Sentence First, Arguments Afterward

Lila R. Gleitman is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, among other honors. She was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1993 and won the David Rumelhart Prize in 2017. Spanning six decades, Gleitman's work has shaped our understanding of language and cognition, as well as the relation between these domains. She is best known for her work showing that children's sensitivity to syntactic structure plays a critical role in their acquisition of verb meanings.Jeffrey Lidz is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, having previously held positions at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and CNRS Paris. Lidz's research explores language acquisition from the perspective of comparative syntax and semantics, focusing on the relative contributions of experience, extralinguistic cognition, and domain-specific knowledge in learners' discovery of linguistic structure. Lidz was co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (2016) and is Editor-in-Chief of Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics.

• Section I. PRELIMINARIESForeword by Noam ChomskyChapter 1. From Structuralism to Cognitive Science: Lila R. Gleitman's Contributions to Language and Cognition, Jeffrey LidzSection II. WHAT DO THEY KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT? Chapter 2. The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (And How They Do It), Lila R. Gleitman, Mark Y. Liberman, Cynthia A. McLemore, and Barbara H. ParteeChapter 3. A Study in the Acquisition of Language: Free Responses to Commands, Elizabeth F. Shipley, Carlota S. Smith, and Lila R. GleitmanChapter 4. The Emergence of the Child as Grammarian, Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, and Elizabeth F. ShipleyChapter 5. Language Use and Language Judgment, Henry Gleitman and Lila R. GleitmanSection III. WHERE DOES LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE COME FROM? INPUT AND INNATENESS Chapter 6. Mother, I'd Rather Do It Myself: Some Effects and Non-Effects of Maternal Speech Style, Elissa L. Newport, Henry Gleitman, and Lila R. GleitmanChapter 7. Beyond Herodotus: The Creation of Language by Linguistically Deprived Deaf Children, Heidi Feldman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, and Lila R. GleitmanChapter 8. Every Child an Isolate: Nature's Experiments in Language Learning, Lila R. Gleitman and Barbara LandauSection IV. HARD WORDS AND SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING A: ESTABLISHING PLAUSIBILITYChapter 9. Structural Sources of Verb Learning, Lila R. GleitmanChapter 10. On the Semantic Content of Subcategorization Frames, Cynthia Fisher, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry GleitmanChapter 11. Human Simulations of Vocabulary Learning, Jane Gillette, Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, and Anne LedererSection V. HARD WORDS AND SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING B: BUT IS IT TRUE? Chapter 12. Understanding How Input Matters: Verb Learning and the Footprint of Universal Grammar, Jeffrey Lidz, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry GleitmanChapter 13. Hard Words, Lila R. Gleitman, Kimberly Cassidy, Anna Papafragou, Rebecca Nappa, and John C. TrueswellChapter 14. When We Think About Thinking: The Acquisition of Belief Verbs, Anna Papafragou, Kimberly Cassidy, and Lila R. GleitmanSection VI. EASY WORDS? NOT SO EASYChapter 15. How Words Are (and Are Not) Learned by Observation, Tamara N. Medina, John C. Trueswell, Jesse Snedeker, and Lila R. GleitmanChapter 16. Propose But Verify: Fast Mapping Meets Cross-Situational Word Learning, John C. Trueswell, Tamara N. Medina, Alon Hafri, and Lila R. GleitmanChapter 17. Quality of Input Predicts Child Vocabulary Three Years Later, Erica A. Cartmill, Benjamin F. Armstrong III, Lila R. Gleitman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Tamara N. Medina, and John C. TrueswellChapter 18. The Easy Words: Reference Resolution in a Malevolent Referent World, Lila R. Gleitman and John C. TrueswellSection VII. WORDS AND CONCEPTSChapter 19. What Some Concepts Might Not Be, Sharon Armstrong, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry GleitmanChapter 20. Why Stereotypes Aren't Even Good Defaults, Andrew C. Connolly, Jerry A. Fodor, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry GleitmanChapter 21. "Similar" and Similar Concepts, Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Carol Miller, and Ruth OstrinChapter 22. The Emergence of the Formal Category "Symmetry" in a New Sign Language, Lila R. Gleitman, Ann Senghas, Molly Flaherty, Marie Coppola, and Susan Goldin-MeadowChapter 23. Turning the Tables: Spatial Language and Spatial Reasoning, Peggy Li and Lila R. GleitmanChapter 24. Relations Between Language and Thought, Lila R. Gleitman and Anna Papafragou