History

The Modular Cognition Framework: began life in 2000 as a development of an earlier attempt ( the ‘UGC’ model) by a linguist and a psychologist interested in language, namely  Michael Sharwood Smith (Heriot-Watt University) and John Truscott (National Tsing Hua, Hsinchu, Taiwan), to answer a basic question in language acquisition research, namely how children and adults acquire a language as a by-product of language processing. Their background assumption was that  any explanation would have to include the idea supported by many linguists today that human language ability depended in one way or another upon systems or systems that have evolved specifically for this purpose, in other words, what is often referred to as the language faculty.

Language: a window on the mind

The first presentation of MOGUL, MCF’s precursor, was in November, 2000 at the Linguistics Circle meeting  at Edinburgh University. The title of the paper was “Detection failure in second language acquisition”. The elaboration of a wider framework for accounting for language processing and development was then initiated and the initial idea that parsing failure triggered a special mechanism for ‘correcting’ the current mental grammar of the current language system being developed was abandoned.

Ultimately, the pursuit of a very specific question in a branch of linguistics led to a considerable broadening of the perspective to include all of the mind. This would enable explanations concerning language, along with other cognitive abilities, to be embedded in the context of the mind in general. MOGUL remains the name of language part of the MCF enterprise and, thus far, much of the research has focused on linguistic issues. Nevertheless, since language use involves all cognitive systems one way of another, it offers a particularly promising window into human cognition as a whole. The introductory tour on the Multimedia page provides a very simple demonstration of this point. The publications page on this website  charts the development of MOGUL up to its present incarnation as a mind-wide perspective with ‘the framework’ recast as the MCF in 2017.

The MCF as a research programme

The framework is offered to fellow researchers in all relevant disciplines as a way of placing their research into particular aspects of human cognition within a wider explanation and framing new questions and explanations that will contribute not only to their own research questions but to the broader framework as well. This will inevitably result in alternative conceptions of how given parts of the  framework should be elaborated. This is why it has to be open for anyone to contribute, that is, given it relevance to cognition in general and not just language. This website is for everybody interested in human language cognition who can accept the basic principles of a framework that, in essence, functions as a cognitive science research programme. 

!n Edinburgh, Scotland (UK),  where “The Framework”  continues to be elaborated by:

Mike Sharwood Smith (link to his webpage and ResearchGate page)

In TAIPEI  in Taiwan,  where “The Framework” also continues to be elaborated by:

John Truscott (links to his university web pages  1  &  2  and ResearchGate page)