Language Policy

Language Policy PDF Author: Elana Shohamy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134333528
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
A critical look at language policies, how they are implemented and the hidden agendas which often lie behind them, drawing on examples from the US and UK and showing what the consequences are for the people involved.

Language Policy

Language Policy PDF Author: Elana Shohamy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134333528
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
A critical look at language policies, how they are implemented and the hidden agendas which often lie behind them, drawing on examples from the US and UK and showing what the consequences are for the people involved.

Languages in Action

Languages in Action PDF Author: Marinela Burada
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527526976
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This book includes a selection of papers in linguistics presented at the 14th Conference on British and American Studies. Its tripartite structure reflects the main topics around which the nineteen contributions cluster. The first part, “Native language profiling: explorations and findings”, displays a variety of methodological approaches aimed at highlighting syntactic, morphological, and lexico-semantic aspects of, primarily, English and Romanian. The papers in the second section, “Aspects of language change, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic variation”, bring to the fore some of the topical issues falling within the ambit of language contact, such as mixed languages, bilingualism, and code-switching, as well as contrastive investigations of language structure. The research strand in the final part, “Meaning and communication within and across cultures”, relates to lexico-pragmatic inquiries into the construction of meaning, focusing on the “language beyond language”, as well as on the extent to which the lexical and pragmatic repertoires of various languages can be made to overlap.

Bottom-up and Top-down Processes in Reading

Bottom-up and Top-down Processes in Reading PDF Author: Michael Dambacher
Publisher: Universitätsverlag Potsdam
ISBN: 3869560592
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In reading, word frequency is commonly regarded as the major bottom-up determinant for the speed of lexical access. Moreover, language processing depends on top-down information, such as the predictability of a word from a previous context. Yet, however, the exact role of top-down predictions in visual word recognition is poorly understood: They may rapidly affect lexical processes, or alternatively, influence only late post-lexical stages. To add evidence about the nature of top-down processes and their relation to bottom-up information in the timeline of word recognition, we examined influences of frequency and predictability on event-related potentials (ERPs) in several sentence reading studies. The results were related to eye movements from natural reading as well as to models of word recognition. As a first and major finding, interactions of frequency and predictability on ERP amplitudes consistently revealed top-down influences on lexical levels of word processing (Chapters 2 and 4). Second, frequency and predictability mediated relations between N400 amplitudes and fixation durations, pointing to their sensitivity to a common stage of word recognition; further, larger N400 amplitudes entailed longer fixation durations on the next word, a result providing evidence for ongoing processing beyond a fixation (Chapter 3). Third, influences of presentation rate on ERP frequency and predictability effects demonstrated that the time available for word processing critically co-determines the course of bottom-up and top-down influences (Chapter 4). Fourth, at a near-normal reading speed, an early predictability effect suggested the rapid comparison of top-down hypotheses with the actual visual input (Chapter 5). The present results are compatible with interactive models of word recognition assuming that early lexical processes depend on the concerted impact of bottom-up and top-down information. We offered a framework that reconciles the findings on a timeline of word recognition taking into account influences of frequency, predictability, and presentation rate (Chapter 4).

An Encyclopedia of Language

An Encyclopedia of Language PDF Author: N.E. Collinge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134977166
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 1170

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Book Description
* Examines how language works, accounting for its nature, its use, its study and its history * Two comprehensive indexes of Topics and Technical Terms, and Names * Carefully illustrated to explain key points in the text `This rich repository of information on all aspects of language is a must for all libraries in higher education, schools and larger public libraries.' - Library Review `Each article has an excellent bibliography. In addition, there are comprehensive indexes of topics and technical terms and names. Highly recommended for all college and general public libraries.' - Choice `This important book is in many ways a state-of-the -art survey of current conceptions of, and approaches to, language, with generous references to more detailed sources. Each chapter has a good bibliography.' - Language International `A comprehensive guide ... with very thorough bibliographies ... Collinge's Encyclopedia is recommended to academic libraries.' - Reference Reviews `The bibliographies are an invaluable aid ... the editor is to be congratulated for having done an excellent job ... there are virtually no areas of language and linguistics that do not get a look in somewhere, and there is good signposting in the text itself.' - Nigel Vincent, Times Higher Education Supplement

Speech and Language

Speech and Language PDF Author: Norman J. Lass
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 1483219941
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
Speech and Language: Volume 6, Advances in Basic Research and Practice is a collection of papers that discusses pathology, theories, and clinical issues related to language and speech. Some papers describe auditory discrimination and intervention techniques for articulatory defects, assessment of auditory disorders, phonological systems of deaf speakers, as well as speech and language characteristics of aging persons. Other papers discuss issues in language and cognitive assessment of black children, distortions of the supralaryngeal vocal tract, the structure of the human tongue, transformation of the acoustic signal into speech, and methods to estimate glottal volume velocity waveform properties. One paper suggests guidelines that investigators should be aware of before giving any speech discriminating tests. These guidelines include the following: use of age appropriate tests, use of culturally unbiased tests, adaption of intrapersonal testing procedures, and utilization of recorded stimulus presentation. Another paper reviews auditory processing deficits associated with brain damage and the considerations applicable to the assessment of such disorders. It also suggests treatment planning. One paper concludes that the phonological structure of a fluent speech requires that the listener employ higher level sources of knowledge while making phonetic decisions. Linguists, speech pathologists., psychologists, speech therapists, neurologists, neuropsychologists, and neurolinguists will find the collection highly relevant.

Cognition and Pragmatics

Cognition and Pragmatics PDF Author: Dominiek Sandra
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027207801
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this third volume focuses on the interface between language and cognition. Language use is impossible without the mobilization of a large variety of cognitive processes, each serving a different purpose. During the last half century cognitive approaches to language have been particularly successful, and the broad spectrum of contributions to this volume testify to this success. As cognitive approaches to language are by definition a subset of the larger enterprise of cognitive science, a contribution on this general topic sets the stage. This is joined by a chapter on cognitive grammar, a theoretical study of the architecture of human language that is deeply inspired by general cognitive principles. A chapter on experimentation offers a crash-course on basic issues of experimental design and on the rationale behind statistical testing in general and the most important statistical tests in particular, offering a methodological toolkit for understanding many of the other contributions. Different chapters cover a broad range of topics: language acquisition, psycholinguistics, specialized topics within the latter field (e.g. the bilingual mental lexicon, categorization), and aspects of language awareness. Some chapters home in on what have become indispensible perspectives on the cognitive underpinnings of language: the way language is represented and processed in the human brain and simulation studies. The ever-growing success of the latter type of studies is exemplified, for instance, by the highly flourishing connectionist tradition and the more general paradigm of artificial intelligence, each of which is dealt with in a separate contribution.

Constructing a Language

Constructing a Language PDF Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067425712X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, Michael Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Tomasello demonstrates that we don’t need a self-contained “language instinct” to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities. Tomasello argues that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, which rests on the uniquely human ability to comprehend intention. Grammar emerges as the speakers of a language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols; children pick up these patterns in the buzz of words they hear around them. All theories of language acquisition assume these fundamental skills of intention-reading and pattern-finding. Some formal linguistic theories posit a second set of acquisition processes to connect somehow with an innate universal grammar. But these extra processes, Tomasello argues, are completely unnecessary—important to save a theory but not to explain the phenomenon. For all its empirical weaknesses, Chomskian generative grammar has ruled the linguistic world for forty years. Constructing a Language offers a compellingly argued, psychologically sound new vision for the study of language acquisition.

Agrammatic Aphasia

Agrammatic Aphasia PDF Author: Lise Menn
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902722045X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 2014

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Book Description
This major reference work fills a need long recognized in neurolinguistics: a source for analyzable speech transcripts from agrammatic aphasic patients that provides detailed grammatical descriptions and distributional analyses. This 3-volume set is unique in that it presents narrative speech from carefully selected clinically comparable patients, speakers of 14 languages, and parallel narratives by normal speakers. For each of the 14 languages there is a case presentation chapter analyzing and discussing the language of agrammatic patients, followed by primary data, which are organized as follows: running text of speech by two patients; interlinear morphemic translations of those texts; running text of speech elicited from two normal control subjects (plus interlinear translations); tables and figures analyzing distributional properties of the patients' speech; results of comprehension tests of the patients; transcriptions of patients' oral reading and writing samples. Neurological information is included with the case presentations, and a short grammatical sketch of each language is added to make the work on all languages accessible even to those who only read English. Language findings are presented for English, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Swedish, French, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Finnish, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese.The book is an indispensable reference work for all linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists who wish to test their theories against a massive body of data.

Motor and Sensory Processes of Language

Motor and Sensory Processes of Language PDF Author: Eric Keller
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135059926
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Published in 1987, Motor and Sensory Processes of Language is a valuable contribution to the field of Cognitive Psychology.

Clinical Neuropsychology

Clinical Neuropsychology PDF Author: MD Kenneth M. Heilman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195384873
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 707

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Book Description
Since its first publication in 1979, Clinical Neuropsychology has been a valued resource for students and scientists interested in brain-behavior relationships. The text covers all of the major syndromes, but reflects the major advances in understanding and treatment of neurobehavioral disorders since the previous edition was published.