A magyar kognitív pszichológia 30 éve (1990–2020)

Az áttekintő írás a magyar kognitív pszichológia és kognitív tudomány utóbbi 30 évét mutatja be. Intézményesen sokat jelentett a ’90-es években a Soros Alapítvány támogatása az egyetemi kognitív programokban, melynek egyik következménye, hogy ma Budapesten három kognitív tanszék működik. Az intézményes fejlődés második oldala a sok szakmát érintő konferenciák (MAKOG) sorozata és a bekapcsolódás a nemzetközi kognitív oktatási programokba. Tudományos tartalmában a magyar kognitív kutatás is elmozdult a lehorgonyzatlan tiszta kognitív modellektől az idegrendszeri, fejlődési, szociális és evolúciós értelmezés irányába, részben hazai hagyományokat is folytatva. Fontosabb sikeres területei az észlelés, elsősorban a látás és hallás fejlődésének vizsgálata (Kovács, Winkler), az emlékezeti gátlás és az implicit emlékezeti rendszerek neuropszichológiai értelmezése (Racsmány, Németh), a pszicholingvisztikában a magyar mondatszerkezet és az alaktan megértési modellekbe illesztése (Pléh, Lukács, Gergely), a magyar téri nyelv fejlődési és patológiás jellemzése (Pléh, Lukács), a képes beszéd elemzése pszichopatológiai folyamatokban (Schnell), és a metaforikusság és gyakoriság neuropszichológiai szétválasztása (Forgács). A fejlődési pszicholingvisztika legfontosabb eredményei a korai tudatelmélet nyelvelsajátítási szerepével kapcsolatosak (Kovács, Téglás, Király, Forgács). Tisztázták azt is, hogy a nyelvi fejlődés zavarai Williams-szindrómában és az ún. specifikus nyelvi zavarban (Lukács, Racsmány, Ladányi) a munkaemlékezeti rendszer moduláló szerepével, illetve általános tanulási zavarokkal kapcsolatosak, különös tekintettel a procedurális rendszerek zavaraira ( Lukács, Racsmány, Ladányi). Az utóbbi érintettségét számos neurológiai nyelvi zavarban is kimutatták (Janacsek, Németh, Lukács).The review paper surveys the last 30 years of Hungarian cognitive psychology. Institutionally, support by the Soros foundation in the 90s for the university cognitive programs had as one consequence that three departments of cognition are active in Budapest today. Another aspect of insitutional development was the series of multidisciplinary conferences in Hungary (MAKOG), and Hungarian involvement in international graduate training programs in cognitive science. In its scientific substance, Hungarian cognitive research, like elsewhere in the world, moved from unanchored pure cognitive models towards neural, developmental, social, and evolutionary interpretations, partly also influenced by Hungarian traditions. Some of the most important domains of Hungarian cognitive research are perception, especially studies on the development of vision and hearing (Kovács, Winkler), neuropsychological interpretation of memory inhibition and implicit memory systems (Racsmány, Németh). In psycholinguistics, issues of Hungarian morphology and sentence processing were integrated in models of understanding (Pléh, Lukács, Gergely), alongside with a developmental and clinical characterization of Hungarian spatial language (Pléh, Lukács). Figurative language use was extensively studied in psychopathological contexts (Schnell), and a model was developed towards a neuropsychological separation of metaphoricity and frequency issues (Forgács). The most important results of developmental psycholinguistics are related to the role of ToM in early language acquisition (Kovács, Téglás, Király, Forgács). Contrastive studies also clarified that problems with language development in Williams syndrome, and the so called SLI (Lukács, Racsmány, Ladányi) are related to the modulating role of the working memory system and to general learning disturbances, with a special regard to disorders of procedural systems (Lukács, Racsmány, Ladányi). The involvement of this later system in several neurologically conditioned language disturbances was also observed (Janacsek, Németh, Lukács).

Sentence First, Arguments Afterward

This book collects the most significant papers written by Lila R. Gleitman, spanning 50 years of research on language and its acquisition. The book traces the roots of developmental psycholinguistics while presenting empirically driven arguments in favor of a rationalist theory of language acquisition. Gleitman’s work simultaneously shows how learners acquire knowledge richer than what can be found in the environment and how they use their input to acquire a specific language. The book also includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky and an introductory chapter by Jeffrey Lidz contextualizing Gleitman’s work in the transition from structuralism to mentalist architectures in linguistics.

Syntax and working memory in typically-developing children

A growing trend in developmental psycholinguistics is to relate linguistic development to the development of other cognitive systems. Jakubowicz (2005, 2011) in particular argued that the processing of a complex sentence requires considerable working memory (WM) resources and that these resources are limited in young children, which would explain their non-adult grammar. The present research aims to clarify the relationship between WM and complex syntax, in comprehension, repetition, and spontaneous production, in 48 typically-developing children aged 5 to 12. Our results demonstrate a strong age effect for all measures of WM and syntax. They also reveal strong correlations between scores on simple and complex spans and syntactic performance. Finally, we show the highly predictive value of WM capacities on the acquisition of syntactic skills in both comprehension and production. In particular, the complex-span task, measuring counting span, explains the largest part of the variance in the spontaneous production of embedded clauses.

"Look up!" Using easy words to explain how we learn hard words and other aspects of language, an interview with Lila Gleitman

Lila Gleitman is undoubtedly one of the world’s foremost experts on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics. Starting in the 60s, she rose to prominence by bringing experimental methods from psychology to bear on the questions raised by linguistics and philosophers of language, namely how children could learn the rules of a language when there is so much ambiguity both in the language and in the world surrounding them. She has done much work in this vein, focusing both on how children learn words that refer to abstract concepts such as think or believe, as well as how they acquire concepts when they lack certain inputs, such as in the case of blind or deaf children. Though her contributions and collaborations span many questions and problems in language acquisition, she is perhaps best known for proposing and showing that, from an early age, children are capable of using syntactic cues to learn the meaning of words, particularly verbs (especially those she describes as “hard words” because they are difficult or impossible to observe, like think). Through this process, termed syntactic bootstrapping, young children would be able rely on the linguistic context in which the words appear to discover aspects of the meanings of words that they don’t know yet (e.g., Landau & Gleitman, 1985; Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005). More specifically, Lila and her collaborators proposed that syntax could serve as a “zoom lens” allowing language learners to figure out which part of the world is being talked about, which would then help them identify candidate meanings for novel words (e.g., Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz, & Gleitman, 1994). ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2018.v14n3a22643

– Linguistic knowledge of the selected groups of people with disabilities in the course of educational research – constraints and opportunities

The aim of the article is to identify certain limitations in the research conducted in a group of people with intellectual disabilities and people with hearing impairments. On the basis of reports from the field of developmental psycholinguistics it has been assumed that some of the limitations of research in the above-mentioned study groups will result from the shortcomings of linguistic knowledge of these people. It should be emphasised that linguistic difficulties have completely different backgrounds in the selected groups of people with disabilities, which was sought to be explained here. The authors attempt to identify opportunities posed by qualitative methods increasingly used in the social sciences, including special education. The success of the research procedure, both in the paradigm of the quantitative and qualitative strategies, depends on the level of communication skills and language subjects of the research (respondents, but also researchers).

Why shouldn’t she spit on his grave? Critical discourse analysis of the revenge narratives in american popular film from the developmental point of view

One of the premises of developmental psycholinguistics is that we live our life according to certain narratives that are learned through language and media. These narratives teach children to express emotions and to attribute actions in a variety of life situations; they construct the way in which the threatening feelings such as anger, injustice, or the urge of vengeance are experienced. In this paper, we present a critical analysis of the gendered discourse in popular American cinema, based on the plot analysis of 60 films featuring male or female protagonist seeking revenge. We use critical discourse analysis to decipher the patterns of the gender roles, behaviors, and emotions, which these movies intent to force upon the viewer. As the psychological research does not clearly testify to gender differences in the experience and expression of the trait anger, we would like to argue that it is a matter of the socially moderated narrative patterns, rather than inborn tendencies, that urges boys and girls to play such different roles in those situations as well as experience them in distinct ways. Our most crucial conclusion is that Western societies have developed the narrative-based mechanisms which later helped to successfully discourage women from expressing anger in the form of physical aggression, under the threat of being left out of the discourses of femininity and, in some cases, humanity.

Developmental psycholinguistics teaches us that we need multi-method, not single-method, approaches to the study of linguistic representation

In developmental psycholinguistics, we have, for many years, been generating and testing theories that propose both descriptions of adult representations and explanations of how those representations develop. We have learnt that restricting ourselves to any one methodology yields only incomplete data about the nature of linguistic representations. We argue that we need a multi-method approach to the study of representation.

Computational Theories of Learning and Developmental Psycholinguistics

There is a bright future for research which honestly integrates the insights of computational learning theories with the insights and methodologies of developmental psycholinguistics. With this aim in mind, this chapter surveys results in computational learning theory focusing on the many formal definitions of learning and the kinds of patterns which can and cannot be learned according to these definitions. The main takeaways are that the central problem of learning is generalization, that feasible learning can only occur when target classes of patterns are restricted and structured appropriately, and that debates pitting statistical learning against symbolic learning are largely misplaced since the real issue there is about which data presentations learners should succeed on.