COGS 50.11 Logic in Language and Thought

Languages universally do not lexicalize certain concepts–no natural language contains a color term meaning "red or green", an operation which expresses logic "NAND" (i.e., a binary operation which returns false when both inputs are true), or a quantifier meaning "between 2 and 7". In recent years, work in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics has converged on the hypothesis that languages only lexicalize the expressions which are the easiest to learn. In this course, we will explore this hypothesis, focusing in particular on quantifiers.

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Cognitive Science