This volume owes its existance to many different sources and influ ences. It is based on a meeting that took place from April 30 to May 2, 1982 at the University of Technology in Darmstadt. The idea for that meeting came while we were elaborating a research program on concept development and the development of word meaning; we were inspired by Werner Deutsch of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and by the Volkswagen Foundation in Hannover (Federal Republic of Germany) to organize an international conference on the same topic. We set out to invite a long list of colleagues, and we only regret that not all of them were able to attend. This volume should not be viewed as the proceedings of that conference. On the one hand, it does not include all of the papers presented there, and on the other hand, some of our colleagues who were unable to attend were nevertheless willing to write contributions. Furthermore, some who did pre sent papers at the conference revised and reformulated them or even submitted completely new ones for this book. We feel, however, that in the end we have arranged a valuable collection of work in the theory and research of a field that has occupied not only psychologists and linguists, but also philosophers, anthropologists, and many others for a long time.
For some time now, the study of cognitive development has been far and away the most active discipline within developmental psychology. Although there would be much disagreement as to the exact proportion of papers published in develop mental journals that could be considered cognitive, 50% seems like a conserva tive estimate. Hence, a series of scholarly books devoted to work in cognitive development is especially appropriate at this time. The Springer Series in Cognitive Development contains two basic types of books, namely, edited collections of original chapters by several autbors, and original volumes written by one author or a small group of authors. The flagship for the Springer Series is a serial publication of the "advances" types, carrying the sub title Progress in Cognitive Development Research. Each volume in the Progress sequence is strongly thematic, in that it is limited to some well-defmed domain of cognitive-developmental research (e. g. , logical and mathematical development, development of learning). All Progress volumes will be edited collections. Editors of such collections, upon consultation with the Series Editor, may elect to have their books published either as contributions to the Progress sequence or as sepa rate volumes. All books written by one author or a small group of authors are being published as separate volumes within the series. A fairly broad defmition of cognitive development is being used in the selec tion of books for this series.
Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events. Concepts are also relevant to understanding domains such as social situations, personality types, and even artistic styles. Yet like other phenomenologically simple cognitive processes such as walking or understanding speech, concept formation and use are maddeningly complex. Research since the 1970s and the decline of the "classical view" of concepts have greatly illuminated the psychology of concepts. But persistent theoretical disputes have sometimes obscured this progress. The Big Book of Concepts goes beyond those disputes to reveal the advances that have been made, focusing on the major empirical discoveries. By reviewing and evaluating research on diverse topics such as category learning, word meaning, conceptual development in infants and children, and the basic level of categorization, the book develops a much broader range of criteria than is usual for evaluating theories of concepts.
Vygotksy's legacy is an exciting but often confusing fusion of ideas. An Introduction to Vygotksy provides students with an accessible overview of his work combining reprints of key journal and text articles with editorial commentary and suggested further reading. Harry Daniels explores Vygotsky's work against a backdrop of political turmoil in the developing USSR. Major elements include use of the "culture" concept in social development theory and implications for teaching, learning and assessment. Academics and students at all levels will find this an essential key source of information.
This thoroughly updated third edition provides students with an accessible overview of Vygotsky’s work, combining reprints of key journal and text articles with rich editorial commentary. Lev Vygotsky provided the twentieth century with an enticing mix of intellectual traditions within an attempt to provide an account of the social formation of the mind. His legacy is an exciting, but at times challenging fusion of ideas. Retaining a multi-disciplinary theme, Introduction to Vygotsky, 3rd edition begins with a review of current interpretations of Vygotksy’s original work. Harry Daniels goes on to consider the development of Vygotsky’s work against a backdrop of political turmoil in the developing USSR. Major elements explored within the volume include the use of the 'culture' concept in social development theory, the development of means of describing social life, the concept of mediation, and implications for teaching, learning and assessment This book will be essential reading for Vygotskian students in developmental psychology, education and social sciences, as well as to students on specialised courses on cultural, cross-cultural and socio-cultural psychology, philosophical psychology, philosophy of science, history of psychology and Soviet/Russian history.
Narrative therapy is one of the most commonly practised forms of therapy. Each chapter in this book provides an overview of a main area of narrative therapy by explaining how it works and detailing the psychotherapeutic implications of these conversations.
Vygotsky Philosophy and Education reassesses the works of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky work by arguing that his central ideas about the nature of rationality and knowledge were informed by the philosophic tradition of Spinoza and Hegel. Presents a reassessment of the works of Lev Vygotsky in light of the tradition of Spinoza and Hegel informing his work Reveals Vygotsky’s connection with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Brandom and McDowell Draws on discussions in contemporary philosophy to revise prominent readings of Vygotskian psychology and revisits educational debates where Vygotsky’s ideas were central Reveals the limitations of appropriations of Vygotsky which fail to recognize the Hegelian provenance of his work Shows the relevance of Brandom’s inferentialism for contemporary educational theory and practice
Most research on children's lexical development has focused on their acquisition of names for concrete objects. This is the first edited volume to focus specifically on how children acquire their early verbs. Verbs are an especially important part of the early lexicon because of the role they play in children's emerging grammatical competence. The contributors to this book investigate: * children's earliest words for actions and events and the cognitive structures that might underlie them, * the possibility that the basic principles of word learning which apply in the case of nouns might also apply in the case of verbs, and the role of linguistic context, especially argument structure, in the acquisition of verbs. A central theme in many of the chapters is the comparison of the processes of noun and verb learning. Several contributors make provocative suggestions for constructing theories of lexical development that encompass the full range of lexical items that children learn and use.
Somewhere between birth and maturity the highly structured linguistic system characteristic of the adult mind evolves. While young children commonly group words idiosyncratically or according to a thematic principle, adults prove more homogeneous in obeying conceptual categories. A gradual transition between two age extremes and their modes of organizing language can be mapped in detail. The several experiments presented in this volume are designed to tap the growth of appreciation of relations among 20 specific words, though inferences drawn from the data may be applicable to much of the lexicon. Where empirical evidence to date is scant in the area of semantic evolution, Jeremy Anglin establishes the hypothesis that development proceeds from the concrete to the abstract. As tools to survey the architecture of cognitive capacities, he adopts and adapts traditional verbal learning and psycholinguistic techniques and applies them to subjects ranging in age from 7 to 26 years. The experiments and their findings are described clearly enough to be readily understood by the general reader.A blend of preconceptions and perplexities gave rise to Dr. Anglin's experiments, which included sorting, free-recall, free-association, and concept-formation tasks. Four biases concerning the nature of words governed selection of the tasks, the set of words, and the methods of analysis. First, the word contains meaning, which can be identified in part with the features or criterial properties associated with it. Next, words cohere in a system in which many features can be organized hierarchically or in theoretical nests. Third, the meaning of a word is often derived from the contexts in which it occurs, and similarity of meaning among words relates to privileges of occurrence within the same context. Finally, the word, as a social tool whose function is to communicate, is useless unless it means the same thing to different members of a linguistic community. All the verbal tasks chosen could be administered to children with ease, and words selected were presumed to be within the vocabularies of the youngest subjects tested.Major findings of most tasks supported the concrete-abstract progression. A persistent puzzle for proponents of this theory, however, is the ubiquitous phenomenon that children of about 4 years of age can spontaneously speak the language, giving parts of speech their proper grammatical treatment, despite the fact that young children in the various experiments consistently ignore the form class distinctions that are so important to adults. Employment of such principles and cognizance of them may reflect very different abilities. Semantic development appears to be an extremely prolonged process which may never be complete.Patterns of interrelations revealed among the host of experimental methods suggest that many results may reflect different aspects of the same underlying cognitive capacities. Dr. Anglin's novel application of multidimensional scaling procedures to meaningful psychological data provides a graphic illustration of the various stages of the growth of the subjective lexicon.MIT Research Monograph No. 63
