23.03.2020

New Research Topic in Frontiers: Rational Approaches in Language Science

Submission is now open for a new topic in Frontiers – Rational Approaches in Language Science – with topic editors Matthew Crocker, Gerhard Jäger, Gina Kuperberg, Hannah Rohde, Elke Teich and Rory Turnbull.

We invite manuscripts on rational explanations of

• Language use: behavioural or neurophysiological evidence — whether production or comprehension — for rational processes of speech and language production and perception, as exemplified by expectation-based theories, Bayesian, and noisy-channel models of communication;
• Language development: evidence for rational strategies in the acquisition of all levels of linguistic structure, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics;
• Language change and language evolution: Corpus-based, typological, or simulation-based evidence regarding the emergent structure of human languages;
• Situated language use: the influence of visual context and communicative goals. Examples include evidence for expectation-based mechanisms, pragmatic inference, as well as rational encoding strategies.

Keywords: rationality, information theory, bayesian modeling, surprisal theory, entropy, language evolution, psycholinguistics, language change, language production, language development

Find more information here.