Lila R Gleitman
Biographic Data
| ID | 731999 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lila R Gleitman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lila R |
| FAMILY NAME | Gleitman |
| SIGNATURE | GLEITMAN L R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
The present handbook is a state-of-the-art compilation of papers from leading scholars on the mental lexicon—the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and computational cognitive science. This comprehensive collec…
Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
The violin case
Structural cues for symmetry, asymmetry, and non-symmetry in Central Taurus Sign Language
We investigate how predicates expressing symmetry, asymmetry and non-symmetry are encoded in a newly emerging sign language, Central Taurus Sign Language (CTSL). We find that predicates involving symmetry (i.e., reciprocal and symmetrical actions) differ from those involving asymmetry (i.e., transitive) in their use of the morphological devices investigated here: body segmentation, mirror-image articulators and double perspective. Symmetrical pre…
The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (and How They Do It)
This autobiographical article, which began as an interview, reports some reflections by Lila Gleitman on the development of her thinking and her research—in concert with a host of esteemed collaborators over the years—on issues of language and mind, focusing on how language is acquired. Gleitman entered the field of linguistics as a student of Zellig Harris, and learned firsthand of Noam Chomsky's early work. She chose the psychological perspecti…
Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later
Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguis…
On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation
Hard Words
How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is s…
Understanding how input matters
Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll
One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog
Human simulations of vocabulary learning
The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental devel…
An Invitation to Cognitive Science
Symbolic processes in the brain - the case of insect navigation, Charles R. Gallistel The mental representation of time - uncovering a biological clock, Seth Roberts The evolution of cognition - questions we will never answer, Richard C. Lewontin Consciousness and the mind - contributions from philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, Owen Flanagan, Donald T. Dryden Cognitive algorithms - questions of representation and computation in building a …
What is a language made out of
This study clarifies the concept of customer equity in today's social media landscape. The study shows: (1) motivation to use social network services (SNS) and celebrity source credibility positively affect parasocial relationships; (2) parasocial relationships positively affect attitudes toward using SNS; (3) parasocial relationships positively affect customer equity drivers; and (4) customer equity drivers positively affect customer lifetime va…
When it is better to receive than to give
We ask how children solve the mapping problem for verb acquisition: how they pair concepts with their phonological realizations in their language. There is evidence that nouns but not verbs can be acquired by pairing each sound (e.g., 'elephant') with a concept inferred from the world circumstances in which that sound occurs. Verb meanings pose problems for this word-world mapping procedure, motivating a model of verb mapping mediated by attentio…
The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings
If we will observe how children learn languages, we will find that, to make them understand what the names of simple ideas or substances stand for, people ordinarily show them the thing whereof they would have them have the idea; and then repeat to them the name that stands for it, as 'white', 'sweet', 'milk', 'sugar', 'cat', 'dog'.
The current status of the motherese hypothesis
Partially conflicting results from correlational studies of maternal speech style and its effects on child language learning motivate a comparative discussion of Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman (1977) and Furrow, Nelson & Benedict (1979), and a reanalysis of the original Newport et al. data. In the current analysis the data are from two groups of children equated for age, in response to the methodological questions raised by Furrow et al. ; but, in …
What some concepts might not be
Old and new ways not to study comprehension
This paper rebuts a recent article in this journal (Petretic & Tweney 1977), which claimed to overthrow prior findings of ours. We show that subject populations, methods, and scoring procedures differed materially in the two studies, logically disallowing comparative interpretation of them. We demonstrate that the original study concerned syntactic organization; and that interpretation of it, or of the recent study, as bearing on comprehension is…
Phoenician Go Home? (A Response to Goodman)
Why Teaching reading by use of a syllabary occasions so polemical and intemperate a response is one of many mysteries we cannot solve. After all we didn't invent the alphabet. Dr. Goodman appears to believe that the alphabet was a dreadful historical mistake. He suggests that children can most effectively learn to read by treating each English word as if it were an ideograph for the and that literate adults bypass phonology since deep structure a…
Phrase and Paraphrase
Teaching Reading by Use of a Syllabary
USE OF THE SYLLABLE as a unit for initial acquisition of reading is advocated. It is argued that since English alphabetic writing is based on a mapping between sound-stream and symbol, a decoding approach is necessary at early stages of the acquisition process. However, conventional phonics methods confound two very difficult tasks in initial learning: 1) acquiring the notion that the orthography tracks sound directly, and meaning only indirectly…
A Study in the Acquisition of Language
Empirical investigation of the development of language has usually focused on the child as a speaker, and primarily on his spontaneous verbalizations. From this work, a picture of the successive stages of speech of the English-speaking child begins to emerge. The recent studies of Braine 1963, Miller & Ervin 1964, Brown & Fraser 1964, and Weir 1962 describe the period in which the child begins to put two or three words together under a unified in…
Coordinating Conjunctions in English
The traditional definition of conjoining particles in English is this: [i] Conjunction: A connective or connecting particle with the special function of joining together sentences, clauses, phrases or words
Pronominals and Stress in English Conjunctions1
When it is better to receive than to give
We ask how children solve the mapping problem for verb acquisition: how they pair concepts with their phonological realizations in their language. There is evidence that nouns but not verbs can be acquired by pairing each sound (e.g., 'elephant') with a concept inferred from the world circumstances in which that sound occurs. Verb meanings pose problems for this word-world mapping procedure, motivating a model of verb mapping mediated by attentio…
A Study in the Acquisition of Language
Empirical investigation of the development of language has usually focused on the child as a speaker, and primarily on his spontaneous verbalizations. From this work, a picture of the successive stages of speech of the English-speaking child begins to emerge. The recent studies of Braine 1963, Miller & Ervin 1964, Brown & Fraser 1964, and Weir 1962 describe the period in which the child begins to put two or three words together under a unified in…
Coordinating Conjunctions in English
The traditional definition of conjoining particles in English is this: [i] Conjunction: A connective or connecting particle with the special function of joining together sentences, clauses, phrases or words
One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog
Teaching Reading by Use of a Syllabary
USE OF THE SYLLABLE as a unit for initial acquisition of reading is advocated. It is argued that since English alphabetic writing is based on a mapping between sound-stream and symbol, a decoding approach is necessary at early stages of the acquisition process. However, conventional phonics methods confound two very difficult tasks in initial learning: 1) acquiring the notion that the orthography tracks sound directly, and meaning only indirectly…
What is a language made out of
This study clarifies the concept of customer equity in today's social media landscape. The study shows: (1) motivation to use social network services (SNS) and celebrity source credibility positively affect parasocial relationships; (2) parasocial relationships positively affect attitudes toward using SNS; (3) parasocial relationships positively affect customer equity drivers; and (4) customer equity drivers positively affect customer lifetime va…
The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (and How They Do It)
This autobiographical article, which began as an interview, reports some reflections by Lila Gleitman on the development of her thinking and her research—in concert with a host of esteemed collaborators over the years—on issues of language and mind, focusing on how language is acquired. Gleitman entered the field of linguistics as a student of Zellig Harris, and learned firsthand of Noam Chomsky's early work. She chose the psychological perspecti…
Pronominals and Stress in English Conjunctions1
Coordinating Conjunctions in English
The traditional definition of conjoining particles in English is this: [i] Conjunction: A connective or connecting particle with the special function of joining together sentences, clauses, phrases or words
A Study in the Acquisition of Language
Empirical investigation of the development of language has usually focused on the child as a speaker, and primarily on his spontaneous verbalizations. From this work, a picture of the successive stages of speech of the English-speaking child begins to emerge. The recent studies of Braine 1963, Miller & Ervin 1964, Brown & Fraser 1964, and Weir 1962 describe the period in which the child begins to put two or three words together under a unified in…
Phoenician Go Home? (A Response to Goodman)
Why Teaching reading by use of a syllabary occasions so polemical and intemperate a response is one of many mysteries we cannot solve. After all we didn't invent the alphabet. Dr. Goodman appears to believe that the alphabet was a dreadful historical mistake. He suggests that children can most effectively learn to read by treating each English word as if it were an ideograph for the and that literate adults bypass phonology since deep structure a…
Phrase and Paraphrase
Teaching Reading by Use of a Syllabary
USE OF THE SYLLABLE as a unit for initial acquisition of reading is advocated. It is argued that since English alphabetic writing is based on a mapping between sound-stream and symbol, a decoding approach is necessary at early stages of the acquisition process. However, conventional phonics methods confound two very difficult tasks in initial learning: 1) acquiring the notion that the orthography tracks sound directly, and meaning only indirectly…
Old and new ways not to study comprehension
This paper rebuts a recent article in this journal (Petretic & Tweney 1977), which claimed to overthrow prior findings of ours. We show that subject populations, methods, and scoring procedures differed materially in the two studies, logically disallowing comparative interpretation of them. We demonstrate that the original study concerned syntactic organization; and that interpretation of it, or of the recent study, as bearing on comprehension is…
What some concepts might not be
The current status of the motherese hypothesis
Partially conflicting results from correlational studies of maternal speech style and its effects on child language learning motivate a comparative discussion of Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman (1977) and Furrow, Nelson & Benedict (1979), and a reanalysis of the original Newport et al. data. In the current analysis the data are from two groups of children equated for age, in response to the methodological questions raised by Furrow et al. ; but, in …
The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings
If we will observe how children learn languages, we will find that, to make them understand what the names of simple ideas or substances stand for, people ordinarily show them the thing whereof they would have them have the idea; and then repeat to them the name that stands for it, as 'white', 'sweet', 'milk', 'sugar', 'cat', 'dog'.
When it is better to receive than to give
We ask how children solve the mapping problem for verb acquisition: how they pair concepts with their phonological realizations in their language. There is evidence that nouns but not verbs can be acquired by pairing each sound (e.g., 'elephant') with a concept inferred from the world circumstances in which that sound occurs. Verb meanings pose problems for this word-world mapping procedure, motivating a model of verb mapping mediated by attentio…
An Invitation to Cognitive Science
Symbolic processes in the brain - the case of insect navigation, Charles R. Gallistel The mental representation of time - uncovering a biological clock, Seth Roberts The evolution of cognition - questions we will never answer, Richard C. Lewontin Consciousness and the mind - contributions from philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, Owen Flanagan, Donald T. Dryden Cognitive algorithms - questions of representation and computation in building a …
What is a language made out of
This study clarifies the concept of customer equity in today's social media landscape. The study shows: (1) motivation to use social network services (SNS) and celebrity source credibility positively affect parasocial relationships; (2) parasocial relationships positively affect attitudes toward using SNS; (3) parasocial relationships positively affect customer equity drivers; and (4) customer equity drivers positively affect customer lifetime va…
Human simulations of vocabulary learning
The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental devel…
One Frog, Two Frog, Red Frog, Blue Frog
Shake, rattle, ‘n’ roll
Understanding how input matters
Hard Words
How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is s…
On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation
Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later
Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguis…
The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (and How They Do It)
This autobiographical article, which began as an interview, reports some reflections by Lila Gleitman on the development of her thinking and her research—in concert with a host of esteemed collaborators over the years—on issues of language and mind, focusing on how language is acquired. Gleitman entered the field of linguistics as a student of Zellig Harris, and learned firsthand of Noam Chomsky's early work. She chose the psychological perspecti…
Structural cues for symmetry, asymmetry, and non-symmetry in Central Taurus Sign Language
We investigate how predicates expressing symmetry, asymmetry and non-symmetry are encoded in a newly emerging sign language, Central Taurus Sign Language (CTSL). We find that predicates involving symmetry (i.e., reciprocal and symmetrical actions) differ from those involving asymmetry (i.e., transitive) in their use of the morphological devices investigated here: body segmentation, mirror-image articulators and double perspective. Symmetrical pre…
Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
The violin case
The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon
The present handbook is a state-of-the-art compilation of papers from leading scholars on the mental lexicon—the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and computational cognitive science. This comprehensive collec…
Psychology (22 works) · Linguistics (21 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Language Development and Disorders (10 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (8 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (7 works) · Cognitive psychology (7 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (7 works) · Verb (6 works)