Some Recent Publications by R. Port:
Port, Robert (2008, in press) Language and its two complex systems. To appear in Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg). [PDF]
Port, Robert (2008) All is prosody: Phones and phonemes are the ghosts of letters. Keynote address for Prosody2008 in Campinas, Brazil. To appear in conference proceedings. [PDF]
Port, Robert (2007) How are words stored in memory? Beyond phones and phonemes. New Ideas in Psychology 25, 143-170. [PDF]
Port, Robert (2007) The problem of speech patterns in time. In M. Gareth Gaskell (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. (Oxford University Press) pp. 503-514. [PDF]
Port, Robert (2006) The graphical basis of phones and phonemes. In Murray Munro and Ocke Schwen-Bohn Eds., Second Language Speech Learning: The Role of Language Experience in Speech Perception and Production. (John Benjamins, Amsterdam). This essay focusses on why our intuitions about the segmental organization of speech are so powerful and persuasive. The simple answer is that we all learned alphabetic writing when we were very young and this descriptive method is very useful. But we need to learn to mistrust these intuitions. [PDF]Port, Robert and Adam Leary (2005) Against formal phonology. (Language. December issue). [PDF] A frontal assault on the phonetics of Chomsky and Halle. It seemed important to try to disabuse phonologists of the viability of beginning the study of phonology with the Chomsky-Halle system of universal segmental phonetic features (or any other universal feature system).
Port, Robert (2003) Meter and speech. Journal of Phonetics 31, pp. 599-611.[ PDF]
Port, Robert (2002) Implications of rhythmic discreteness in speech. Paper prepared for the conference `Temporal Integration in the Perception of Speech' in Aix-en-Provence, April 8-11, 2002. [PDF]
Port, Robert (2002) `The dynamical systems hypothesis in cognitive science.' Entry for the MacMillan ``Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science''. L. Nadel, Associate Editor. Volume 1, pp. 1027-1032 [PDF]
A summary of the dynamical point of view about cognition contrasting it with the dominant symbolic or computational view. 3400 words.
Port, Robert (2002) Phonetics and motor activity. In Fabrice Cavoto (ed.) The Complete Linguist: A Collection of Papers in Honor of Alexis Manaster-Ramer. (LINCOM Europa: Munich ) pp. 329-344 (Volume 2)
Self-entrainment by parts of the human body is very similar to the tendency of speech to become rhythmic. This behavior is easily observed in repetitive speech.
Last modified April 21, 2008 Port's homepage.