Language in the mind and how it gets there.
9 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read
National Reading Panel (NICHD) · 2000
Argues, from a meta-analysis of experimental reading research, that systematic phonics instruction combined with explicit phonemic-awareness teaching…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Child's Learning of English Morphology
Jean Berko · 1958
Uses nonsense words in the 'wug test' to show children apply grammatical rules productively to forms they have never heard, demonstrating that…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Perception of the Speech Code
Alvin M. Liberman et al. · 1967
Argues listeners perceive speech sounds by recovering the articulatory gestures that produced them rather than by decoding the acoustic signal…
+12 more at this level
12 of 16 works
National Reading Panel (NICHD)
Argues, from a meta-analysis of experimental reading research, that systematic phonics instruction combined with explicit phonemic-awareness teaching produces reliably better reading outcomes than whole-language instruction alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean Berko
Uses nonsense words in the 'wug test' to show children apply grammatical rules productively to forms they have never heard, demonstrating that morphology is rule-governed knowledge rather than memorised vocabulary.
François Grosjean
Argues a bilingual's two languages form one integrated system rather than two separate monolingual competences bolted together, so bilinguals should be studied on their own terms rather than benchmarked against monolingual norms.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alvin M. Liberman et al.
Argues listeners perceive speech sounds by recovering the articulatory gestures that produced them rather than by decoding the acoustic signal directly, because identical acoustic cues shift categorically depending on phonetic context.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lyn Frazier & Janet Dean Fodor
Argues the human sentence processor first builds syntactic structure over a small window of words, then checks it against the rest of the sentence, explaining why readers are garden-pathed by sentences that later force a reanalysis.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Stephen D. Krashen
Sets out the Monitor Model, arguing adults draw on two independent systems for a second language, a subconscious acquisition process that builds real competence and a conscious learning process that can only edit output after the fact.
Janet F. Werker & Richard C. Tees
Shows infants can discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts at 6-8 months but lose this ability by 10-12 months unless still exposed to the language, demonstrating that speech perception narrows toward the native language during the first year of life.
Keith E. Stanovich
Argues small early differences in reading skill compound over time because better readers read more and so build vocabulary and comprehension faster, producing an ever-widening gap between early strong and weak readers.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jacqueline S. Johnson & Elissa L. Newport
Tests the critical period hypothesis directly by measuring grammaticality judgments in Korean and Chinese immigrants who began learning English at different ages, finding attainment declines linearly with age of arrival up to puberty and unpredictably after.
Robert Bley-Vroman
Argues adult second-language learning differs fundamentally from child first-language acquisition because adults can no longer rely on Universal Grammar and instead solve the task through general problem-solving abilities, which explains why adult outcomes are so much more variable and rarely native-like.
Myrna Gopnik & Martha Crago
Documents a three-generation family with a heritable pattern of grammatical impairment affecting tense, number and agreement marking, arguing the data point to a genetically influenced deficit specific to grammar rather than to general cognition.
Jenny R. Saffran, Richard N. Aslin and Elissa L. Newport
Shows that infants segment a continuous speech stream using transitional probabilities between syllables alone, so word boundaries can be learned from statistics without any innate grammar doing the work.
link checked 17 Sept 2026