward the sentence subject or object before any substantive information about an event is communicated ? a possibility with profound implications for our understanding of everyday judgment and decision-making. Moreover, this project investigates the extent to which information about distinctiveness and mental state capacities shifts implicit causal attributions, and, downstream, explicit causal attributions (i.e., self-compassion and self-blame). Legal arguments, the news media, educational materials, psychotherapeutic interventions, and public health warnings often draw upon people?s intuitive statistical models (e.g., by using statements about distinctiveness, or whether outcomes are likely to affect particular people or groups) and emphasize mental state information (e.g., by using statements about people?s capacities for thinking and planning versus feeling and sensing). Thus, this research has implications for the use of this information in messaging in multiple domains of everyday life. Finally, by determining the extent to which explicit causal attribution can be altered through these cognitive-linguistic pathways, this project also paves the way for potential broader positive impacts, including interventions aimed at attenuating inappropriate blaming and improving day-to-day well-being.
A series of behavioral studies in three phases unites methods from psychology and linguistics in order to track causal processing inaccessible to conscious awareness through patterns in language processing. Phase 1 maps the effects of implied gender and race on linguistic signatures of causal attribution for morally-relevant actions and determines their connections with: a) social attitudes, b) representations of distinctiveness (i.e., intuitive statistical models), and c) representations of mental states. Phase 2 directly tests effects on implicit causality from interventions on two potential cognitive mechanisms: representations of (a) distinctiveness, and (b) mental state capacities. Phase 3 involves determining effects on explicit causal attribution (i.e., self-compassion and self-blame) from interventions on implicit causality. Besides revealing the complexity of causal processing of morally-relevant action in language and thought, the project addresses specific concerns within and across disciplines. For linguistics, these studies aim to inform the critical project of delineating intrinsic properties of the lexicon from extrinsic effects on language from world knowledge. For social-moral psychology, these studies bring new focus to the role of purely linguistic features in moral judgment of human behavior. And, by increasing understanding of the consequences of shifting causal representations in language and thought, this research addresses issues at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and social-moral psychology, including the extent to which explicit causal models are alterable through interventions on implicit causality via general cognitive representations (e.g., models of distinctiveness and/or mental state capacities).
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