ReviewFrontiers in psychology2015
Simplicity and Specificity in Language: Domain-General Biases Have Domain-Specific Effects.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- More caution or more lenient: deciphering the role of negative affect in recognition and inference.Cognitive processing · 2026Article
- Symmetry in category systems across languages.Nature communications · 2026Article
- With or Without a System: How Category-Specific and System-Wide Cognitive Biases Shape Word Order.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Domain Specificity vs. Domain Generality: The Case of Faces and Words.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Encoding of speech in convolutional layers and the brain stem based on language experience.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Impact of Information Structure on the Emergence of Differential Object Marking: An Experimental Study.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Cumulative cultural evolution, population structure and the origin of combinatoriality in human language.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated Learning.Cognitive science · 2021Article
- Interindividual Variation Refuses to Go Away: A Bayesian Computer Model of Language Change in Communicative Networks.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- How Culture and Biology Interact to Shape Language and the Language Faculty.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Constructing a Consensus on Language Evolution? Convergences and Differences Between Biolinguistic and Usage-Based Approaches.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Article
- Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Article
- Innovation of Word Order Harmony Across Development.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2017Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The extent to which the linguistic system-its architecture, the representations it operates on, the constraints it is subject to-is specific to language has broad implications for cognitive science and its relation to evolutionary biology. Importantly, a given property of the linguistic system can be "specific" to the domain of language in several ways. For example, if the property evolved by natural selection under the pressure of the linguistic function it serves then the property is domain-specific in the sense that its design is tailored for language. Equally though, if that property evolved to serve a different function or if that property is domain-general, it may nevertheless interact with the linguistic system in a way that is unique. This gives a second sense in which a property can be thought of as specific to language. An evolutionary approach to the language faculty might at first blush appear to favor domain-specificity in the first sense, with individual properties of the language faculty being specifically linguistic adaptations. However, we argue that interactions between learning, culture, and biological evolution mean any domain-specific adaptations that evolve will take the form of weak biases rather than hard constraints. Turning to the latter sense of domain-specificity, we highlight a very general bias, simplicity, which operates widely in cognition and yet interacts with linguistic representations in domain-specific ways.
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