Evolution and the brain have done a marvelous job solving many tricky problems in action
control, including problems of learning, hierarchical control over serial behavior, continuous …

Many animals can be trained to perform novel tasks. People, too, can be trained, but
sometime in early childhood people transition from being trainable to something qualitatively …

Language and action have been found to share a common neural basis and in particular a
common 'syntax', an analogous hierarchical and compositional organization. While …

I explain a strategy, called model-based control, which has proven useful in control theory,
and argue that many aspects of brain function can be understood as applications of this …

I apply a recently emerging perspective on the complexity of action selection, the rate–
distortion theory of control, to provide a computational-level model of errors and difficulties in …

Children learn a variety of verbs for hand actions starting in their second year of life. The
semantic distinctions can be subtle, and they vary across languages, yet they are learned …

Speech production has been studied predominantly from within two traditions,
psycholinguistics and motor control. These traditions have rarely interacted, and the …

Our use of language depends upon two capacities: a mental lexicon of memorized words
and a mental grammar of rules that underlie the sequential and hierarchical composition of …

OULD two topics be less related than language and action? Both historical (eg Descartes,
1992) and contemporary (eg Fodor, 1975) philosophers have argued that language is …

Students of the neural basis of cognition might weil take as their dictum the first phrase in the
gospel according to St. John:“In the beginning was the word.” In this chapter, we beg to differ …