Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development

by Melissa Bowerman (Editor), Stephen Levinson (Editor)

Overview

Recent years have seen a revolution in our knowledge of how children learn to think and speak. In this volume, leading scholars from these rapidly evolving fields of research examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development, bringing two vital strands of investigation into close dialog. The book explains important new ideas about how language acquisition interacts with the process of early cognition, providing original empirical contributions based on a variety of languages, populations and ages as well as theoretical discussions that bridge psychology, linguistics and anthropology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521596596
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/11/2001
Series:	Language Culture and Cognition , #3
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 8.98(h) x 1.50(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; Introduction; Part I. Foundational Issues: 1. The mosaic evolution of cognitive and linguistic ontogeny Jonas Langer; 2. Theories, language, and culture: Whorf without wincing Alison Gopnik; 3. Initial knowledge and conceptual change: space and number Elizabeth S. Spelke and Sanna Tsivkin; Part II. Constraints on Word Learning?: 4. How domain-general processes may create domain-specific biases Linda B. Smith; 5. Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life Michael Tomasello; 6. Roots of word learning Paul Bloom; Part III. Entities, Individuation, and Quantification: 7. Whorf versus continuity theorists: bringing data to bear on the debate Susan Carey; 8. Individuation, relativity, and early word learning Dedre Gentner and Lera Boroditsky; 9. Grammatical categories and the development of classification preferences: a comparative approach John A. Lucy and Suzanne Gaskins; 10. Person in the language of singletons, siblings, and twins Werner Deutsch, Angela Wagner, Renate Buchardt, Nina Schultz and Jörg Nakath; 11. Early representation for all, each, and their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese Patricia J. Brooks, Martin D. S. Braine, Gisele Jia and Maria da Graca Dias; 12. Children's weak interpretations of universally quantified questions Kenneth F. Drozd; Part IV. Relational Concepts in Form-Function Mapping: 13. Emergent categories in first language acquisition Eve V. Clark; 14. Form-function relations: how do children find out what they are? Dan J. Slobin; 15. Cognitive-conceptual development and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: the development of time concepts and verb tense Heike Behrens; 16. Shaping meanings for language: universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories Melissa Bowerman and Soonja Choi; 17. Learning to talk about motion UP and DOWN in TΔl: is there a language-specific bias for verb learning? Penelope Brown; 18. Finding the richest path: language and cognition in the acquisition of verticality in Tzotzil (Mayan) Lourdes de León; 19. Covariation between spatial language and cognition, and its implications for language learning Stephen C. Levinson; Indexes.

Editorial Reviews

"[This volume] is an excellent reference." Language in Society

From the Publisher