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It’s not Avi’s fault, it’s those sourish, mind-bending little berries that are to blame, those tiny wee spheres. Bilberries, bletherberries that befuddle the mind, babbleberries that give you a kick. The beautiful green forest scales, the timber songs, play out like a kaleidoscope before his eyes. It’s hard tae breathe, yer haunds skedaddle awa…  In a camp at the edge of a forest children are trained to forget their language through drugs, therapy, and coercion. Alicia and her brother Avi are re...

Acquisition of the native language proceeds in a stage-wise manner for both typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD). As shown in TD children learning Dutch and German, the ability to establish contextual cohesion serves as the driving force to proceed from a simple, lexical system to a more complex, functional system. It is argued that precisely this ability is challenged in children with DLD. The present book offers an account of the functional...

Bilingualism Across the Lifespan explores the opportunities and challenges that are inherent in conducting cognitive research in an increasingly global and multilingual society. Divided into three sections, the book highlights the multifaceted and complex nature of bilingualism. The first section focuses on what every cognitive psychologist ought to know about bilingualism: the impact of bilingualism on cognition across the lifespan, the idea that bilinguals are not a special case, and the imp...

Over the past decades, the use of quantitative methods has become almost generalized in all domains of linguistics. However, using these methods requires a thorough understanding of the principles underlying them. Introduction to quantitative methods in linguistics aims at providing students with an up-to-date and accessible guide to both corpus linguistics and experimental linguistics. The objectives are to help students developing critical thinking about the way these methods are used in the l...

This book is the first in-depth examination of the application of theories of space to issues of second language learning. The author introduces the work of key thinkers on the theory of space and place and the relevance of their ideas to second language acquisition (SLA). He also outlines a new conceptual framework and set of terms for researching SLA that centre on the idea of 'language learning environments'. The book considers the spatial contexts in which language learning takes place and i...

Linguistic theory since the Cognitive Revolution has fol- lowed one of the premises of that revolution by largely sidelining the issue of emotions and concentrating on those aspects of language that are more strictly cognitive. However, during the last ten years research in cognitive science, especially in neuropsychology, has begun to fill in the gaps left by the exclusion of emotions from cognitive research. The work of those like Oatley, Zajonc, Damasio, and LeDoux, to name a few, has demonst...

This book studies the origins of language. It presents language as the product of a unique non-linguistic cognitive feature (i.e., metacognition) that emerged late in human evolution. Within this framework, the author lays special emphasis on the tight links that exist between language and consciousness, with the conviction that the creation of language was ultimately made possible by the onset of a new type of awareness that enabled the invention of words. The volume studies the parallels betw...

Cognitive linguists believe that metaphors are prevalent in human thought, while metaphorical structures are reflected at the linguistic level. Therefore, analysing extensive language data can aid in revealing the metaphorical mappings of embodied experience with the senses of vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and temperature. This volume seeks to discover the similarities and differences between the metaphorical systems of the English and Chinese languages. Adopting a comparative view, th...

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and...

When do human beings begin producing gestures, and how do they evolve throughout our cognitive and social development? This book investigates the rich and complex ways in which gesture precedes language development and then is used in conjunction with language across the lifespan. Some experts argue that gesture is a part of language, while others argue it is a partner to language. But all agree that gesture plays a major role in language development and practices, and therefore must be capt...

The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, Clifton Pye shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. Both an overview of lessons Pye has gleaned from more than thirty years of studying how children learn Mayan languages as well as a strong case for a novel m...

Developed directly with the IB to be fully integrated with the revised MYP Language Acquisition framework, for first teaching in 2020. This comprehensive, inquiry-based resource equips learners to acquire and practice essential language skills while developing wider conceptual and contextual awareness. An inquiry-led, concept-based approach applies key and related concepts to relevant learning material, helping you fully deliver the MYP approach and build meaningful conceptual connections....

The book identifies how excitory and inhibitory messages in the human nervous system combine and coordinate to affect attention, cognition, memory and language. Communication within the nervous system involves the excitation and inhibition of neurons. How these processes interact to affect cognition and behavioural performance has been an area of ongoing investigation that is once again at the forefront of cognitive research. This volume brings together cognitive psychologists and neuroscientist...

Written Documents in the Workplace is divided into three parts, the first of which provides a linguistic definition of professional documents, describing their different types and genres. This definition necessarily takes into account both the formal characteristics of these types of document (e.g. nature of linguistic units involved) and their functional goals (the way these linguistic units are used to fulfill the text's communicative aim). The second part focuses on the mental mechanisms invo...

This book is a necessary supplement to the theoretical exploration into semantic rhetoric, particularly a breakthrough in the study of the relationship between the source domain and target domain involved in the construction of semantic rhetorical discourse.The study focuses on rhetorical expressions constructed by means of semantic variation or deviation of concepts. Based on the holistic cognitive pragmatic model and the framework of impartment and inheritance of connotation and denotation, th...

This book presents research on the learning of foreign languages by children aged 6-12 years old in primary school settings. The collection provides a significant and important contribution to this often overlooked domain and aims to provide research-based evidence that might help to inform and develop pedagogical practice. Topics covered in the chapters include the influence of learner characteristics on word retrieval; explicit second language learning and language awareness; meaning construct...

Biolinguistics is a highly interdisciplinary field that seeks the rapprochement between linguistics and biology. Linking theoretical linguistics, theoretical biology, genetics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, this book offers a collection of chapters situating the enterprise conceptually, highlighting both the promises and challenges of the field, and chapters focusing on the challenges and prospects of taking interdisciplinarity seriously. It provides concrete illustrations of some of th...

How do we experience poetry as readers? What is it in the text that provokes particular reactions, and how can we methodologically reveal these effects? Introducing an evidence-based approach to poetics, this book explores the psychological effects of poetic form and content, with an emphasis on how real readers respond to and experience poetry. Engaging with texts from diverse cultural and historical settings, it covers the basics of stylistic theory while at the same time outlining the specif...