Displaying 1 - 8 of 8
-
Levelt, W. J. M. (2018). Is language natural to man? Some historical considerations. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 21, 127-131. doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.04.003.
Abstract
Since the Enlightenment period, natural theories of speech and language evolution have florished in the language sciences. Four ever returning core issues are highlighted in this paper: Firstly, Is language natural to man or just an invention? Secondly, Is language a specific human ability (a ‘language instinct’) or does it arise from general cognitive capacities we share with other animals? Thirdly, Has the evolution of language been a gradual process or did it rather suddenly arise, due to some ‘evolutionary twist’? Lastly, Is the child's language acquisition an appropriate model for language evolution? -
Levelt, W. J. M. (2016). Localism versus holism. Historical origins of studying language in the brain. In R. Rubens, & M. Van Dijk (
Eds. ), Sartoniana vol. 29 (pp. 37-60). Ghent: Ghent University. -
Levelt, W. J. M. (2016). The first golden age of psycholinguistics 1865-World War I. In R. Rubens, & M. Van Dyck (
Eds. ), Sartoniana vol. 29 (pp. 15-36). Ghent: Ghent University. -
Levelt, W. J. M., & De Swaan, A. (2016). Levensbericht Nico Frijda. In Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (
Ed. ), Levensberichten en herdenkingen 2016 (pp. 16-25). Amsterdam: KNAW. -
Meyer, A. S., Huettig, F., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2016). Same, different, or closely related: What is the relationship between language production and comprehension? Journal of Memory and Language, 89, 1-7. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2016.03.002.
-
Towle, V. L., Lee, R., Spire, J.-P., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2016). Letter to the editor. Journal of Child Neurology, 31, 804. doi:10.1177/0883073815609154.
-
Bien, H., Levelt, W. J. M., & Baayen, R. H. (2005). Frequency effects in compound production. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(49), 17876-17881.
Abstract
Four experiments investigated the role of frequency information in compound production by independently varying the frequencies of the first and second constituent as well as the frequency of the compound itself. Pairs of Dutch noun-noun compounds were selected such that there was a maximal contrast for one frequency while matching the other two frequencies. In a position-response association task, participants first learned to associate a compound with a visually marked position on a computer screen. In the test phase, participants had to produce the associated compound in response to the appearance of the position mark, and we measured speech onset latencies. The compound production latencies varied significantly according to factorial contrasts in the frequencies of both constituting morphemes but not according to a factorial contrast in compound frequency, providing further evidence for decompositional models of speech production. In a stepwise regression analysis of the joint data of Experiments 1-4, however, compound frequency was a significant nonlinear predictor, with facilitation in the low-frequency range and a trend toward inhibition in the high-frequency range. Furthermore, a combination of structural measures of constituent frequencies and entropies explained significantly more variance than a strict decompositional model, including cumulative root frequency as the only measure of constituent frequency, suggesting a role for paradigmatic relations in the mental lexicon. -
Levelt, W. J. M. (2005). Habitual perspective. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2005).
Share this page