KAT LOMB (1909-2003) was one of the great polyglots of the 20th century. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. She achieved further fame by writing books on languages, interpreting, and polyglots. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.
Comprehension is the ultimate aim of reading and listening. How do children develop the ability to comprehend written and spoken language, and what can be done to help those who are having difficulties? This book presents cutting-edge research on comprehension problems experienced by children without any formal diagnosis as well as those with specific language impairment, autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, hearing impairment, head injuries, and spina bifida. Providing in-depth information to guide research and practice, chapters describe innovative assessment strategies and identify important implications for intervention and classroom instruction. The book also sheds light on typical development and the key cognitive skills and processes that underlie successful comprehension.
Before children are readers and writers, they are speakers and listeners. This book provides creative, hands-on strategies for developing preschoolers' speaking, listening, and oral comprehension skills, within a literacy-rich classroom environment. Each chapter features helpful classroom vignettes; a section called Preschool in Practice, with step-by-step lesson ideas; and Ideas for Discussion, Reflection, and Action. The book addresses the needs of English language learners and describes ways to support students' literacy development at home. The final chapter pulls it all together through a portrait of an exemplary day of preschool teaching and learning. Reproducible forms and checklists can be downloaded and printed in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.
Develops concept imagery: the ability to create mental representations and integrate them with language. This sensory-cognitive skill underlies language comprehension and higher order thinking for students of all ages.
Visually Situated Language Comprehension has been compiled as a state-of the-art introduction to real-time language processing in visually-situated contexts. It covers the history of this emergent field, explains key methodological developments and discusses the insights these methods have enabled into how language processing interacts with our knowledge and perception of the immediate environment. Scientists interested in how language users integrate what they know with their perception of objects and events will find the book a rewarding read. The book further covers lexical, sentence, and discourse level processes, as well as active visual context effects in both non-interactive and interactive tasks and thus present a well-balanced view of the field. It is aimed at experienced researchers and students alike in the hopes of attracting new talent to the field. Thanks to its in-depth methodological introduction and broad coverage it constitutes an excellent course book.
Spoken Language Comprehensionis the first coherent presentation of an original detailed experimental and theoretical account of what are rationally taken to be "online" processing deficits that lie at the core of aphasic miscomprehension. It presents exciting work that is highly relevant to the important current debate about the nature of aphasic comprehension impairment and its relationship to models of normal functioning. Lorraine K. Tyler focuses on a crucial but neglected aspect of language disorders: how the real-time analysis processes involved in comprehending spoken language break down in acquired aphasia. She describes a new approach to the study of language disorders that specifies the processes involved in the immediate construction of various types of linguistic representations. Her unique large-scale analysis makes possible the evaluation of various theoretical accounts of the underlying basis of different kinds of aphasic deficits. By developing a set of experimental tests designed to detect specific deficits in the principal categories of real-time comprehension, Tyler constructs a processing profile of ten patients that shows where each patient performs normally and where performance breaks down. This provides a detailed picture of a patient's ability to perform the appropriate analyses of speech input: breaking down the speech signal, recognizing words, making the appropriate form-function mapping, and constructing the appropriate types of higher-level representations (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic). Data from standard tests of comprehension deficits are also included, which permits comparison of performance in various tasks and among patients to see where differences and similarities emerge. Lorraine Komisarjevsky Tyler is Professor of Psychology at the University of London.
Using sentence comprehension as a case study for all of cognitive science, David Townsend and Thomas Bever offer an integration of two major approaches, the symbolic-computational and the associative-connectionist. The symbolic-computational approach emphasizes the formal manipulation of symbols that underlies creative aspects of language behavior. The associative-connectionist approach captures the intuition that most behaviors consist of accumulated habits. The authors argue that the sentence is the natural level at which associative and symbolic information merge during comprehension. The authors develop and support an analysis-by-synthesis model that integrates associative and symbolic information in sentence comprehension. This integration resolves problems each approach faces when considered independently. The authors review classic and contemporary symbolic and associative theories of sentence comprehension, and show how recent developments in syntactic theory fit well with the integrated analysis-by-synthesis model. They offer analytic, experimental, and neurological evidence for their model and discuss its implications for broader issues in cognitive science, including the logical necessity of an integration of symbolic and connectionist approaches in the field.
A straightforward, reader-friendly guide to teaching comprehension, this book prepares teachers for one of their most important tasks—helping all their students make the critical leap from "learning to read" to "reading to learn."
