Based on an in-depth study of children’s language development theory, this book puts forward the original proposition that semantic perception is the human sixth sense. Presenting a detailed, complete, and scientific argumentation, it asserts that the innateness of semantic perception has a physiological basis and that language acquisition is based on semantic perception, and proposes the idea of a critical period of nurture and language growth. To this end, the book not only contrasts children’s language acquisition processes and the process of adult speech generation and comprehension, but also discusses the ability to read and write, describing this important stage of children’s language development and analyzing semantic perception. Focusing on education and psychology, it also discusses the use of semantic perception theory to instruct teaching and learning. This book is a valuable resource for teachers, researchers, practitioners and graduate students in the fields of educational technology, child development and language learning, as well as anyone interested in children’s language development.

Humans involuntarily experience physical items as having meaning-properties. Semantic Perception explores this experience--the phenomenology of the understanding of language--in depth. Jody Azzouni shows the many ways that we experience the meaning-properties of language artifacts as independent of the intentions of their makers.

Wylie Breckenridge offers a fresh understanding of the character of visual experience by deploying the methods of semantics. He develops a theory of what we mean by the 'look' sentences that we use to describe our visual experiences, and on that basis develops a theory of what it is to have a visual experience with a certain character.

The book illustrates how the human ability to adapt to the environment and interact with it can explain our linguistic representation of the world as constrained by our bodies and sensory perception. The different chapters discuss philosophical, scientific, and linguistic perspectives on embodiment and body perception, highlighting the core mechanisms humans employ to acquire knowledge of reality. These processes are based on sensory experience and interaction through communication.

The growing interest in prepositions is reflected by this impressive collection of papers from leading scholars of various fields. The selected contributions of Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context focus on the local and temporal semantics of prepositions in relation to their context, too. Following an introduction which puts this new approach into a thematical and historical perspective, the volume presents fifteen studies in the following areas: The semantics of space dynamics (mainly on French prepositions); Language acquisition (aphasia and code-switching); Artificial intelligence (mainly of English prepositions); Specific languages: Hebrew (from a number of perspectives — syntax, semiotics, and sociolinguistic impact on morphology), Maltese, the Melanesian English-based Creole Bislama, and Biblical translations into Judeo-Greek.