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Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language

Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin

• Edited by Elena Lieven, Jiansheng Guo, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Keiko Nakamura, Seyda Ozcaliskan

This volume covers state-of-the-art research in the field of crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language. The forty chapters cover a wide range of topics that represent the many research interests of a pioneer, Dan Isaac Slobin, who has been a major intellectual and creative force in the field of child language development, linguistics, and psycholinguistics for the past four decades.

Slobin has insisted on a rigorous, crosslinguistic approach in his attempt to identify universal developmental patterns in language learning, to explore the effects of particular types of languages on psycholinguistic processes, to determine the extent to which universals of language and language behavior are determined by modality (vocal/auditory vs. manual/visual) and, finally, to investigate the relation between linguistic and cognitive processes.

In this volume, researchers take up the challenge of the differences between languages to forward research in four major areas with which Slobin has been concerned throughout his career: language learning in crosslinguistic perspective (spoken and sign languages); the integration of language specific factors in narrative skill; theoretical issues in typology, language development and language change; and the relationship between language and cognition.

All chapters are written by leading researchers currently working in these fields, who are Slobin's colleagues, collaborators or former students in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Each section starts with an introductory chapter that connects the themes of the chapters and reviews Slobin's contribution in the context of past research trends and future directions. The whole volume focuses squarely on the central argument: universals of human language and of its development are embodied and revealed in its diverse manifestations and utilization.

Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Study of Language is a key resource for those interested in the range of differences between languages and how this impacts on learning, cognition and language change, and a tribute to Dan Slobin's momentous contribution to the field.

ISBN: 9780805859980

Published December 22 2008 by Psychology Press.

Routes to Language

Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman

• Edited by Virginia C. Mueller Gathercole

This volume contains contributions from leaders in the field of child language in honor of one of the lights, Melissa Bowerman, who has had a profound, widespread, and enduring influence on research conducted for nearly 40 years.

In Section I, on Learning Words, Dedre Gentner & Lera Boroditsky lay out their latest theorizing--and new data from Navajo--on the status of their complementary hypotheses, the Natural Partitions hypothesis and the Relational Relativity hypothesis. Esther Dromi provides a rich review of theories of word meaning and re-examines her own data from her daughter Keren's acquisition of Hebrew to uncover the best components of theories that have evolved from early categorical views of children's word meanings to more current dynamic systems and emergentist perspectives.

In Section II, on Crosslinguistic Patterning and Acquisition of Lexical Semantics, Lourdes de León explores children's early sensitivity to language-specific verb meaning, through an examination of children's acquisition of verbs for 'fall' and 'eat' in the Mayan language Tzotzil, and argues for early influence of both the input and cognition. Bhuvana Narasimhan & Penelope Brown further examine a "Semantic Specificity Hypothesis" by comparing children's acquisition of Hindi and the Mayan language Tzeltal and find that the data are not consistent with the hypothesis.

In Section III, Crosslinguistic Patterning and Events, Paths, and Causes, William Croft addresses the nature of the causal-aspectual structure of events and proposes that a proper treatment requires two major components--aspectual structure and force-dynamic structure--as well as incorporation of multiple subevents. Soonja Choi explores speakers' expression of PATH and CAUSE in Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages and argues from English, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese data that PATH must be broken into two sub-types, "endpoint" paths and "trajectory" paths, as languages differ in their treatment of these two sub-types. Dan Slobin further examines whether PATH expression in motion verbs relates to paths of vision and argues, from English, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish data, that just as the structure of the language directs "thinking for speaking" about physical paths, it by extension also influences conceptualizations regarding paths of vision.

In Section IV, Influences on Development, Eve Clark argues that adults "shape the way children speak" by offering terms and elaborations in the input and by providing feedback when children make errors. Ping Li examines the acquisition of meaning from a connectionist-emergentist perspective and argues that the child's discovery of meaning emerges as a natural outgrowth of the processing of statistical probabilities--the frequency of co-occurrence of form-to-form, form-to-meaning, and meaning-to-meaning mappings. Mabel Rice focuses on children with Specific Language Impairment and provides a rich analysis of the research while trying to solve a conundrum: How is that children with SLI can demonstrate deficits in learning some aspects of language, and yet show robust abilities in other areas of linguistic development? Virginia Mueller Gathercole traces the protracted development of a wide range of "scalar predicates" in English and argues that cognitive abilities and linguistic input work together to "invite" the child to move from rudimentary lexical-specific usage to complex usage.

ISBN: 9781841697161

Published December 19 2008 by Psychology Press.

Cognitive and Cultural Influences on Eye Movements

• Edited by Keith Rayner, Deli Shen, Xuejun Bai, Guoli Yan

It is well-known that cognitive variables influence eye movements during reading. To what extent do cultural differences influence eye movements? This volume contains chapters that examine these two issues.

The first half of the volume documents recent research findings with respect to models of eye movement control in reading, eye movements and visual processing, and eye movements during scene perception, search, and mental rotation. The second half of the volume deals with two main cultural issues: eye movements in reading Chinese and cultural influences on eye movements. A number of experts provide overviews of their research findings concerning the topics in the five sections of the volume.

Readers interested in eye movements in reading, cognitive influences on eye movements, and cultural influences on eye movements will find the chapters valuable reading.

ISBN: 9787201061078

Published May 11 2009 by Psychology Press.

Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation

• No Author/Editor data available

Over the past thirty years, and particularly within the last ten years, researchers in the areas of social psychology, cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience have been examining fascinating questions regarding the nature of imagination and mental simulation – the imagination and generation of alternative realities. Some of these researchers have focused on the specific processes that occur in the brain when an individual is mentally simulating an action or forming a mental image, whereas others have focused on the consequences of mental simulation processes for affect, cognition, motivation, and behavior.

This Handbook provides a novel and stimulating integration of work on imagination and mental simulation from a variety of perspectives. It is the first broad-based volume to integrate specific sub-areas such as mental imagery, imagination, thought flow, narrative transportation, fantasizing, and counterfactual thinking, which have, until now, been treated by researchers as disparate and orthogonal lines of inquiry. As such, the volume enlightens psychologists to the notion that a wide-range of mental simulation phenomena may actually share a commonality of underlying processes.

ISBN: 9781841698878

Published December 15 2008 by Psychology Press.

Delusion and Self-Deception

Affective and Motivational Influences on Belief Formation

• No Author/Editor data available

This collection of essays focuses on the interface between delusions and self-deception. As pathologies of belief, delusions and self-deception raise many of the same challenges for those seeking to understand them. Are delusions and self-deception entirely distinct phenomena, or might some forms of self-deception also qualify as delusional? To what extent might models of self-deception and delusion share common factors? In what ways do affect and motivation enter into normal belief-formation, and how might they be implicated in self-deception and delusion? The essays in this volume tackle these questions from both empirical and conceptual perspectives. Some contributors focus on the general question of how to locate self-deception and delusion within our taxonomy of psychological states. Some contributors ask whether particular delusions - such as the Capgras delusion or anosognosia for hemiplegia - might be explained by appeal to motivational and affective factors. And some contributors provide general models of motivated reasoning, against which theories of pathological belief-formation might be measured.

The volume will be of interest to cognitive scientists, clinicians, and philosophers interested in the nature of belief and the disturbances to which it is subject.

ISBN: 9781841694702

Published December 15 2008 by Psychology Press.

Emotional Memory Across the Adult Lifespan

• No Author/Editor data available

Though many factors can influence the likelihood that we remember a past experience, one critical determinant is whether the experience caused us to have an emotional response. Emotional experiences are more likely to be remembered than nonemotional ones, and over the past couple of decades there has been an increased interest in understanding how emotion conveys this memory benefit.

This book begins with a broad overview of emotion, memory, and the neural underpinnings of each, providing the reader with an appreciation of the complex interplay between emotion and memory. It then examines how emotion influences young adults’ abilities to store information temporarily, or over the long term. It explains emotion’s influence on the memory processes that young adults use consciously and on the processes that guide young adults’ preferences and actions without their awareness. This book then moves on to describe how each of these influences of emotion are affected by the aging process, and by age-related disease, providing the reader with a lifespan perspective of emotional memory.

Within each of the domains covered, the book integrates research from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychological perspectives, examining both the behavioral and thought processes that lead to emotion’s effects on memory and also the underlying brain processes that guide those influences of emotion.

This book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in memory, emotion, and aging, working in the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive or affective neuroscience, and developmental or lifespan psychology.

ISBN: 9781841694832

Published December 15 2008 by Psychology Press.

Foundations of Sensation and Perception

2nd Edition

• No Author/Editor data available

The first edition of this comprehensive introduction to Sensation and Perception has been highly praised for its unique approach, which begins with the minor senses and progresses to vision.

The book begins with an introductory chapter on general physiological, perceptual and theoretical principles which gives the reader the conceptual tools to build a clear understanding of how we perceive the world. The next two chapters then flesh out basic topics such as transduction, receptive fields, and sensory adaptation via coverage of the minor senses (touch, balance, smell, and taste). Later chapters on hearing and vision build on these foundations. This approach allows students to thoroughly grasp the fundamental principles in relation to the relatively simple sensory systems before moving on to the more complex topics. Unlike other perception textbooks, this has a whole chapter on Individual Differences, which considers potential sources of difference such as age, sex, expertise and culture.

This full-colour 2^nd edition has been revised and updated to include:

• Revised and expanded coverage of taste processing and perception, touch perception, pitch perception, and receptive field modeling.
• New sections on word perception, the size after-effect, crowding, scene perception, and optic flow.
• A completely new chapter devoted to multi-sensory processing and synesthesia, with a new tutorial on attentional effects in perception.
• A new tutorial on visual dysfunction in artists.

The book includes a number of helpful textbook features, such as key terms, chapter summaries, and student and instructor supplementary resources. There are also 'Tutorial' sections in each chapter, which provide an opportunity for students to advance their studies by exploring supplementary information on recent or controversial developments. Further, over 700 references to original source material lead the interested reader into the specialist literature.

Foundations of Sensation and Perception provides students with a thorough analysis of our perceptual experience, how it relates to the physical properties of the world and how it is linked to the biological properties of the brain. It will be an invaluable resource for those studying psychology and neuroscience, enabling the reader to achieve a firm grasp of current knowledge concerning the complex processes that underlie our perception of the world.

Student Resources: Perception Student Learning Program

The student website includes our Perception Student Learning Program (Perception SLP) which offers a unique and innovative approach to study. The Perception SLP is available free of charge to departments adopting Foundations of Sensation and Perception by George Mather.

Each chapter from Foundations of Sensation and Perception is condensed into a concise summary version, providing an effective set of revision notes. These notes also expand on and elucidate the book's content, with references to specific pages in the textbook. 'Must know' information is presented in a clear, accessible style, along with sections to stretch more advanced students. The notes also provide an integrative framework for a range of interactive multimedia materials and features, including:

• Animations and simulations of key perceptual phenomena
• Fill-in-the-blank questions
• Multiple-choice questions
• Key-term definitions
• Research studies
• Short-essay questions
• Links to related websites.

Several demo chapters from the Perception Student Learning Program are available to view.

Instructor Resources

We offer web-based, password-protected resources free of charge to instructors who recommend Foundations of Sensation and Perception by George Mather. These resources include:

• A comprehensive chapter-by-chapter slideshow lecture course
• A set of short-answer questions per chapter to stimulate discussion.

ISBN: 9781841696980

Published December 08 2008 by Psychology Press.

Information-Processing Channels in the Tactile Sensory System

A Psychophysical and Physiological Analysis

• Edited by George A. Gescheider, John H. Wright, Ronald T. Verrillo

Information-Processing Channels in the Tactile Sensory System addresses the fundamental question of whether sensory channels, similar to those known to operate in vision and audition, also operate in the sense of touch. Based on the results of psychophysical and neurophysiological experimentation the authors make a powerful case that channels operate in the processing of mechanical stimulation of the highly sensitive glabrous skin of the hand. According to the multichannel model presented in this monograph, each channel, with its specific type of mechanoreceptor and afferent nerve fiber, responds optiimally to particular aspects of the tactile stimulus. It is further proposed that the tactile perception of objects results from the combined activity of the individual tactile channels. This work is important because it provides researchers and students in the field of sensory neuroscience with a comprehensive model that enhances our understanding of tactile perception.

ISBN: 9781841698960

Published December 17 2008 by Psychology Press.