How can humans keep thousands of words in mind and have no difficulty understanding trillions of sentences? The answer to this question might lie in parents teaching their children language skills, or in in the human brain, which may be equipped with a language instinct or maybe in impressive memory skills that link words to their perceptual information. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to some of these explanations. But one answer - perhaps the most important answer - has been largely ignored. Keeping Those Words in Mind tries to remedy this oversight. Linguist and cognitive psychologist Max Louwerse, PhD. argues that understanding language is not just possible because of memory, brains, environment and computation, but because of the patterns in the sequence of sounds and words themselves.He demonstrates that what seems to be an arbitrary communication system, with arbitrary characters and sounds that become words, and arbitrary meanings for those words, actually is a well-organized system that has evolved over tens of thousands of years to make communication as efficient as it is. What is needed for humans to acquire language, is for humans to recognize and discover the patterns in our communication system. By examining how our brains process language and find patterns, the intricacies of the language system itself, and even scientific breakthroughs in computer science and artificial intelligence, Keeping Those Words in Mind brings a brand new and interdisciplinary explanation for our ability to extract meaning from language.
Max Louwerse, PhD., is a linguist, a cognitive psychologist, and an artificial intelligence researcher. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and became full professor in Psychology and Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis, where he also directed the interdisciplinary Institute for Intelligent Systems. He is currently Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Louwerse has published his interdisciplinary research in over 130 articles in literary studies, linguistics, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. His work has been cited over 6,500 times, and his research has been awarded almost 30 million dollars in research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the European Union. Most recently he founded Mind Labs (www.mind-labs.eu), a research hub to bring research to society, the general public and industry.
"A delightful tour of our amazing collective ability to spin the web of language. Sparkles with insights, striking metaphors, and wonderful examples of how language is both utterly familiar and full of mysteries." -Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Warwick and the author of The Mind is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain
