This book presents a set of contributions to the current flow of psycholinguistic research, with new and challenging data gathered from Spanish that may illuminate issues about the generality of language processing models. Although it is possible to find a considerable amount of papers on psycholinguistic research with the Spanish language published in English-speaking journals, unfortunately, the scientific community does not have access to an overview of psycholinguistics in Spain. This book overcomes these limitations because it brings together state-of-the-art descriptions of the research and theory of the different subareas of psycholinguistics currently being studied in Spain. Spanish, the third most widely-used language in the world, differs from English in a number of important respects. Since English has been predominant in psycholinguistic research, contrasting properties of Spanish may help to test the generality of language processing mechanisms and to refine their description. The set of contrasting features considered in this book includes acoustical and syllabic transparency, shallow orthography, a much richer morphology, flexibility in word order, less variability in intonational contours, and the existence of null pronominal subjects for inflected verbs. There are also interesting contrasts in the frequency of different linguistic units, whose impact on language processing is also evaluated. One of the main lines of argument throughout this book deals with the tension between universality and variation as a way of characterizing the functioning of language capacities and processes. The variety of topics covered by this book ranges from one end of the spectrum of language related behavior to the other: speech perception, lexical access in word recognition, relations between phonological and orthographic representations, sentence processing, discourse comprehension, and language production. All chapters focus on questions of general interest within each topic, and in most cases they appeal to one particular feature of the Spanish language that is relevant for a given question. Most chapters show the indisputable importance of crosslinguistic research in psycholinguistics to improve understanding on whether universal cognitive mechanisms and language specific routines underlie the ability of understanding and producing language.

Idioms have always aroused the curiosity of linguists and there is a long tradition in the study of idioms, especially within the fields of lexicology and lexicography. Without denying the importance of this tradition, this volume presents an overview of recent idiom research outside the immediate domain of lexicology/lexicography. The chapters address the status of idioms in recent formal and experimental linguistic theorizing. Interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions are written by psycholinguists and theoretical and computational linguists who take mutual advantage of progress in all disciplines. Linguists supply the facts and analyses psycholinguists base their models and experiments on; psycholinguists in turn confront linguistic models with psycholinguistic findings. Computational linguists build natural language processing systems on the basis of models and frameworks provided by theoretical linguists and, sometimes psycholinguists, and set up large corpora to test linguistic hypotheses. Besides the fascination for idioms that make up such a large part of our knowledge of language, interdisciplinarity is one of the attractions of investigations in idiomatic language and language processing.

The first serious attempt that challenges the theoretical foundation of Bernhard Karlgren’s system which has dominated Chinese phonological study for a century Proposes a new theory of dental-pivot hypothesis in the deng-rhyme studies A clear account of the difference of the two major arguments on the nature of qieyun, the basic material in Chinese phonological study

*An approachable and engaging introduction to Historical Linguistics with up-to-date pedagogy including exercises, further reading and online support material. *Historical Linguistics is a core part of most linguistics programmes. With the more experienced linguistics student in mind, this book covers many subjects in considerable depth while not sacrificing an appreciation of the whole. *Includes examples and datasets from a wide variety of languages and language families, whereas most historical linguistics textbooks tend to just focus on the language family the author works on.

This volume is a direct result of the International Symposium on Japanese Sentence Processing held at Duke University. The symposium provided the first opportunity for researchers in three disciplinary areas from both Japan and the United States to participate in a conference where they could discuss issues concerning Japanese syntactic processing. The goals of the symposium were three-fold:
* to illuminate the mechanisms of Japanese sentence processing from the viewpoints of linguistics, psycholinguistics and computer science;
* to synthesize findings about the mechanisms of Japanese sentence processing by researchers in these three fields in Japan and the United States;
* to lay foundations for future interdisciplinary research in Japanese sentence processing, as well as international collaborations between researchers in Japan and the United States.
The chapters in this volume have been written from the points of view of three different disciplines, with various immediate objectives -- from building usable speech understanding systems to investigating the nature of competence grammars for natural languages. All of the papers share the long term goal of understanding the nature of human language processing mechanisms. The book is concerned with two central issues -- the universality of language processing mechanisms, and the nature of the relation between the components of linguistic knowledge and language processing. This volume demonstrates that interdisciplinary research can be fruitful, and provides groundwork for further research in Japanese sentence processing.

Many regional languages across the world are threatened by modernization and urbanization whilst the universal and rapid rise of migration has created new and unprecedented forms of multilingualism. Aspects of education, national policies and attitudes towards minority languages are documented.

One of the liveliest forums for sharing psychological, linguistic, philosophical, and computer science perspectives on psycholinguistics has been the annual meeting of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. Documenting the state of the art in several important approaches to sentence processing, this volume consists of selected papers that had been presented at the Sixth CUNY Conference. The editors not only present the main themes that ran through the conference but also honor the breadth of the presentations from disciplines including linguistics, experimental psychology, and computer science. The variety of sentence processing topics examined includes:
* how evoked brain potentials reflect sentence comprehension
* how auditory words are processed
* how various sources of grammatical and nongrammatical information are coordinated and used
* how sentence processing and language acquisition might be related.
This distinctive volume not only presents the most exciting current work in sentence processing, but also places this research into the broader context of theorizing about it.

Asia is now home to some 800 million multilingual speakers of English, more than the total number of native English speakers, and how they use English is continuously evolving and changing to reflect their cultural backgrounds and everyday experiences. Can English, therefore, be considered an Asian language? Drawing upon the Asian Corpus of English, this book will be the first comprehensive account of the roles, uses and features of English in Asia, encompassing several different varieties of Asian English. Chapters cover the distinctive linguistic features of English in different settings, such as in law, religion and popular culture, as well as the use of local rhetorical, pragmatic and cultural styles and its use as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals. It will also examine the role of English in education - from primary through to higher education - and consider the implications of this for other languages of Asia.

This volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project that studied the development of linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse. It is unique in the extent of data which it analyzes-more than 250 texts from children and adults speaking five different languages-and in its crosslinguistic, typological focus. It is the first book to address the issue of how the structural properties and rhetorical preferences of different native languages-English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish-impinge on narrative abilities across different phases of development. The work of Berman and Slobin and their colleagues provides insight into the interplay between shared, possibly universal, patterns in the developing ability to create well-constructed, globally organized narratives among preschoolers Contact Susan Barker at (201) 258-2282 for more information. from three years of age compared with school children and adults, contrasted against the impact of typological and rhetorical features of particular native languages on how speakers express these abilities in the process of "relating events in narrative." This volume also makes a special contribution to the field of language acquisition and development by providing detailed analyses of how linguistic forms come to be used in the service of narrative functions, such as the expression of temporal relations of simultaneity and retrospection, perspective-taking on events, and textual connectivity. To present this information, the authors prepared in-depth analyses of a wide range of linguistic systems, including tense-aspect marking, passive and middle voice, locative and directional predications, connectivity markers,null subjects, and relative clause constructions. In contrast to most work in the field of language acquisition, this book focuses on developments in the use of these early forms in extended discourse-beyond the initial phase of early language development. The book offers a pioneering approach to the interactions between form and function in the development and use of language, from a typological linguistic perspective. The study is based on a large crosslinguistic corpus of narratives, elicited from preschool, school-age, and adult subjects. All of the narratives were elicited by the same picture storybook, Frog, Where Are You?, by Mercer Mayer. (An appendix lists related studies using the same storybook in 50 languages.) The findings illuminate both universal and language-specific patterns of development, providing new insights into questions of language and thought.

Ever since attempts were made to describe and explain normal language development, references to exceptional circumstances have been made. Variations in the conditions under which language is acquired can be regarded as natural experiments, which would not be feasible or ethical under normal circumstances. This can throw light on such questions as:
*What language input is necessary for the child to learn language?
*What is the relationship between cognition and language?
*How independent are different components of language function?
*Are there critical periods for language development?
*Can we specify necessary and sufficient conditions for language impairment? This book covers a range of exceptional circumstances including: extreme deprivation, twinship, visual and auditory impairments, autism and focal brain damage?
Written in a jargon-free style, and including a glossary of linguistic and medical terminology, the book assumes little specialist knowledge. This text is suitable for both students and practitioners in the fields of psycholinguistics, developmental and educational psychology, speech pathology, paediatrics and special education.

Research in cognitive psychology has contributed much to our understanding of reading and spelling. Most of this work has concentrated on the processes used by literate adults to comprehend and produce written language, but there is a growing interest in applying cognitive theories to the development of literacy, and to the understanfing of disorders of reading and writing. Such disorders may be acquired as a consequence of a brain injury to a previously literate adult, or may be developmental, occurring in otherwise normal children.; This textbook attempts to present this work to a non-specialist audience. Though written primarily with students of psychology and education in mind, it is accessible also to parents and teachers.; The broad organization of the first edition is retained. The book opens with a consideration of the history and nature of writing, then moves on to deal with the nature of skilled reading. Other chapters deal with: the different ways that brain injury in adulthood can disrupt the mature reading skill the "acquired dyslexias"; spelling and writing processes, both in skilled writers and in patients with "acquired dysgraphia"; the way children develop the skills of reading and writing; and developmental reading and writing problems.

Rather than offering variations in "world view" as evidence for linguistic relativity, this book views language related differences in terms of the facility with which information is processed. Distinctive perceptual, memory, and neurolinguistic aspects of the Chinese language are discussed, as is the cognitive style of the Chinese people. Chinese orthography and other features of morphology and syntax are examined in relation to both bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes. While providing an extensive review of the experimental literature published in English on the Chinese language, this volume also offers a significant sample of the literature originally published in Chinese.

A compilation of the proceedings of a conference held to honor Alvin M. Liberman for his outstanding contributions to research in speech perception, this volume deals with two closely related and controversial proposals for which Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories have argued forcefully over the past 35 years. The first is that articulatory gestures are the units not only of speech production but also of speech perception; the second is that speech production and perception are not cognitive processes, but rather functions of a special mechanism. This book explores the implications of these proposals not only for speech production and speech perception, but for the neurophysiology of language, language acquisition, higher-level linguistic processing, the visual perception of phonetic gestures, the production and perception of sign language, the reading process, and learning to read. The contributors to this volume include linguists, psycholinguists, speech scientists, neurophysiologists, and ethologists. Liberman himself responds in the final chapter.

Comprehension Processes in Reading addresses the interrelationship among several areas relevant to understanding how people comprehend text. The contributors focus on the on-line processes associated with text understanding rather than simply with the product of that comprehension -- what people remember from reading. Presenting the latest theories and research findings from a distinguished group of contributors, Comprehension Processes in Reading is divided into four major sections. Each section, concluding with a commentary chapter, discusses a different aspect of reader understanding or dysfunction such as individual word comprehension, sentence parsing, text comprehension, and comprehension failures and dyslexia .

Comprehension Processes in Reading addresses the interrelationship among several areas relevant to understanding how people comprehend text. The contributors focus on the on-line processes associated with text understanding rather than simply with the product of that comprehension -- what people remember from reading. Presenting the latest theories and research findings from a distinguished group of contributors, Comprehension Processes in Reading is divided into four major sections. Each section, concluding with a commentary chapter, discusses a different aspect of reader understanding or dysfunction such as individual word comprehension, sentence parsing, text comprehension, and comprehension failures and dyslexia .

Endangered Languages in the 21st Century provides research on endangered languages in the contemporary world, the challenges still to be faced, the work still to be done, and the methods and practices that have come to characterize efforts to revive and maintain disadvantaged indigenous languages around the world. With contributions from scholars across the field, the book brings fresh data and insights to this imperative, but still relatively young, field of linguistics. While the studies acknowledge the threat of losing languages in an unprecedented way, they focus on cases that show resilience and explore paths to sustainable progress. The articles are also intended as a celebration of the twenty-five years' work of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and as a parting gift to FEL's founder and quarter-century chair, Nick Ostler. This book will be informative for researchers, instructors, and specialists in the field of endangered languages. The book can also be useful for university graduate or undergraduate students, and language activists.

The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the world English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases-such as a la mode, ennui, naivete and caprice-lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world. Emigres demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, "turned" English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn's complaint that English lacks "words that do so fully express" the French ennui and naivete, to George W. Bush's purported claim that "the French don't have a word for entrepreneur," this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as "creolizing keywords" that both connect English speakers to-and separate them from-French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete. At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Emigres invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.

Linguistic Morphology is a unique collection of cutting-edge research in the psycholinguistics of morphology, offering a comprehensive overview of this interdisciplinary field. This book brings together world-leading experts from linguisics, experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to examine morphology research from different disciplines. It provides an overview of how the brain deals with complex words; examining how they are easier to read, how they affect our brain dynamics and eye movements, how they mould the acquisition of language and literacy, and how they inform computational models of the linguistic brain. Chapters discuss topics ranging from subconscious visual identification to the high-level processing of sentences, how children make their first steps with complex words through to how proficient adults make lexical identification in less than 40 milliseconds. As a state-of-the-art resource in morphology research, this book will be highly relevant reading for students and researchers of linguistics, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It will also act as a one-stop shop for experts in the field.

From late antiquity through to the early middle ages, people across north-western Europe were inscribing runes on a range of different objects. Once identified and interpreted by experts, runes provide us with invaluable evidence for the early Germanic languages including English, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages and reveal a wealth of information about our early civilisations. Runes employ many techniques from informal scratchings to sophisticated inlaid designs on weapons, or the exquisite relief carvings of the Franks Casket. The task of reading and understanding them involves a good deal of detective-work, calling on expertise from a number of academic disciplines: archaeology, art history, linguistics, and even forensic science. This book tells the story of runes from their mysterious origins, their development as a script, to their use and meaning in the modern world. Illustrated with a range of beautiful objects from jewellery to tools and weapons, Runes will reveal memorials for the dead, business messages, charms and curses, insults and prayers, giving us a glimpse into the languages and cultures of Europeans over a thousand years ago.

Primatology, Ethics and Trauma offers an analytical re-examination of the research conducted into the linguistic abilities of the Oklahoma chimpanzees, uncovering the historical reality of the research. It has been 50 years since the first language experiments on chimpanzees. Robert Ingersoll was one of the researchers from 1975 to 1983. He is well known for being one of the main carers and best friend of the chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, but there were other chimpanzees in the University of Oklahoma's Institute for Primate Studies, including Washoe, Moja, Kelly, Booee, and Onan, who were taught sign language in the quest to discover whether language is learned or innate in humans. Antonina Anna Scarna's expertise in language acquisition and neuroscience offers a vehicle for critical evaluation of those studies. Ingersoll and Scarna investigate how this research failed to address the emotional needs of the animals. Research into trauma has made scientific advances since those studies. It is time to consider the research from a different perspective, examining the neglect and cruelty that was inflicted on those animals in the name of psychological science. This book re-examines those cases, addressing directly the suffering and traumatic experiences endured by the captive chimpanzees, in particular the female chimpanzee, Washoe, and her resultant inability to be a competent mother. The book discusses the unethical nature of the studies in the context of recent research on trauma and offers a specific and direct psychological message, proposing to finally close the door on the language side of these chimpanzee studies. This book is a novel and groundbreaking account. It will be of interest to lay readers and academics alike. Those working as research, experimental, and clinical psychologists will find this book of interest, as will psychotherapists, linguists, anthropologists, historians of science and primatologists, as well as those involved in primate sanctuary and conservation.

As the fourth volume of a multi-volume set on the Chinese language, this book studies the lexical system of Old Chinese and the development of different types of lexicons during the period. Focusing on lexicons in Old Chinese, the early form of the Chinese language used between the 18th century BC and the 3rd century AD, this volume first introduces the methods of word formation in Old Chinese by analyzing words inscribed in oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty. Illustrated with examples, it then examines the lexical features of Old Chinese and explores the progress and evolutionary features of monosyllabic words, polysyllabic words, lexical meanings, synonyms, and idioms and proverbs over the course of the volume. This comprehensive groundwork on Chinese lexical history is a must read for scholars and students studying ancient Chinese language, linguistics and especially for beginning learners of the Old Chinese lexicon.

As the fifth volume of a multi-volume set on the Chinese language, this book studies the development of monosyllables and polysyllables in Middle Chinese and the overall evolution of lexical meanings during the period. Focusing on lexicons in Middle Chinese, the Chinese language used between the 4th century AD and the 12th century AD, the book first introduces the monosyllabic neologisms of Middle Chinese, including characters and words derived from Old Chinese lexicons and those newly created. It then examines the development of polysyllabic words in Middle Chinese, ranging from single morpheme words, tautologies and compound words. The final chapter discusses the changes and extension of word meanings in medieval Chinese. Illustrated with abundant examples, this comprehensive groundwork on Chinese lexical history will be a must read for scholars and students studying ancient Chinese language, linguistics and especially for beginning learners of the Middle Chinese lexicon.

As the sixth volume of a multi-volume set on the Chinese language, this book studies the influence of foreign culture on Middle Chinese lexicon and the development of synonyms, idioms and proverbs during the period. Focusing on lexicons in Middle Chinese, the middle form of the Chinese language used between the 4th century AD and the 12th century AD, this book first analyzes loanwords in Middle Chinese, a product of cultural exchange with western regions on the silk road and the impact of Buddhism. It then discusses the differences in meaning between monosyllables and polysyllables. The final chapter describes enriching idioms and proverbs and the major sources of words, including classical works, Buddhist texts and the spoken language. Illustrated with abundant examples, this comprehensive groundwork on Chinese lexical history will be a must read for scholars and students studying ancient Chinese language, linguistics and especially for beginning learners of the Middle Chinese lexicon.

As the seventh volume of a multi-volume set on the Chinese language, this book studies the Mongolian influence on neologisms in Modern Chinese and innovations in word formation and lexical meanings during the period. Focusing on lexicons in Modern Chinese, the Chinese language used since the 13th century AD, this book first introduces new monosyllables and the entry of spoken idioms and dialects into the written language as well as the mingling of the Chinese language with the Mongolian and Manchu languages. It then focuses on the development and features of polysyllabic words in Modern Chinese, covering alliterative and rhyming compounds, trisyllabic and four-syllable words. The final chapter discusses the change of lexical meaning systems in Modern Chinese based on an analysis of monosyllables, disyllables and polysyllables. Illustrated with abundant examples, this comprehensive groundwork on Chinese lexical history will be a must read for scholars and students studying modern Chinese language, linguistics and especially for beginning learners of the modern Chinese lexicon.