With an Introduction by Anthony D. Pellegrini, this work is one of the most extensive studies of early language and literacy undertaken to date. This volume describes the four interdisciplinary facets of a three-year longitudinal investigation of the early literate and linguistic experience and knowledge of a cohort of sixty 3- and 4-year-olds. Coverage includes: an extensive survey of home literate environment and development across a broad range of earliest literate and meta-literate knowledge over the three-year span of the study; links early literate experience and knowledge to differential strategies of speech act comprehension over time, showing that early literate experience heightens dependence upon linguistic as distinct from contextual information in comprehension; the employment of parent-child book reading as the matrix for a detailed analysis of lexical development, relating forms of parent-child interaction around text to variation in sophistication of reference; and finally, the examination of child-child interaction in a detailed, naturalistic framework, in relation to aspects of literate experience and knowledge.

The beginnings of written science have long been associated with classical Greece. Yet in ancient Mesopotamia, highly-sophisticated scientific works in cuneiform script were in active use while Greek civilization flourished in the West. The subject of this volume is the astronomical series MUL.APIN, which can be dated to the seventh century BCE and which represents the crowning achievement of traditional Mesopotamian observational astronomy. Writing Science before the Greeks explores this early text from the perspective of modern cognitive science in an effort to articulate the processes underlying its composition. The analysis suggests that writing itself, through the cumulative recording of observations, played a role in the evolution of scientific thought. "All in all, the authors should be congratulated for this groundbreaking study. Apart from significant new insights into MUL.APIN it has opened up a new avenue for research on ancient scientific texts that is likely to yield further interesting results, particularly if the cognitive analysis is combined with other approaches." Mathieu Ossendrijver, Humboldt University

While never formally recognized as a school of thought in its time, the work of a number of University of Toronto scholars over several decades - most notably Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan - formulated a number of original attempts to conceptualize communication as a phenomenon, and launched radical and innovative conjectures about its consequences. This landmark collection of essays re-assesses the existence, and re-evaluates the contribution, of the so-called Toronto School of Communication.

While the theories of Innis and McLuhan are notoriously resistant to neat encapsulation, some general themes have emerged in scholarly attempts to situate them within the discipline of communications studies that they helped to define. Three such themes - focus on the effects and consequences of communications, emphasis on communications as a process rather than as structure, and a sharp focus on the technology of communication, or the 'medium' - are the most fundamental in characterizing the unique perspective of the Toronto School. This collection not only represents a crucial step in defining the 'Toronto School, ' it also provides close analysis of the ideas of its individual members.

With an Introduction by Anthony D. Pellegrini, this work is one of the most extensive studies of early language and literacy undertaken to date. This volume describes the four interdisciplinary facets of a three-year longitudinal investigation of the early literate and linguistic experience and knowledge of a cohort of sixty 3- and 4-year-olds. Coverage includes: an extensive survey of home literate environment and development across a broad range of earliest literate and meta-literate knowledge over the three-year span of the study; links early literate experience and knowledge to differential strategies of speech act comprehension over time, showing that early literate experience heightens dependence upon linguistic as distinct from contextual information in comprehension; the employment of parent-child book reading as the matrix for a detailed analysis of lexical development, relating forms of parent-child interaction around text to variation in sophistication of reference; and finally, the examination of child-child interaction in a detailed, naturalistic framework, in relation to aspects of literate experience and knowledge.