Creating Language

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences.

Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales.

Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.

"[C]ompelling....I would like to believe that this book and the momentum of its approach should have a large impact and eventually supersede Chomsky’s and improve the science of language."
—American Journal of Psychology

"Where [Christiansen and Chater] really achieve is in synthesizing a wealth of recent empirical data on the learnability of languages. The huge amount of data presented, largely drawn from computational models and developmental psychology, is impressive and never less than clearly explained....their book offers a compelling illustration of the growing power of non-specialized machine learning tools."
—Biology & Philosophy

"Christiansen and Chater cover a wide range of issues and their coverage of the review of literature over the last 20 or so years is impressive....Creating Language is a recommended resource for anyone wishing to understand how language acquisition and processing constrain each other or for those seeking an alternative to generative approaches."
—The Canadian Journal of LinguisticsMorten H. Christiansen is Professor of Psychology and Codirector of the Cognitive Science Program at Cornell University.

Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick.

Peter Culicover is Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University.