Language in Mind PDF Download

Author: Dedre Gentner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262571630
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think has evoked perennial fascination and intense controversy. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the American linguists who propounded it, languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world, and the structure of one's language influences how one understands the world. Thus speakers of different languages perceive the world differently. Although the last two decades have been marked by extreme skepticism concerning the possible effects of language on thought, recent theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive science have given the question new life. Research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology has revealed striking differences in cross-linguistic semantic patterns, and cognitive psychology has developed subtle techniques for studying how people represent and remember experience. It is now possible to test predictions about how a given language influences the thinking of its speakers. Language in Mind includes contributions from both skeptics and believers and from a range of fields. It contains work in cognitive psychology, cognitive development, linguistics, anthropology, and animal cognition. The topics discussed include space, number, motion, gender, theory of mind, thematic roles, and the ontological distinction between objects and substances. Contributors Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Giyoo Hatano, Stan Kuczaj, Barbara Landau, Stephen Levinson, John Lucy, Barbara Malt, Dan Slobin, Steven Sloman, Elizabeth Spelke, and Michael Tomasello

Author: Ray S. Jackendoff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262600248
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, Ray Jackendoff has persistently tackled difficult issues in the theory of mind and related theories of cognitive processing. Chief among his contributions is a formal theory that elaborates the nature of language and its relationship to a broad set of other domains. Languages of the Mind provides convenient access to Jackendoff's work over the past five years on the nature of mental representations in a variety of cognitive domains, in the context of a detailed theory of the level of conceptual structure developed in his earlier books Semantics and Cognition and Consciousness and the Computational Mind. The first two chapters summarize the theory of levels of mental representation ("languages of the mind") and their relationships to each other and show how conceptual structure can be approached along lines familiar from syntactic and phonological theory. From this background, subsequent chapters develop issues in word learning (and its pertinence to the Piaget-Chomsky debate) and the relation of conceptual structure to the understanding of physical space. Further chapters apply the theory to domains outside of traditional cognitive science. They include an approach to social and cultural cognition modeled on first principles of linguistic theory, the beginnings of a formal description of psychodynamic phenomena, and a discussion of musical parsing and its relation to musical affect that bears on current disputes in linguistic parsing. The final chapter takes up a long-standing conflict between philosophical and psychological approaches to the study of mind, arguing that mental representations should be regarded purely in terms of the combinatorial organization of brain states, and that the philosophical insistence on the intentionality of mental states should be abandoned.

Author: Albert M. Galaburda
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674007727
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
The only way we can convey our thoughts to another person is through verbal language. Does this imply that our thoughts ultimately rely on words? This text takes the contrary position, arguing that many possible 'languages of thought' play different roles in the life of the mind.

Author: Rafael Art Javier
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387309144
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This book fills a critical gap in the cross-cultural literature by illuminating the bilingual experience in both its social and clinical contexts. Rafael Javier makes a convincing, empirically founded case for what he terms the bilingual mind, with its own particular approach to cognition, memory, and emotional and social development. Using this framework, he provides answers to important questions about the way bilingualism affects cognition and development.

Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In this collection of Chomsky's lectures, the first three essays describe linguistic contributions to the study of the mind and the last three discuss the relationship among linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062032526
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

Author: Ray S Jackendoff
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786724056
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
What is it about the human mind that accounts for the fact that we can speak and understand a language? Why can't other creatures do the same? And what does this tell us about the rest of human abilities? Recent dramatic discoveries in linguistics and psychology provide intriguing answers to these age-old mysteries. In this fascinating book, Ray Jackendoff emphasizes the grammatical commonalities across languages, both spoken and signed, and discusses the implications for our understanding of language acquisition and loss.

Author: Aneta Pavlenko
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521888425
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
If language influences the way we think, does it mean that bilinguals think differently in their respective languages? Interweaving cutting edge research, case studies and personal experience, this book will take you on a quest to unlock the mysteries of the bilingual mind.

Author: Rhodri Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521874750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
Language, Mind and Nature is a 2007 text which fully reconstructs this artificial language movement. In so doing, it reveals a great deal about the beliefs and activities of those who sought to reform learning in seventeenth-century England.

Author: Mark Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019512667X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind.