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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.
by Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
by Thomas G. Bever, Susan Franck, John Morton and Steven Pinker
by Luca L. Bonatti
by Dan Sperber
by Zenon Pylyshyn
by Philip N. Johnson-Laird
by Ned Block
by Christophe Pallier and Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Lévi
by Marina Nespor
by Thomas G. Bever and David J. Townsend
Debate?
by Steven Pinker
by Anne Cutler, James M. McQueen, Dennis Norris and A. Somejuan
Lexical Processing
by Juan Segui, Ulricht Frauenfelder and Pierre Hallé
by Alfonso Caranaza, Michele Miozzo, Albert Costa, Neils Schiller and F.-Xavier Alario
by Merrill Garrett
Neurological Observations
by Willem J. M. Levelt
by Anne Christophe
by John Morton and Uta Frith
by Rochel Gelman and Sara Cordes
by Susan Carey
by Elizabeth Spelke and Susan Hespos
by Renée Baillargeon
by Peter W. Jusczyk
by Nária Sebastán-Gallés and Laura Bosch
by Stanislaus Dehaene, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz and Laurent Cohen
by Michael I. Posner
by Marc Hauser
by Isabelle Peretz
by Albert M. Galaburda
by José Morais and Régine Kolinsky
Acquisition
by Elissa L. Newport, Daphne Bavelier and Helen J. Neville
by John C. Marshall
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 stu-
dents or professors at the Ecole Normale Sup´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 neuro-
science. 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 cogni-
tive 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 pro-
cessing: representations and computations over representations, as in a
computer programming language. At the methodological level, informa-
tion processing provides a common vocabulary that allows us to integrate
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