Books in the Oxford Studies in Biolinguistics series

This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology.

This book traces the lines of research that grew out of Thomas Bever's "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition; the current status of universals; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970.

This book, written accessibly for both biologists and linguists, argues that language is not as exceptional a human trait as some linguists believe it to be. It is rather, according to the authors, just the human version of a fairly common and conservative organic system, the Central Computational Complex.

Phonological Architecture bridges linguistic theory and the biological sciences, presenting a comprehensive view of phonology from a biological perspective. Its back-to-basics approach breaks phonology into primitive operations and representations and investigates their possible origins in cognitive abilities found throughout the animal kingdom.

This book traces the lines of research that grew out of Thomas Bever's "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition; the current status of universals; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970.

This book shows that language, though now routinely used for communication, actually primarily evolved as a system for thought. Anne Reboul proposes a new two-step approach whereby syntax first evolved as a language of thought, which was then externalized for communication due to social selection pressures.

The book examines one of the most contested topics in linguistics and cognitive science: the role of recursion in language. It offers a precise account of what recursion is, what role it should play in cognitive theories of human knowledge, and how it manifests itself in the mental representations of language and other cognitive domains.