Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T06:11:13.206Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Working memory and language: From phonology to grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2017

William O'Grady*
Affiliation:
University of Hawai'I at Manoa

Extract

Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan (2017) are right to suggest that working memory is a crucial part of the machinery underlying linguistic development. In this brief commentary, I will move beyond the emergence of phonological representations, on which Pierce et al.’s essay focuses, and consider ways in which working memory shapes the character and acquisition of grammatical phenomena, a topic that has been explored in various ways in the recent literature (e.g., Chater & Christiansen, 2010; Hawkins, 2014; O'Grady, 2005, 2015).

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Chater, N., & Christiansen, M. (2010). Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive Science, 34, 11311157.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1989). Comprehending sentences with long-distance dependencies. In Carlson, G. & Tanenhaus, M. (Eds.), Linguistic structure in language processing (pp. 273317). Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conroy, A., Takahashi, E., Lidz, J., & Phillips, C. (2009). Equal treatment for all antecedents: How children succeed with Principle B. Linguistic Inquiry, 40, 446486.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, J. (2014). Cross-linguistic variation and efficiency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joo, K., Deen, K., & O'Grady, W. (2015). Acquisition of the Korean reflexive pronoun in intra-sentential binding and extra-sentential binding. In Grillo, E. & Jepson, K. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 279288). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
O'Grady, W. (2005). Syntactic carpentry. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Grady, W. (2015). Anaphora and the case for emergentism. In MacWhinney, B. & O'Grady, W. (Eds.), The handbook of language emergence (pp. 100122). West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierce, L. J., Genesee, F., Delcenserie, A., & Morgan, G. (2017). Variations in phonological working memory: Linking early language experiences and language learning outcomes. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38, 12651302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pullum, G. (1997). The morphological nature of English to-contraction. Language, 73, 79102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Su, Y. (2004.) The development of long-distance binding for Chinese ziji revisited. Chinese Journal of Psychology, 46, 249257.Google Scholar
Warren, P., Speer, S. & Schafer, A. (2003). Wanna-contraction and prosodic disambiguation in US and NZ English. Wellington Working Papers in Linguistics, 15, 3149.Google Scholar