Rather than surveying theories and data in the manner characteristic of many introductory textbooks in the field, An Invitation to Cognitive Science employs a unique case study approach, presenting a focused research topic in some depth and relying on suggested readings to convey the breadth of views and results.

The study of cognition, Daniel Osherson; language - introduction, Lila R. Gleitman and Mark Liberman; the invention of language by children - environmental and biological influence on the acquisition of language, Lila R. Gleitman and Elissa L. Newport; the case of the missing copula - the interpretation of zeroes in African-American English, William Labov; why the child holded the baby rabbits - a case study in language acquisition, Steven Pinker; the sound structure of Mawu words - a case study in the cognitive science of speech, Mark Liberman; exploring developmental changes in cross-language speech perception, Janet F. Werker; language acquisition, Steven Pinker; speaking and misspeaking, Gary S. Dell; comprehending sentence structure, Janet Dean Fodor; computational aspects of the theory of grammar, Mark Steedman; the forms of sentences, Howard Lasnik; lexical semantics and compositionality, Barbara H. Partee; semantics, Richard Larson; brain regions of relevance to syntactic processing, Edgar B. Zurif; some philosophy of language, James Higginbotham.