Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Psycholinguistics

In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of...

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 demonstrated both that it is possible to construct models of how emotions play into the workings of the...

Within the complex process of second language acquisition there lies a highly variable component referred to as the silent period, during which some beginning second language learners may not willingly produce the target language. Silence in Second Language Learning claims that the silent period might represent a psychical event, a non-linguistic as well as a linguistic moment in the continuous process of identity formation and re-formation. Colette Granger calls on psychoanalytic concepts of anxiety, ambivalence, conflict and loss, and on language learning narratives, to undertake a...

Examining the overseas experience of language learners in diverse contexts through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, studies in this volume look at the acquisition of language use, socialization processes, learner motivation, identity and learning strategies. In this way, the volume offers a privileged window into learner experiences abroad while addressing current concerns central to second language acquisition.

This book makes Relevance Theory (RT) relevant for L2 teachers and L2 teacher educators, in particular those working in foreign language teaching contexts. L2 classroom discourse data collected in seven research projects in the years 1984 - 2004 are reinterpreted in this book in the light of Relevance Theory - a theory of interpretation of the incoming messages. In this perspective the teachers' input for instructed L2 learners facilitates shifts in the learners' attention from meaning to form and vice versa. Such shifts of attention, according to Relevance Theory, change the level of...

In the last ten years the neuroscience of language has matured as a field. Ten years ago, neuroimaging was just being explored for neurolinguistic questions, whereas today it constitutes a routine component. At the same time there have been significant developments in linguistic and psychological theory that speak to the neuroscience of language. This book consolidates those advances into a single reference.

The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Language provides a comprehensive overview of this field. Divided into five sections, section one discusses methods and techniques...

This book explores the importance of cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning. While linguists have primarily focussed upon differences between languages, learners strive to make use of any similarities to prior linguistic knowledge they can perceive. The role of positive transfer is emphasized as well as the essential differences between comprehension and production. In comprehension of related languages, cross-linguistic similarities are easily perceived while in comprehension of distant languages they are merely assumed. Production may be based on previous perception of...

The book contains studies on second language lexical processes based on empirical findings by authors mostly from Central Europe. The reader may have access to how lexical items are stored in the memory and also to how second language lexicons work in speech processing. Questions of the two lexicons' integration or separation, the fashion of bilingual word storage, vocabulary acquisition and assessment, word retrieval from the memory and lexical access are the focus of the studies. The authors of the studies refer to analyses of different psycholinguistic experiments (e.g. a word...

This is the first book that deals primarily with vocabulary learning strategies as a specific and integral subgroup of language learning strategies. Its aim is to define the concept of language learning strategies in general and their features on the basis of cognitive theory and relevant models of second language acquisition as the basis for empirical research. Furthermore, the book gives a survey of relevant research on vocabulary learning strategies and describes three original empirical studies. Thus, the book integrates the approaches of theories of second language acquisition, the...

This book assembles 11 analytical and empirical studies on the process of second language acquisition, probing a wide array of issues, from transfer appropriate processing to L2 default processing strategies, among hearing or deaf learners of a variety of target languages including English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, Spanish, and American Sign Language. Although instruction per se is not the focus of this volume, the chapters are written with instructed learners in mind, and hence offer valuable insights for both second and foreign language researchers and practitioners.