Every language has a way of talking about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. This can be done through lexical means, and through grammatical evidentials. The studies presented here focus on the experssions of perception and cognition in languages of Africa, Oceania, and South America.

Perceptual and Cognitive Development illustrates how the developmental approach yields fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole. The book discusses how to relate developmental, comparative, and neurological considerations to early learning and development, and it presents fundamental problems in cognition and language, such as the acquisition of a coherent, organized, and shared understanding of concepts and language. Discussions of learning, memory, attention, and problem solving are embedded within specific accounts of the neurological status of developing minds and the nature of knowledge. - Research advances and theoretical reorientations are updated in the Second Edition; the revision focuses more attention on the cognitive and biological sciences and neuroscience - Illustrates how the developmental approach can yield fundamental contributions to our understanding of perception and cognition as a whole - Discussions of learning, memory, and attention permeate individual chapters

The essays range across fields foundational to cognitive science, including perception, attention, memory, and language, using formal, experimental, and neuroscientific approaches to issues of representation and learning. These original empirical research essays in the psychology of perception, cognition, and language were written in honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman, two of the most prominent psychologists of our time. The essays range across fields foundational to cognitive science, including perception, attention, memory, and language, using formal, experimental, and neuroscientific approaches to issues of representation and learning. An introduction provides a historical perspective on the development of the field from the 1960s onward. The contributors have all been colleagues and students of the Gleitmans, and the collection celebrates their influence on the field of cognitive science. Contributors Cynthia Fisher, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Katherine Hirsh-Pasek, John Jonides, Phillip Kellman, Michael Kelly, Donald S. Lamm, Barbara Landau, Jack Nachmias, Letitia Naigles, Elissa Newport, W. Gerrod Parrott, Daniel Reisberg, Robert A. Rescorla, Paul Rozin, John Sabini, Elizabeth Shipley, Thomas F. Shipley, John C. Trueswell

Originally published in 1983, the aim of this book was to discuss some fundamental problems of cognitive developmental psychology at the time. The theme which underlies the discussion is that scientific knowledge of the cognitive characteristics of other people starts from the cognitive instruments that we psychologist employ, viz. our theories, models, assumptions, methods of enquiry etc. Thus our scientific cognitive equipment not only provides the format in which cognition in other people is expressed, it also exemplifies, in some abstract sense, this cognition. The first part of the book deals with the concept of development in relation to the structure of developmental theories. It is argued that theories originate from (implicit) conceptual analyses of (implicit) final state definitions. Starting from this specific view on the nature of developmental theories, the second part of the book discusses perception and perceptual development.

One of the key questions in cognitive psychology is how people represent knowledge about concepts such as football or love. Some researchers have proposed that concepts are represented in human memory by the sensorimotor systems that underlie interaction with the outside world. These theories represent developments in cognitive science to view cognition no longer in terms of abstract information processing, but in terms of perception and action. In other words, cognition is grounded in embodied experiences. Studies show that sensory perception and motor actions support understanding of words and object concepts. Moreover, even understanding of abstract and emotion concepts can be shown to rely on more concrete, embodied experiences. Finally, language itself can be shown to be grounded in sensorimotor processes. This book brings together theoretical arguments and empirical evidence from several key researchers in this field to support this framework.

Intro to Amer Sign Lang w/ focus on psychological processes involvd in its acquistion & use, as well as the brain bases of ASL. An upper- level txt w/ readership among researchers in cognitve psych & cognitve neuroscience, language & linguistics, speech,

The 1987 landmark publications by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson made image schema one of the cornerstone concepts of the emerging experientialist paradigm of Cognitive Linguistics, a framework founded upon the rejection of the mind-body dichotomy and stressing the fundamentally embodied nature of meaning, imagination and reason - hence language. Conceived of as the pre-linguistic, dynamic and highly schematic gestalts arising directly from motor movement, object manipulation, and perceptual interaction, image schemas served to anchor abstract reasoning and imagination to sensori-motor patterns in the conceptual theory of metaphor. Being itself informed by preceding crosslinguistic work on semantic primitives in the linguistic representations of spatial relations (carried out by L. Talmy, R. Langacker, and others), the notion has inspired a large amount of subsequent research and debate on diverse issues ranging from the meaning, structure and acquisition of natural languages to the embodied mind itself. From Perception to Meaning is the first survey of current image-schema theory and offers a collection of original and innovative essays by leading scholars, many of whom have shaped the theory from the very beginning. The edition unites essays on major issues in recent research on image-schemas - from aspects of their definition and linguistic formalization, their psychological status and neural grounding to their role as semantic universals and primitives in language acquisition. The book will thus not only be welcomed by linguists of a cognitive orientation, but will prove relevant to philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in language, and indeed to anyone studying the embodied mind.