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10Religion and the RebelHoughton Mifflin. 2017.Religion and the Rebel, Colin Wilson's second volume from his internationally acclaimed Outsider Cycle, is a casebook about and for rebels. With inspirational wisdom and engaging clarity, Wilson shows us that the purpose of religion, of our personal relationship with the sacred and the all-pervading mystery of existence, is to expand our consciousness and intensify our sense of life. Wilson heroically claims that the power to create meaning resides in our mental and spiritual discipline. Examini…Read more
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8Super consciousness: the quest for the peak experienceWatkins. 2009.Blending existential and occult thought, a highly acclaimed philosopher explains how we can find profound meaning and joy by inducing states of extreme awareness and emotion Throughout history there have been references and examples in literature, art and philosophy of an increased awareness of life while under the influence of extreme emotions. These have become known as Peak Experiences. Soon after Colin Wilson became aware of this phenomenon in the 1960s, he wondered about its history and how…Read more
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15The importance of lexical verbs in the acquisition of spatial prepositions: The case of in and onCognition 157 (C): 174-189. 2016.
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41Spatial Language and the Embedded Listener Model in Parents’ Input to ChildrenCognitive Science 40 (8): 1877-1910. 2016.Language is a collaborative act: To communicate successfully, speakers must generate utterances that are not only semantically valid but also sensitive to the knowledge state of the listener. Such sensitivity could reflect the use of an “embedded listener model,” where speakers choose utterances on the basis of an internal model of the listener's conceptual and linguistic knowledge. In this study, we ask whether parents’ spatial descriptions incorporate an embedded listener model that reflects t…Read more
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37Learning Phonology With Substantive Bias: An Experimental and Computational Study of Velar PalatalizationCognitive Science 30 (5): 945-982. 2006.There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A new framework is proposed in which substance acts as a bias, or prior, on phonological learning. Two experiments tested this framework with a method in which participants are first provided highly impoverished evidence of a new phonological pattern, and then tested on how they extend this pattern to novel contexts a…Read more
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420Cognitive Biases, Linguistic Universals, and Constraint‐Based Grammar LearningTopics in Cognitive Science 5 (3): 392-424. 2013.According to classical arguments, language learning is both facilitated and constrained by cognitive biases. These biases are reflected in linguistic typology—the distribution of linguistic patterns across the world's languages—and can be probed with artificial grammar experiments on child and adult learners. Beginning with a widely successful approach to typology (Optimality Theory), and adapting techniques from computational approaches to statistical learning, we develop a Bayesian model of co…Read more
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University of New England (United States)Undergraduate
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |