Online Publications

Can Chimps Talk? - Introductory essay by Robert Beard discussing animal language studies and their implications for nativism, the doctrine that humans possess a specialised faculty for language acquisition.

Chih-Hao Tsai's Research Page - General overviews and references on the subjects of language processing, the mental lexicon and language processing in Chinese.

Genie, Secret of the Wild Child - Broadcast transcript about a girl who grew up without exposure to language until she was 13 years old.

How Brains Think - Online text of a book by W. H. Calvin. Outlines his view of the evolution of higher cognitive functions and the circuitry that supports them in the neocortex, drawing on anthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the neurosciences.

Mama Teached Me Talk - Introductory essay by Robert Beard on the tacit nature of first language acquistion.

A Review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior - Noam Chomsky's much cited review (1959) of the ultimate behaviorist work on language. Includes the introduction to the 1967 reprint.

Three cognitive theories: major differences and similarities - Talmy, Langacker, Jackendoff - Paper (Bilyana Martinovski, 1995) comparing the cognitive theories of language of Jackendoff, Langacker and Talmy.