Language Down the Garden Path: The Cognitive and Biological Basis of Linguistic Structures (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. This text traces the lines of research that grew out of Thomas Bever's 'The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures'. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition; the current status of universals; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. This book traces the lines of research that grew out of Thomas Bever's "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition; the current status of universals; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. "The workshop that originated this book was entitled "Understanding language : forty years down the garden path". It took place in July 2010." --Acknowledgements p. [xii]