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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Philosophy & theory of psychology > Cognitive theory

The Oxford Handbook of Hypo-egoic Phenomena (Hardcover): Kirk Warren Brown, Mark Leary The Oxford Handbook of Hypo-egoic Phenomena (Hardcover)
Kirk Warren Brown, Mark Leary
R5,459 Discovery Miles 54 590 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Egoicism, a mindset that places primary focus upon oneself, appears to be rampant in contemporary Western cultures as commercial advertisements, popular books, song lyrics, and mobile software applications consistently promote self-interest. Although a focus on oneself has adaptive value for physical preservation, decision making, and planning, researchers have begun to address the psychological, interpersonal, and broader societal costs of excessive egoicism. In an increasingly crowded and interdependent world, there is a pressing need for investigation of alternatives to a "me and mine first" mindset. For centuries, scholars, spiritual leaders, and social activists have advocated a "hypo-egoic" way of being that is characterized by less self-concern in favor of a more inclusive, "we first" mode of functioning. In recent years, investigations of hypo-egoic functioning have been taken up by philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and psychologists. Edited by Kirk Warren Brown and Mark Leary, The Oxford Handbook of Hypo-egoic Phenomena brings together these vital lines of inquiry, distilling current knowledge about hypo-egoicism into a single source book. The authors of each chapter have conducted high-quality research and written authoritatively about topics that involve hypo-egoicism, all together providing an authoritative account of theory, research, and applications of hypo-egoic functioning. Part I of the book offers theoretical perspectives from philosophy and several major branches of psychology to inform our understanding of the nature of hypo-egoicism and its expressions in various domains of life. Part II presents psychological research findings regarding particular psychological phenomena in which hypo-egoicism is a prominent feature, demonstrating the implications of hypo-egoicism for well-being, emotion regulation, adaptive decision-making, positive social relations, and other markers of human well-being. Each chapter reviews the research literature regarding a particular hypo-egoic phenomenon and offers constructive criticism of the current limits of the research and important agendas for future investigation. Thus, this Handbook offers the most comprehensive and thoughtful analyses of hypo-egoicism to date.

The Renaissance Extended Mind (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2015): Miranda Anderson The Renaissance Extended Mind (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2015)
Miranda Anderson
R2,848 Discovery Miles 28 480 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The Renaissance Extended Mind explores the parallels and contrasts between current philosophical notions of the mind as extended across brain, body and world, and analogous notions in literary, philosophical, and scientific texts circulating between the fifteenth century and early-seventeenth century.

Exploring Robotic Minds - Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena (Hardcover): Jun Tani Exploring Robotic Minds - Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena (Hardcover)
Jun Tani
R2,484 Discovery Miles 24 840 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In Exploring Robotic Minds: Actions, Symbols, and Consciousness as Self-Organizing Dynamic Phenomena, Jun Tani sets out to answer an essential and tantalizing question: How do our minds work? By providing an overview of his "synthetic neurorobotics" project, Tani reveals how symbols and concepts that represent the world can emerge in a neurodynamic structure-iterative interactions between the top-down subjective view, which proactively acts on the world, and the bottom-up recognition of the resultant perceptual reality. He argues that nontrivial problems of consciousness and free will could be addressed through structural understanding of such iterative, conflicting interactions between the top-down and the bottom-up pathways. A wide range of readers will enjoy this wonderful journey of the mind and will follow the author on interdisciplinary discussions that span neuroscience, dynamical systems theories, robotics, and phenomenology. The book also includes many figures, as well as a link to videos of Tani's exciting robotic experiments.

Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain - How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Hardcover): Stephen Grossberg Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain - How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Hardcover)
Stephen Grossberg
R1,035 Discovery Miles 10 350 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.

The Conscious Brain - How Attention Engenders Experience (Paperback): Jesse J Prinz The Conscious Brain - How Attention Engenders Experience (Paperback)
Jesse J Prinz
R1,351 Discovery Miles 13 510 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The problem of consciousness continues to be a subject of great debate in cognitive science. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz's account of consciousness makes two main claims: first consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and, second, consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access memory systems. Neurobiologically, this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience. Prinz also explores the limits of consciousness. We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allows for flexible behavior. Prinz concludes by discussing prevailing philosophical puzzles. He provides a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism, and argues that materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem. The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions, while also surveying, challenging, and extending philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. All readers interested in the nature of consciousness will find Prinz's work of great interest.

Language Down the Garden Path - The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structures (Paperback): Montserrat Sanz,... Language Down the Garden Path - The Cognitive and Biological Basis for Linguistic Structures (Paperback)
Montserrat Sanz, Itziar Laka, Michael K. Tanenhaus
R1,267 Discovery Miles 12 670 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Thomas G. Bever's now iconic sentence, The horse raced past the barn fell, first appeared in his 1970 paper "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". This 'garden path sentence', so-called because of the way it leads the reader or listener down the wrong parsing path, helped spawn the entire subfield of sentence processing. It has become the most often quoted element of a paper which spanned a wealth of research into the relationship between the grammatical system and language processing. Language Down the garden Path traces the lines of research that grew out of Bever's classic paper. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition (the role of prediction, grammar, working memory, prosody, abstractness, syntax, and semantics mapping); the current status of universals and narrow syntax; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book will appeal to all those interested in understanding the questions that shaped, and are still shaping, this field and the ways in which linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are seeking to answer them.

Experiencing Art - In the Brain of the Beholder (Hardcover): Arthur Shimamura Experiencing Art - In the Brain of the Beholder (Hardcover)
Arthur Shimamura
R2,634 Discovery Miles 26 340 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

How do we appreciate a work of art? Why do we like some artworks but not others? Is there no accounting for taste? Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to explore connections between art, mind, and brain, Shimamura considers how we experience art. In a thoughtful and entertaining manner, the book explores how the brain interprets art by engaging our sensations, thoughts, and emotions. It describes interesting findings from psychological and brain sciences as a way to understand our aesthetic response to art. Beauty, disgust, surprise, anger, sadness, horror, and a myriad of other emotions can occur as we experience art. Some artworks may generate such feelings rather quickly, while others depend on thought and knowledge. Our response to art depends largely on what we know-from everyday knowledge about the world, from our cultural backgrounds, and from personal experience. Filled with artworks from many traditions and time points, "Experiencing Art" offers insightful ways of broadening one's approach and appreciation of art.

The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience - Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology (Hardcover): Anjan Chatterjee, H.Branch Coslett The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience - Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychology (Hardcover)
Anjan Chatterjee, H.Branch Coslett
R4,005 Discovery Miles 40 050 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience takes a close look at what we can learn about our minds from how brain damage impairs our cognitive and emotional systems. This approach has a long and rich tradition dating back to the 19th century. With the rise of new technologies, such as functional neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation, interest in mind-brain connections among scientists and the lay public has grown exponentially. Behavioral neurology and neuropsychology offer critical insights into the neuronal implementation of large-scale cognitive and affective systems. The book starts out by making a strong case for the role of single case studies as a way to generate new hypotheses and advance the field. This chapter is followed by a review of work done before the First World War demonstrating that the theoretical issues that investigators faced then remain fundamentally relevant to contemporary cognitive neuroscientists. The rest of the book covers central topics in cognitive neuroscience including the nature of memory, language, perception, attention, motor control, body representations, the self, emotions, and pharmacology. There are chapters on modeling and neuronal plasticity as well as on visual art and creativity. Each of these chapters take pains to clarify how this research strategy informs our understanding of these large scale systems by scrutinizing the systematic nature of their breakdown. Taken together, the chapters show that the roots of cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neurology and neuropsychology, continue to ground our understanding of the biology of mind and are as important today as they were 150 years ago.

How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? (Hardcover): John R. Anderson How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? (Hardcover)
John R. Anderson
R2,012 Discovery Miles 20 120 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

"The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University
The argument John Anderson gives in this book was inspired by the passage above, from the last lecture by one of the pioneers of cognitive science. Newell describes what, for him, is the pivotal question of scientific inquiry, and Anderson gives an answer that is emerging from the study of brain and behavior.
Humans share the same basic cognitive architecture with all primates, but they have evolved abilities to exercise abstract control over cognition and process more complex relational patterns. The human cognitive architecture consists of a set of largely independent modules associated with different brain regions. In this book, Anderson discusses in detail how these various modules can combine to produce behaviors as varied as driving a car and solving an algebraic equation, but focuses principally on two of the modules: the declarative and procedural. The declarative module involves a memory system that, moment by moment, attempts to give each person the most appropriate possible window into his or her past. The procedural module involves a central system that strives to develop a set of productions that will enable the most adaptive response from any state of the modules. Newell argued that the answer to his question must take the form of a cognitive architecture, and Anderson organizes his answer around the ACT-R architecture, but broadens it by bringing in research fromall areas of cognitive science, including how recent work in brain imaging maps onto the cognitive architecture.

The Book of Why - The New Science of Cause and Effect (Paperback): Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie The Book of Why - The New Science of Cause and Effect (Paperback)
Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie 1
R375 R341 Discovery Miles 3 410 Save R34 (9%) Ships in 9 - 17 working days

The hugely influential book on how the understanding of causality revolutionized science and the world, by the pioneer of artificial intelligence 'Wonderful ... illuminating and fun to read' Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow 'Correlation does not imply causation.' For decades, this mantra was invoked by scientists in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer, or carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we too can think better. 'Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and have redefined the term "thinking machine"' Vint Cerf

Introspection and Consciousness (Hardcover, New): Declan Smithies, Daniel Stoljar Introspection and Consciousness (Hardcover, New)
Declan Smithies, Daniel Stoljar
R3,167 Discovery Miles 31 670 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The topic of introspection stands at the interface between questions in epistemology about the nature of self-knowledge and questions in the philosophy of mind about the nature of consciousness. What is the nature of introspection such that it provides us with a distinctive way of knowing about our own conscious mental states? And what is the nature of consciousness such that we can know about our own conscious mental states by introspection? How should we understand the relationship between consciousness and introspective self-knowledge? Should we explain consciousness in terms of introspective self-knowledge or vice versa? Until recently, questions in epistemology and the philosophy of mind were pursued largely in isolation from one another. This volume aims to integrate these two lines of research by bringing together fourteen new essays and one reprinted essay on the relationship between introspection, self-knowledge, and consciousness.

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism (Hardcover): Cedric Boeckx The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism (Hardcover)
Cedric Boeckx
R4,217 Discovery Miles 42 170 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This Handbook provides a complete assessment of the current achievements and challenges of the Minimalist Program. Established 15 years ago by Noam Chomsky with the aim of making all statements about language as simple and general as possible, linguistic minimalism is now at the centre of efforts to understand how the human language faculty operates in the mind and manifests itself in languages. In this book leading researchers from all over the world explore the origins of the program, the course of its sometimes highly technical research, and its connections with other disciplines, such as parallel developments in fields such as developmental biology, cognitive science, computational science, and philosophy of mind. The authors examine every aspect of the enterprise, show how each part relates to the whole, and set out current methodological and theoretical issues and proposals. The various chapters in this book trace the development of minimalist ideas in linguistics, highlight their significance and distinctive character, and relate minimalist research and aims to those in parallel fields. They focus on core aspects in syntax, including feature, case, phrase structure, derivations, and representations, and on interface issues within the grammar. They also take minimalism outside the domain of grammar to consider its role in closely related biolinguistic projects, including the evolution of mind and language and the relation between language and thought. The handbook is designed and written to meet the needs of students and scholars in linguistics and cognitive science at graduate level and above, as well as to provide a guide to the field for researchers other disciplines.

Minds and Gods - The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (Paperback): Todd Tremlin Minds and Gods - The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (Paperback)
Todd Tremlin
R1,101 Discovery Miles 11 010 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Around the world and throughout history, in cultures as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and modern America, human beings have been compelled by belief in gods and developed complex religions around them. But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions of human thought.
The first general introduction to the "cognitive science of religion," Minds and Gods presents the major themes, theories, and thinkers involved in this revolutionary new approach to human religiosity. Arguing that we cannot understand what we think until we first understand how we think, the book sets out to study the evolutionary forces that modeled the modern human mind and continue to shape our ideas and actions today. Todd Tremlin details many of the adapted features of the brain -- illustrating their operation with examples of everyday human behavior -- and shows how mental endowments inherited from our ancestral past lead many people to naturally entertain religious ideas. In short, belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology, in powerful cognitive processes that all humans share.
In the course of illuminating the nature of religion, this book also sheds light on human nature: why we think we do the things we do and how the reasons for these things are so often hidden from view. This discussion ranges broadly across recent scientific findings in areas such as paleoanthropology, primate studies, evolutionary psychology, early brain development, and cultural transmission. While these subjects are complex, the story is told here in a conversational style that is engaging, jargon free, and accessible to all readers. With Minds and Gods, Tremlin offers a roadmap to a fascinating and growing field of study, one that is sure to generate interest and debate and provide readers with a better understanding of themselves and their beliefs.

Cognitive Grammar - A Basic Introduction (Paperback): Ronald Langacker Cognitive Grammar - A Basic Introduction (Paperback)
Ronald Langacker
R1,744 Discovery Miles 17 440 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book fills a long standing need for a basic introduction to Cognitive Grammar that is current, authoritative, comprehensive, and approachable. It presents a synthesis that draws together and refines the descriptive and theoretical notions developed in this framework over the course of three decades. In a unified manner, it accommodates both the conceptual and the social-interactive basis of linguistic structure, as well as the need for both functional explanation and explicit structural description. Starting with the fundamentals, essential aspects of the theory are systematically laid out with concrete illustrations and careful discussion of their rationale. Among the topics surveyed are conceptual semantics, grammatical classes, grammatical constructions, the lexicon-grammar continuum characterized as assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings), and the usage-based account of productivity, restrictions, and well-formedness. The theory's central claim - that grammar is inherently meaningful - is thereby shown to be viable. The framework is further elucidated through application to nominal structure, clause structure, and complex sentences. These are examined in broad perspective, with exemplification from English and numerous other languages. In line with the theory's general principles, they are discussed not only in terms of their structural characterization, but also their conceptual value and functional motivation. Other matters explored include discourse, the temporal dimension of language structure, and what grammar reveals about cognitive processes and the construction of our mental world.

Big Mind - How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World (Paperback): Geoff Mulgan Big Mind - How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World (Paperback)
Geoff Mulgan
R694 Discovery Miles 6 940 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

How collective intelligence can transform business, government, and our everyday lives A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in recent years, prompted by digital technologies that make it possible to think at large scale. This "bigger mind"-human and machine capabilities working together-could potentially solve the great challenges of our time. Gathering insights from the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind reveals how the power of collective intelligence could help organizations and societies to survive and thrive.

The Phonological Enterprise (Paperback, New): Mark Hale, Charles Reiss The Phonological Enterprise (Paperback, New)
Mark Hale, Charles Reiss
R1,634 Discovery Miles 16 340 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book scrutinizes recent work in phonological theory from the perspective of Chomskyan generative linguistics and argues that progress in the field depends on taking seriously the idea that phonology is best studied as a mental computational system derived from an innate base, phonological Universal Grammar. Two simple problems of phonological analysis provide a frame for a variety of topics throughout the book. The competence-performance distinction and markedness theory are both addressed in some detail, especially with reference to phonological acquisition. Several aspects of Optimality Theory, including the use of Output-Output Correspondence, functionalist argumentation and dependence on typological justification are critiqued. The authors draw on their expertise in historical linguistics to argue that diachronic evidence is often mis-used to bolster phonological arguments, and they present a vision of the proper use of such evidence. Issues of general interest for cognitive scientists, such as whether categories are discrete and whether mental computation is probabilistic are also addressed. The book ends with concrete proposals to guide future phonological research.
The breadth and depth of the discussion, ranging from details of current analyses to the philosophical underpinnings of linguistic science, is presented in a direct style with as little recourse to technical language as possible.

Bare Syntax (Hardcover, Revised): Cedric Boeckx Bare Syntax (Hardcover, Revised)
Cedric Boeckx
R3,340 Discovery Miles 33 400 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This important contribution to the Minimalist Program offers a comprehensive theory of locality and new insights into phrase structure and syntactic cartography. It unifies central components of the grammar and increases the symmetry in syntax. Its central hypothesis has broad empirical application and at the same time reinforces the central premise of minimalism that language is an optimal system.
Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality. He argues that the domains which render syntactic processes local (such as islands, bounding nodes, barriers, and phases in all their cartographic manifestations) are better understood once reduced to, or combined with, the basic syntactic operation, Merge, and its core representation, the X-bar schema. In a detailed examination of the mechanism of phrasal projection or labelling he shows that viewing chains as X-bar phrases allows conditions on chain formation or movement to be captured.
Clearly argued, accessibly written, and illustrated with examples from a wide range of languages, Bare Syntax will appeal to linguists and others interested in syntactic theory at graduate level and above.

The Highly Sensitive Brain - Research, Assessment, and Treatment of Sensory Processing Sensitivity (Paperback): Bianca P.... The Highly Sensitive Brain - Research, Assessment, and Treatment of Sensory Processing Sensitivity (Paperback)
Bianca P. Acevedo
R3,013 Discovery Miles 30 130 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The Highly Sensitive Brain is the first handbook to cover the science, measurement, and clinical discussion of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), a trait associated with enhanced responsivity, awareness, depth-of-processing and attunement to the environment and other individuals. Grounded in theoretical models of high sensitivity, this volume discusses the assessment of SPS in children and adults, as well as its health and social outcomes. This edition also synthesizes up-to-date research on the biological mechanisms associated with high sensitivity, such as its neural and genetic basis. It also discusses clinical issues related to SPS and seemingly-related disorders such as misophonia, a hyper-sensitivity to specific sounds. In addition, to practical assessment of SPS embedded throughout this volume is discussion of the biological basis of SPS, exploring why this trait exists and persists in humans and other species. The Highly Sensitive Brain is a useful handbook and may be of special interest to clinicians, physicians, health-care workers, educators, and researchers.

The Phonological Enterprise (Hardcover, New): Mark Hale, Charles Reiss The Phonological Enterprise (Hardcover, New)
Mark Hale, Charles Reiss
R900 Discovery Miles 9 000 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book scrutinizes recent work in phonological theory from the perspective of Chomskyan generative linguistics and argues that progress in the field depends on taking seriously the idea that phonology is best studied as a mental computational system derived from an innate base, phonological Universal Grammar. Two simple problems of phonological analysis provide a frame for a variety of topics throughout the book. The competence-performance distinction and markedness theory are both addressed in some detail, especially with reference to phonological acquisition. Several aspects of Optimality Theory, including the use of Output-Output Correspondence, functionalist argumentation and dependence on typological justification are critiqued. The authors draw on their expertise in historical linguistics to argue that diachronic evidence is often mis-used to bolster phonological arguments, and they present a vision of the proper use of such evidence. Issues of general interest for cognitive scientists, such as whether categories are discrete and whether mental computation is probabilistic are also addressed. The book ends with concrete proposals to guide future phonological research.
The breadth and depth of the discussion, ranging from details of current analyses to the philosophical underpinnings of linguistic science, is presented in a direct style with as little recourse to technical language as possible.

The Emergence of Distinctive Features (Hardcover, New): Jeff Mielke The Emergence of Distinctive Features (Hardcover, New)
Jeff Mielke
R3,220 R2,286 Discovery Miles 22 860 Save R934 (29%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. Distinctive features in phonology distinguish one meaningful sound from another. Since the mid-twentieth century they have been seen as a set characterizing all possible phonological distinctions and as an integral part of Universal Grammar, the innate language faculty underlying successive versions of Chomskyan generative theory. The usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is uncontroversial, but the supposition that features are innate and universal rather than learned and language-specific has never, until now, been systematically tested. In his pioneering account Jeff Mielke presents the results of a crosslinguistic survey of natural classes of distinctive features covering almost six hundred of the world's languages drawn from a variety of different families. He shows that no theory is able to characterize more than 71 percent of classes, and further that current theories, deployed either singly or collectively, do not predict the range of classes that occur and recur. He reveals the existence of apparently unnatural classes in many languages. Even without these findings, he argues, there are reasons to doubt whether distinctive features are innate: for example, distinctive features used in signed languages are different from those in spoken languages, even though deafness is generally not hereditary.
The author explains the grouping of sounds into classes and concludes by offering a unified account of what previously have been considered to be natural and unnatural classes. The data on which the analysis is based are freely availablein a program downloadable from the publisher's web site.

The Emergence of Distinctive Features (Paperback): Jeff Mielke The Emergence of Distinctive Features (Paperback)
Jeff Mielke
R1,634 Discovery Miles 16 340 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. Distinctive features in phonology distinguish one meaningful sound from another. Since the mid-twentieth century they have been seen as a set characterizing all possible phonological distinctions and as an integral part of Universal Grammar, the innate language faculty underlying successive versions of Chomskyan generative theory. The usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is uncontroversial, but the supposition that features are innate and universal rather than learned and language-specific has never, until now, been systematically tested. In his pioneering account Jeff Mielke presents the results of a crosslinguistic survey of natural classes of distinctive features covering almost six hundred of the world's languages drawn from a variety of different families. He shows that no theory is able to characterize more than 71 percent of classes, and further that current theories, deployed either singly or collectively, do not predict the range of classes that occur and recur. He reveals the existence of apparently unnatural classes in many languages. Even without these findings, he argues, there are reasons to doubt whether distinctive features are innate: for example, distinctive features used in signed languages are different from those in spoken languages, even though deafness is generally not hereditary.
The author explains the grouping of sounds into classes and concludes by offering a unified account of what previously have been considered to be natural and unnatural classes. The data on which the analysis is based are freely availablein a program downloadable from the publisher's web site.

Variation in Working Memory (Paperback): Andrew Conway, Chris Jarrold, Michael Kane, Akira Miyake, John Towse Variation in Working Memory (Paperback)
Andrew Conway, Chris Jarrold, Michael Kane, Akira Miyake, John Towse
R1,883 Discovery Miles 18 830 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Working memory - the ability to keep important information in mind while comprehending, thinking, and acting - varies considerably from person to person and changes dramatically during each person's life. Understanding such individual and developmental differences is crucial because working memory is a major contributor to general intellectual functioning. This volume offers a state-of-the-art, integrative, and comprehensive approach to understanding variation in working memory by presenting explicit, detailed comparisons of the leading theories. It incorporates views from the different research groups that operate on each side of the Atlantic, and covers working-memory research on a wide variety of populations, including healthy adults, children with and without learning difficulties, older adults, and adults and children with neurological disorders. A particular strength of this volume is that each research group explicitly addresses the same set of theoretical questions, from the perspective of both their own theoretical and experimental work and from the perspective of relevant alternative approaches. Through these questions, each research group considers their overarching theory of working memory, specifies the critical sources of working memory variation according to their theory, reflects on the compatibility of their approach with other approaches, and assesses their contribution to general working memory theory. This shared focus across chapters unifies the volume and highlights the similarities and differences among the various theories. Each chapter includes both a summary of research positions and a detailed discussion of each position. Variation in Working Memory achieves coherence across its chapters, while presenting the entire range of current theoretical and experimental approaches to variation in working memory.

Inflectional Identity (Hardcover): Asaf Bachrach, Andrew Nevins Inflectional Identity (Hardcover)
Asaf Bachrach, Andrew Nevins
R909 Discovery Miles 9 090 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure. In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and predictive theories of where syncretism and other "paradigmatic pressures" will occur in natural language. The authors consider phenomena such as allomorphy and syncretism while exploring questions of underlying representations, the formal properties of markedness, and the featural representation of conjugation and declension classes. They do so from the perspective of contemporary theories of morphology and phonology, including Distributed Morphology and Optimality Theory, and in the context of a wide range of languages, among them Amharic, Greek, Romanian, Russian, Saami, and Yiddish. The subjects addressed in the book include the role of featural decomposition of morphosyntactic features, the status of paradigms as the unit of syncretism, asymmetric effects in identity-dependence, and the selection of a base-of-derivation.
The Bases of Inflectional Identity will interest linguists and cognitive scientists, especially students and scholars of phonological theory and the phonology-morphology and mind-language interfaces at graduate level and above.

Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems (Hardcover): Wayne D. Gray Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems (Hardcover)
Wayne D. Gray
R2,017 Discovery Miles 20 170 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and control that arise when integrating with the external environment factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, cognition, and the cognitive system. These problems must be solved in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of these functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, including how and what they communicate to the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.
Contributors: Kevin A. Gluck, Jerry T. Ball, Michael A. Krusmark, Richard W. Pew, Chris R. Sims, Vladislav D. Veksler, John R. Anderson, Ron Sun, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Randy J. Brou, Andrew D. Egerton, Stephanie M. Doane, Christopher W. Myers, Hansjorg Neth, Jeremy M Wolfe, Marc Pomplun, Ronald A. Rensink, Hansjorg Neth, Chris R. Sims, Peter M. Todd, Lael J. Schooler, Wai-Tat Fu, Michael C. Mozer, Sachiko Kinoshita, Michael Shettel, Alex Kirlik, Vladislav D. Veksler, Michael J. Schoelles, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Eric Dimperio, Ryan K. Jessup, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Glenn Gunzelmann, Kevin A. Gluck, Scott Price, Hans P. A. Van Dongen, David F. Dinges, Frank E. Ritter, Andrew L. Reifers, Laura Cousino Klein, Michael J. Schoelles, Eva Hudlicka, Hansjorg Neth, Christopher W. Myers, Dana Ballard, Nathan Sprague, Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershauser, Michael S. Landy, A. Hornof, Michael J. Schoelles, David Kieras, Dario D. Salvucci, Niels Taatgen, Erik M. Altmann, Richard A. Carlson, Andrew Howes, Richard L. Lewis, Alonso Vera, Richard P. Cooper, and Michael D. Byrne

Events and Semantic Architecture (Paperback, New Ed): Paul M. Pietroski Events and Semantic Architecture (Paperback, New Ed)
Paul M. Pietroski
R1,515 Discovery Miles 15 150 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning. The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns (as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in 'Fido chased every cat')? In addressing such questions, Paul Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning according to which the semantic contribution of combining expressions is simple and uniform across constructions. Drawing on work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements. Professor Pietroski also provides fresh ways of thinking about much-discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately determined aspects of human languages. Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of logic, Events and Semantic Architecture will interest advanced students of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science at graduate level and above.

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