Written as a tribute to Lila Gleitman, an influential pioneer in first language acquisition and reading studies, this significant book clearly establishes the relationships between psychology and linguistics. It begins with a thorough examination of issues in developmental psychology, continues with questions on perception and cognition, studies the realm of psycholinguistics, and concludes with an exploration of theoretical linguistics.

People constantly talk to each other about experience or knowledge resulting from spatial perception; they describe the size, shape, orientation and position of objects using a wide range of spatial expressions. The semantic treatment of such expressions presents particular challenges for natural language processing. The meaning representation used must be capable of distinguishing between fine-grained sense differences and ambiguities grounded in our experience and perceptual structure. While there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial expressions, most computational characterisations have been restricted to particularly narrow problem domains. The chapters in the present volume reflect a commitment to the development of cognitively informed computational treatments of spatial language and spatial representation. Therefore the chapters present computational work, empirical work, or a combination of both. The book will appeal to all those interested in spatial language and spatial representation, whether they work in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive psychology or linguistics.

Conversational informatics investigates human behaviour with a view to designing conversational artifacts capable of interacting with humans in a conversational fashion. It spans a broad array of topics including linguistics, psychology and human-computer interaction. Until recently research in such areas has been carried out in isolation, with no attempt made to connect the various disciplines. Advancements in science and technology have changed this. Conversational Informatics provides an interdisciplinary introduction to conversational informatics and places emphasis upon the integration of scientific approaches to achieve engineering goals and to advance further understanding of conversation. It features a collection of surveys structured around four prominent research areas: conversational artifacts, conversational contents, conversation environment design and conversation measurement, analysis and modelling Conversational artifacts shows how synthetic characters or intelligent robots use eye gaze, gestures and other non-verbal communicators to interact. Conversational contents looks at developing techniques for acquiring, editing, distributing and utilising the contents that are produced and consumed in conversation. Conversation environment design explains techniques for creating intelligent virtual environments and for representing individuals within a virtual environment by monitoring and reproducing their non-verbal conversational behaviour. Conversation measurement, analysis and modelling demonstrate how conversational behaviour can be measured and analyzed. Conversational Informatics will be an invaluable resource for postgraduate students and researchers in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering as well as engineers and developers working in the field of automation, robotics and agents technology.

Published in the year 1982, The Social and Psychological Contexts of Language is a valuable contribution to the field of Social Psychology.

This new edition includes the introduction of the WHO distinctions between impairment, disability and handicap; an increased focus on information processing approaches to language disorders, and the introduction of revision questions as well as tutorial activities at the end of every chapter to support student learning.

and processes which are exclusive to humans in their encoding, storing, decoding and retrieving spatial knowledge for various tasks. The authors present and discuss connectionist models of cognitive maps which are based on local representation, versus models which are based on distributed representation, as well as connectionist models concerning language and spatial relations. As is well known, Gibson's (1979) ecological approach suggests a view on cognition which is diametrically different from the classical main stream view: perception (and thus cognition) is direct, immediate and needs no internal information processing, and is thus essentially an external process of interaction between an organism and its external environment. The chapter by Harry Heft introduces J. J. Gibson's ecological approach and its implication to the construction of cognitive maps in general and to the issue of wayfinding in particular. According to Heft, main stream cognitive sciences are essentially Cartesian in nature and have not as yet internalized the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. Gibson, in his ecological approach, has tried to do exactly this. The author introduces the basic terminology of the ecological approach and relates its various notions, in particular optic flow, nested hierarchy and affordances, to navigation and the way routes and places in the environment are learned.

The continuing expansion of research in dialectology, sociolinguistics and English as a world language has made the field increasingly difficult to survey. This bibliography is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the relevant publications of the past few years. Like its predecessor, it will prove an indispensable reference book. The collection is in four parts, dealing respectively with general studies, Britain and Ireland, the United States and Canada, and the rest of the world. There is a joint index in which the 2800 entries are classified according to specific areas, ethnic groups and major linguistic categories, thus making the bibliography easy to use with the greatest profit. The present bibliography complements the one compiled by W. Viereck, E.W. Schneider and M. Görlach, which covered the period from 1965 to 1983 and was published in the same series in 1984.