Psycholinguistic Approaches To Meaning And Understanding Across Languages

Reports on joint work by researchers from different theoretical and linguistic backgrounds offer new insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension. This volume takes a genuinely cross-linguistic approach integrating theoretically well-founded contrastive descriptions with thorough empirical investigations. Authors answer questions on the topic of how we ‘encode’ complex thoughts into linguistic signals and how we interpret such signals in appropriate ways. Chapters combine on- and off-line empirical methods varying from large-scale corpus analyses over acceptability judgements, sentence completion studies and reading time experiments. The authors shed new light on the central questions related to our everyday use of language, especially the problem of how we construe meaning in and through language in general as well as through the means provided by particular languages.

How is language acquired when infants are exposed to multiple language input from birth and when adults are required to learn a second language after early childhood? This handbook will be essential reading for cognitive psychologists, linguists, applied linguists, and educators who wish to better understand the cognitive basis of bilingualism and the logic of experimental and formal approaches to language science.

How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the importance of reconciling the two modalities into a unified account through the investigation of possible connections between the two systems. Authored by key researchers in psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and language development, this volume encompasses state of the art research on the relation between production and comprehension processes in bilingual children and adults. Articles highlight the most recent methodological approaches, as well as a variety of language pairs and linguistic structures. Indispensable for students and researchers working in the areas of language acquisition and processing, neurolinguistics, and experimental linguistics, this volume will also appeal to educators and clinicians focusing on language development and processing in multilingual children and adults. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5 (2019).

Traditionally, anaphor resolution focused on structural cues of the antecedent. Recently, the interaction between discourse factors and information structure affecting antecedent salience has been more thoroughly explored. This volume depicts selected peer-reviewed research papers that tackle issues in anaphor resolution from theoretical, empirical and experimental perspectives. These collected articles present a wide spectrum of cross-linguistic data (Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Yurakaré) and also offer new results from L1 and L2 acquisition studies. Data interpretation span from typological to psycholinguistic viewpoints and are related to recent developments in linguistic theory. One data analysis puts the issue of anaphor resolution in a historical context. The experimental findings are complemented by reviews of the current literature on the role of discourse units. This volume gives a comprehensive overview of the state of discussion how the interaction between information structure and contextual discourse affects salience. That's why it will be welcomed by all linguists and psycholinguists who are theoretically and / or experimentally investigating several aspects of anaphor resolution.

This book discusses developments in the study of implicatures and presuppositions, drawing on recent linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. It provides original discussions of specific formal aspects of the theoretical reconstruction of these phenomena. The authors offer innovative experimental analyses in which crucial processing questions are addressed, and new experimental methodologies are introduced. The result is an advanced debate featuring broad empirical coverage of the issues, as well as an informed discussion of the connections between a Compositional Semantics and a Pragmatic Theory of Implicit Communication, in light of the empirical data coming from Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. This book will be a worthwhile read for those with interests in both the formal and methodological aspects of these arguments.

An argument that the meaning of written or auditory linguistic signals is not derived from the input but results from the brain's internal construction process. When we read a text or listen to speech, meaning seems to be given to us instantaneously, as if it were part of the input. In Meaning in the Brain, Giosuè Baggio explains that this is an illusion created by the tremendous speed at which sensory systems and systems for meaning and grammar operate in the brain. Meaning, Baggio argues, is not derived from input but results from the brain's internal construction process. With this book, Baggio offers the first integrated, multilevel theory of semantics in the brain, describing how meaning is generated during language comprehension, production, and acquisition. Baggio's theory draws on recent advances in formal semantics and pragmatics, including vector-space semantics, discourse representation theory, and signaling game theory. It is designed to explain a growing body of experimental results on semantic processing that have accumulated in the absence of a unifying theory since the introduction of electrophysiology and neuroimaging methods. Baggio argues that there is evidence for the existence of three semantic systems in the brain—relational semantics, interpretive semantics, and evolutionary semantics—and he discusses each in turn, developing neural theories of meaning for all three. Moreover, in the course of his argument, Baggio addresses several long-standing issues in the neuroscience of language, including the role of compositionality as a principle of meaning construction in the brain, the role of sensory-motor processes in language comprehension, and the neural and evolutionary links among meaning, consciousness, sociality, and action.

This book applies a psycholinguistic perspective to instructed second language acquisition, seeking to bridge the gap between second language acquisition research and language teaching practices. It challenges the traditional divide between conscious and unconscious processes, or explicit and implicit learning, and re-envisions this as a continuum of the varying levels of consciousness which can be applied by learners to different language behaviors in the second language classroom. It applies this model to learner development and the classroom context, discussing pedagogical applications for instructors at all levels. This book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language pedagogy. The accessible discussion of research findings, pedagogical approaches and classroom tasks and activities make this book particularly relevant for language teachers, providing the tools needed to apply second language acquisition research in their classroom.

Recent years have seen a small but growing body of psycholinguistic research focused on typologically diverse languages. This represents an important development for the field, where theorizing is still largely guided by the often implicit assumption of universality. Psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science, and is the study of how individuals comprehend, produce and acquire language. Psycholinguists are also interested in the social rules involved in language use, and the brain mechanisms associated with language. Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds within psycholinguistics, research focus is on how the brain process and understand that sounds. This book introduces the topic of cross-linguistic and field-based approaches to the study of psycholinguistics. The current state of our understanding of language learning and processing, the available experimental and analytical techniques used to gain evidence in these areas, and future directions in research will be discussed. The studies in this book draw on data from a variety of genetically and a really divergent languages, to address questions in the production and comprehension of phonology, morphology, words, and sentences. It provides a comprehensive overview of the field of cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, from its early beginnings to the present day, highlighting instances where cross-linguistic data have significantly contributed to psycholinguistic theorizing. Addressing a rapidly growing interest in language research, this hands-on text provides students and researchers with the means to understand and use current methods in psycholinguistics.