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

This book sheds new light on personality dispositions research into interpreter performance, injecting fresh impetus for a new research agenda designed to further our understanding of hardiness-performance linkages in interpreters. Interpreters are made not born (Mackintosh, 1999: 67), i.e., it is generally assumed that everyone has the potential to become an interpreter, given proper training. Nonetheless, time constraints and financial limitations make it advisable to select applicants who need the least training. Aptitude testing for interpreting, with a purpose to admitting the most...

This book presents new research in the field of language acquisition and development. The contributors pay attention to first language development and other language acquisition (second, foreign and additional), and focus on issues directly relevant to both areas of investigation. One of the main aims of the book is to discover how research and practice in first language development can contribute to the teaching and learning of other languages, and vice versa. The book is distinctive in this area in its application of theoretical findings to the development of principles, objectives and...

This volume presents important results of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) "Situated Artificial Communicators," which was funded by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for more than twelve years.

The contributions focus on different aspects of human-human and human-machine interaction in situations which closely model everyday workplace demands. The authors are linguists, psycho- und neurolinguists, psychologists and computer scientists at Bielefeld University. They jointly tackle questions of...

The book focuses on one aspect of foreign language acquisition that has not received much attention, that of the effect of bilingualism in the oral production of the English language learners. Two research areas have tackled this issue separately. On the one hand, third language acquisition researchers have analysed bilingualism effects in the acquisition of a third language. On the other hand, studies in interlanguage pragmatics have taken into account variables affecting the use of request acts by second language learners of English. The two research areas are connected in this volume,...

In this book different aspects of language and aging are discussed. While language spoken by and language spoken with elderly people have been treated as different areas of research, it is argued here that from a dynamical system perspective the two are closely interrelated. In addition to overviews of research on language and aging, a number of projects on this topic in multilingual settings are presented.

This book offers a critical exploration of the role of English in postcolonial communities such as India. Specifically, it focuses on some local ways in which the language falls along the lines of a class-based divide (with ancillary ones of gender and caste as well). The book argues that issues of inequality, subordination and unequal value seem to revolve directly around the general positioning of English in relation to vernacular languages. The author was raised and schooled in the Indian educational system.

The view that a bilingual speaker, or a speaker acquiring more than one language, is the sum of two a -or morea - monolinguals is proving to be a myth rather than a reality. Accordingly, this book provides a new profile of children and young people becoming bilingual or multilingual in todaya (TM)s multicultural Spain. The chapters present studies on the acquisition of the four official languages plus the languages of several new communities. They include descriptive, functional, pragmatic and formal perspectives, covering phonetics, lexis, morphology and syntax, as well as code mixing and...

Throughout the world, the mother tongue fundamentally affects second language acquisition. Japanese contains thousands of loanwords, many based on the most useful types of English vocabulary. This book examines gairaigo -- Western loanwords in Japanese -- and its effect on L2 English acquisition. The first part introduces Japanese lexical borrowing. The second part resolves the "paradox of cognates" and clarifies the effect of gairaigo on English acquisition. The third part assesses the loanword cognates in Japanese that correspond to high-frequency and academic English. The fourth part...

The volume consists of articles on issues relating to the morphosyntactic development of foreign language learners from different L1 backgrounds, in many cases involving languages which are typologically distant from English, such has Polish, Greek and Turkish. It highlights areas which may be expected to be especially transfer-prone at both the interlingual and intralingual levels. The articles in the first part report empirical studies on word morphology and sentence patterns and also look at the interface of lexis and grammar in the discourse and syntactic processing of foreign language...

Drawing on the perspective of language socialization and a theory of indexicality, this book explores ways in which learners of Japanese as a foreign language and their Japanese host families socialize their identities through style shift between the masu and plain forms in a homestay context. Going beyond the usual assumption that the masu form is a polite speech marker, the book analyzes the masu form as an index of various social identities and activities. The book discusses both socialization through speech styles and socialization to use an appropriate speech style. Qualitative...