The expanding field of affective neuroscience is redefining the role of emotions in cognition, reasoning, and judgment. This contradicts long-standing assumptions about cognition that consider emotions antithetical to learning. Emotions arose early in human brain development as essential to survival by directing the embodied brain toward…

Interface Delay is a theory of syntactic development, which attempts to explain an array of constructions that are slow to develop, which are characterized by being sensitive to discourse-pragmatic considerations of the type associated with the natural semantic class of definites. The theory claims that neither syntax itself, nor the…

Reading comprehension is key to knowledge acquisition and to reinforcing memory for previous information. While reading, a mental representation is constructed in the reader's mind. The mental model comprises the words in the text, the relations between the words, and inferences linking to concepts in prior knowledge. The automated model of…

Spelling is a subject that often opens a chasm between "haves" and "have-nots". Students with spelling power, the haves, pick up new spellings almost effortlessly, acing their spelling tests after a few minutes of review. In contrast, the have-nots may painstakingly copy out each word 10 times the night before the test and still fail the test the…

This book illustrates the ways that cognitive linguistics, a relatively new paradigm in language studies, can illuminate and facilitate language research and teaching. The first part of the book introduces the basics of cognitive linguistic theory in a way that is geared toward second language teachers and researchers. The second part of the book…

In instructional multimedia design, it is often recommended that text accompanying pictures be presented in a personalised style to promote learning. The superiority of personalised over formal text is may be explained using social agency theory (Mayer, 2005b), but it has not been investigated empirically whether such effects are valid in…

Discourse comprehension theories frequently assume that discourse comprehension involves a complete analysis of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels of processing. However, discourse psychologists have documented some conditions when a partial processing and underspecification of the resulting representations occurs. The articles in…

This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations--English-Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English-Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups…

A cognitive systems approach of linguistic knowledge is outlined. According to this view, linguistic knowledge or cognitive grammar is part of the coherent structure and function of a cognitive system that is able to process language. (97 references) (JL)

In a recent study of conceptual combination, Estes (2003) presented evidence for the priming of relational information in the absence of shared constituents between the prime and target (e.g., "pancake spatula" was interpreted more quickly following "bacon tongs" than following "city riots"). He argued that these data support the view that…

This book treats human language as the manifestation of a faculty of the mind, a mental organ whose nature is determined by human biology, suggesting that its functional properties should be explored just as physiology explores the functional properties of physical organs. The book asserts that linguistics investigates cognition, taking as its…

This study examined the role of empathy in the choice of syntactic form and the degree of independence of pragmatic and syntactic abilities in a range of aphasic patients. Study 1 involved 9 English-speaking and 9 Japanese-speaking aphasic subjects with 10 English-speaking and 4 Japanese normal controls. Study 2 involved 14 English- and 6…

Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

Argues that writers gain skill in manipulating syntactic structures as they learn to engage in reflexive reading of complex texts. (MM)

The Basic Variety (BV) is understood as instantiation of essential properties of human language capacity and is claimed to be a natural language in the sense that it is constrained by principles of Universal Grammar. This article raises a few points casting doubt on claim that the BV is an I-language, highlighting problem of determining the role…