Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior is a collection of papers that discusses differences at the center of the study of language, specifically, on the various dimensions of linguistic ability and behavior along which individuals can differ from each other. Papers also review the development of techniques that measure these dimensions in relation to biological, psychological, and cultural parameters. Some papers review individual differences in language study in terms of different perspectives: that of a psychometrician's, of an individualistic's vantage point, and of a psycholinguistic's. Other papers discuss how each individual accesses, uses, and judges his language through fluency, biases, spatial principles, or a linguistic-phonetic mode. Several papers examine individual differences in language acquisition, such as "profile analysis," strategies in acquisition of sounds, second language learning, and duplication of adult language system. A group of papers addresses the biological aspects of language variation. These biological aspects include selective disorders of syntax (agrammatism), selective disorders of lexical retrieval (anomia), and cerebral lateralization effects in language processing. Certain papers explain individual differences in languages using sociolinguistic analysis. The collection is well suited for linguists, ethnologists, psychologists, and researchers whose works involve linguistics, learning, communications, and syntax.

This volume examines the ramifications of individual differences in therapy outcomes for a wide variety of communication disorders. In an era where evidence-based practice is the clinical profession's watchword, each chapter attacks this highly relevant issue from a somewhat different perspective. In some areas of communication disorders, considering the variance brought by the client into the therapeutic 'mix' has a healthy history, whereas in others the notion of how individual client profiles mesh with therapy outcomes has rarely been considered. Through the use of research results, case study descriptions and speculation, the contributors have creatively woven what we know and what we have yet to substantiate into an interesting collection of summaries useful for therapy programming and designing clinical research.

This book offers a systemic-functional account of Spanish, and analyses how Spanish grammatical forms compare and contrast with those of English. The authors analyse Spanish according to the three main 'metafunctions': ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The result is a comprehensive examination of Spanish grammar from the clause upwards. Presupposing little or no knowledge of Spanish, this book will be of interest to researchers in Spanish language, systemic functional linguistics or contrastive linguistics.

This volume deals with core issues in figurative language and figurative thought. It also explores areas of convergence between idealised cognitive models and language across fourteen European and non-European languages (Croatian, English, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Russian, Old Saxon, Sicilian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish). The collection foregrounds the relationship that holds between literalness and figurativeness in meaning construction, it emphasises the role of conceptual metonymy and metaphor as the main cognitive tools at work in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties, and it also depicts the import of cognitive models in the production and interpretation of multimodal communication. In addition, a number of more specific topics are addressed from different perspectives, such as language variation and cultural models, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse and the role of empirical work in cognitive linguistics.

In psycholinguistic research there has traditionally been a strong emphasis on understanding how particular language types of are processed and learned . In particular, Romance and Germanic languages (e.g. English, French, German) have, until recently, received more attention than other types, such as Chinese languages. This has led to selective emphasis on the phonological building blocks of European languages, consonants and vowels, to the exclusion of lexical tones which, like consonants and vowels, determine lexical meaning, but unlike consonants and vowels are based on pitch variations. Lexical tone is pervasive; it is used in at least half of the world’ languages (Maddieson, 2013), e.g., most Asian and some African, Central American, and European languages. This Research Topic brings together a collection of recent empirical research on the processing and representation of lexical tones across the lifespan with an emphasis on advancing knowledge on how tone systems are acquired. The articles focus on various aspects of tone: early perception of tones, influences of tone on word learning, the acquisition of new tone systems, and production of tones. One set of articles report on tone perception at the earliest stage of development, in infants learning either tone or non-tone languages. Tsao and Chen et al. demonstrate that infants’ sensitivity to Mandarin lexical tones, as well as pitch, improves over the first year of life in native and non-native learners in contrast to traditional accounts of perceptual narrowing for consonants and vowels. Götz et al. report a different pattern of perception for Cantonese tones and further demonstrate influences of methodological approaches on infants’ tone sensitivity. Fan et al. demonstrate that sensitivity to less well-studied properties of tone languages, such as neutral tone, may develop after the first year of life. Cheng and Lee ask a similar question in an electrophysiological study and report effects of stimulus salience on infants’ neural response to native tones. In a complementary set of studies focused on tone sensitivity in word learning, Burnham et al. demonstrate that infants bind tones to newly-learned words if they are learning a tone language, either monolingually or bilingually; although it was also found that object-word binding was influenced by the properties of individual tones. Liu and Kager chart a developmental trajectory over the second year of life in which infants narrow in their interpretation of non-native tones. Choi et al. investigate how learning a tone language can influence uptake of other suprasegmental properties of language, such as stress, and demonstrate that native tone sensitivity in children can facilitate stress sensitivity when learning a stress-based language. Finally, two studies focus on sensitivity to pitch in a sub-class tone languages: pitch accent languages. In a study on Japanese children’s abilities to recognise words they know, Ota et al. demonstrate a limited sensitivity to native pitch contrasts in toddlers. In contrast, Ramachers et al. demonstrate comparatively strong sensitivity to pitch in native and non-native speakers of a different pitch accent system (Limburghian) when learning new words. Several studies focus on learning new tone systems. In a training study with school-aged children, Kasisopa et al. demonstrate that tone language experience increases children’s abilities to learn new tone contrasts. Poltrock et al. demonstrate similar advantages of tone experience in learning new tone systems in adults. And in an elecrophysiological study, Liu et al. demonstrate order effects in adults’ neural responses to new tones, discussing implications for learning tone languages as an adult. Finally, Hannah et al. demonstrate that extralinguistic cues, such as facial expression, can support adults’ learning of new tone systems. In three studies investigating tone production, Rattansone et al. report the results of a study demonstrating kindergartners’ asynchronous mastery of tones – delayed acquisition of tone sandhi forms relative to base forms. In a study interrogating a corpus of adult tone production, Han et al. demonstrate that mothers produce tones in a distinct manner when speaking to infants; tone differences are emphasised more when speaking to infants than to adults. Combining perception and production of tones, Wong et al. report asynchronous development of tone perception and tone production in children. The Research Topic also includes a series of Opinion pieces and Commentaries addressing the broader relevance of tone and pitch to the study of language acquisition. Curtin and Werker discuss ways in which tone can be integrated into their model of infant language development (PRIMIR). Best discusses the phonological status of lexical tones and considers how recent empirical research on tone perception bears on this question. Kager focuses on how language learners distinguish lexical tones from other sources of pitch variation (e.g., affective and pragmatic) that also inform language comprehension. Finally, Antoniou and Chin unite evidence of tone sensitivity from children and adults and discuss how these areas of research can be mutually informative. Psycholinguistic studies of lexical tone acquisition have burgeoned over the past 13 years. This collection of empirical studies and opinion pieces provides a state-of-the-art panoply of the psycholinguistic study of lexical tones, and demonstrate its coming of age. The articles in this Research Topic will help address the hitherto Eurocentric non-tone language research emphasis, and will contribute to an expanding narrative of speech perception, speech production, and language acquisition that includes all of the world’s languages. Importantly, these studies underline the scientific promise of drawing from tone languages in psycholinguistic research; the research questions raised by lexical tone are unique and distinct from those typically applied to more widely studied languages and populations. The comprehensive study of language acquisition can only benefit from this expanded focus.