The Blackwell Handbook of Language Development provides a comprehensive treatment of the major topics and current concerns in the field; exploring the progress of 21st century research, its precursors, and promising research topics for the future. Provides comprehensive treatments of the major topics and current concerns in the field of language development Explores foundational and theoretical approaches Focuses on the 21st century's research into the areas of brain development, computational skills, bilingualism, education, and cross-cultural comparison Looks at language development in infancy through early childhood, as well as atypical development Considers the past work, present research, and promising topics for the future. Broad coverage makes this an excellent resource for graduate students in a variety of disciplines
"About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell. Lexicon reads like Elmore Leonard high out of his mind on Snow Crash." —Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of The Magicians and The Magician King “Best thing I've read in a long time . . . a masterpiece.” —Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool Stick and stones break bones. Words kill. They recruited Emily Ruff from the streets. They said it was because she's good with words. They'll live to regret it. They said Wil Parke survived something he shouldn't have. But he doesn't remember. Now they're after him and he doesn't know why. There's a word, they say. A word that kills. And they want it back . . .
Although there has been a surge in our understanding of children's vocabulary growth, theories of word learning lack a primary focus on verbs and adjectives. Researchers throughout the world recognize how our understanding of language acquisition can be at best partial if we cannot comprehend how verbs are learned. This volume represents a proliferation of research on the frontier of early verb learning, enhancing our understanding of the building blocks of language and considering new ways to assess key aspects of language growth.
Weaving Words raises important questions about the impact of 21st century practices of education upon human creativity and joy in making meaning through writing. It questions how writing is experienced and valued as a process and product of research; as a means for personal and professional learning; and how it is taught and experienced in the classroom and in teacher education. Weaving Words brings together a range of critical perspectives upon writing within global agendas for education and research, and considers the capacity for writing and reflection to disrupt and transform personal and professional understandings. The parallel traditions of spinning and weaving and the sharing of stories through the spoken and written word shape the structure of this book: its warp is constituted by chapters written by researchers in education; its weft by the poems, plays, short stories and reflections of pre-service teachers. Both researchers and pre-service teachers consider the challenges of becoming writers, and the contradictions they encounter in transferring their understandings of being a writer to the teaching of writing with younger authors, and in conducting research as writing. Weaving Words engages with emerging debates around what forms of writing are valued and supported within 21st century teaching and research; it demonstrates the power of writing for personal expression, suggesting that writing that is creative opens spaces for making meaning and for constructing the world that are important for practices of education and for research.
Part of the authoritative four-volume reference that spans the entire field of child development and has set the standard against which all other scholarly references are compared. Updated and revised to reflect the new developments in the field, the Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition contains new chapters on such topics as spirituality, social understanding, and non-verbal communication. Volume 2: Cognition, Perception, and Language, edited by Deanna Kuhn, Columbia University, and Robert S. Siegler, Carnegie Mellon University, covers mechanisms of cognitive and perceptual development in language acquisition. It includes new chapters devoted to neural bases of cognition, motor development, grammar and langauge rules, information processing, and problem solving skills.
How well have classic ideas on whole-word phonology stood the test of time? Waterson claimed that each child has a system of their own; Ferguson and Farwell emphasized the relative accuracy of first words; Menn noted the occurrence of regression and the emergence of phonological systematicity. This volume brings together classic texts such as these with current data-rich studies of British and American English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, French, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. This combination of classic and contemporary work from the last thirty years presents the reader with cutting-edge perspectives on child language by linking historical approaches with current ideas such as exemplar theory and usage-based phonology, and contrasting state-of-the-art perspectives from developmental psychology and linguistics. This is a valuable resource for cognitive scientists, developmentalists, linguists, psychologists, speech scientists and therapists interested in understanding how children begin to use language without the benefit of language-specific innate knowledge.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication, EELC 2006. The book presents 12 revised full papers together with 5 invited papers. These focus on the evolution and emergence of language - a fast growing interdisciplinary research area touching such different disciplines as anthropology, linguistics, psychology, primatology, neuroscience, cognitive science and computer science.
It is largely accepted in the relevant literature that successful learning of one or more non-native languages is affected by a number of factors that are independent of the target language(s) per se; these factors include the age of acquisition (AoA) of the target language(s), the type and amount of formal instruction the learners have received, as well as the amount of language use that the learners demonstrate. Recent experimental evidence suggests that one crucial factor for efficient native-like performance in the non-native language is the amount of naturalistic exposure, or immersion, that the learners receive to that language. This can be broadly defined as the degree to which language learners use their non-native language outside the classroom and for their day-to-day activities, and usually presupposes that the learners live in an environment where their non-native language is exclusively or mostly used. Existing literature has suggested that linguistic immersion can be beneficial for lexical and semantic acquisition in a non-native language, as well as for non-native morphological and syntactic processing. More recent evidence has also suggested that naturalistic learning of a non-native language can also have an impact on the patterns of brain activity underlying language processing, as well as on the structure of brain regions that are involved, expressed as changes in the grey matter structure. This Research Topic brings together studies on the effects of learning and speaking a non-native language in a naturalistic environment. These include more efficient or “native-like” processing in behavioural tasks tapping on language (lexicon, morphology, syntax), as well as changes in the brain structure and function, as revealed by neuroimaging studies.
Clear assessment of our needs in a global society, and sound creative solutions from an Oceanic perspective and beyond, form the subject matter of this book. Here, the cries of suffering from women in violent relationships, people yearning for growth and dignity, others with mental and emotional trauma, and mother Earth herself are heard, and enlist support and direction from those whose energy and insight are centred in faith, hope and love and firmly anchored in Christian professional academic endeavour. The book is patterned after the woven mats, roof and sails of the great ocean-going canoe to image the diversity of content of this extraordinary gathering of hearts, hands and minds. While it reflects the global scholarly Christian concern and outreach indicative of our times, and a theological approach that is interactive and interdependent, it reveals a ‘weaving’ that is unfinished because the voyage must continue onwards, in an attitude of deep listening and open questioning. As such, the work gathered here represents an energetic contribution towards courageous engagement in the travail that characterises our extraordinary transitional era as we move towards a new consciousness, and the book will be of particular interest to academic theologians, educationalists, Church authorities and pastoral workers from the Oceanic region. However, it will also inspire and inform comparable groups from other parts of the world simply because what is presented here has universal implications.