An Invitation to Cognitive Science provides a point of entry into the vast realm of cognitive science, offering selected examples of issues and theories from many of its subfields. All of the volumes in the second edition contain substantially revised and as well as entirely new chapters.
Rather than surveying theories and data in the manner characteristic of many introductory textbooks in the field, An Invitation to Cognitive Science employs a unique case study approach, presenting a focused research topic in some depth and relying on suggested readings to convey the breadth of views and results. Each chapter tells a coherent scientific story, whether developing themes and ideas or describing a particular model and exploring its implications.
The volumes are self contained and can be used individually in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses ranging from introductory psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and decision sciences, to social psychology, philosophy of mind, rationality, language, and vision science.
The study of cognition, Daniel Osherson;
language - introduction, Lila R. Gleitman and Mark Liberman;
the invention of language by children - environmental and biological influence on the acquisition of language, Lila R. Gleitman and Elissa L. Newport;
the case of the missing copula - the interpretation of zeroes in African-American English, William Labov;
why the child holded the baby rabbits - a case study in language acquisition, Steven Pinker;
the sound structure of Mawu words - a case study in the cognitive science of speech, Mark Liberman;
exploring developmental changes in cross-language speech perception, Janet F. Werker;
language acquisition, Steven Pinker;
speaking and misspeaking, Gary S. Dell;
comprehending sentence structure, Janet Dean Fodor;
computational aspects of the theory of grammar, Mark Steedman;
the forms of sentences, Howard Lasnik;
lexical semantics and compositionality, Barbara H. Partee;
semantics, Richard Larson;
brain regions of relevance to syntactic processing, Edgar B. Zurif;
some philosophy of language, James Higginbotham.
Lila R. Gleitman is Co-director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Steven and Marcia Roth Professor in the Department of Psychology and Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Mark Liberman is Professor in the departments of Linguistics and Computer and Information Science, also at the University of Pennsylvania.
