We argue that the model developed in Epstein et al.'s target article does not explain differences between child first language (LI) acquisition and adult second language (L2) acquisition. We therefore sketch an alternative view, originally developed in Clahsen and Muysken (1989), in the light of new empirical findings and theoretical developments.

Language development is one of the major battle grounds within the humanities and sciences. This book presents, for the first time, an impartial account of the three dominant theories of language development. Written to be accessible for those within developmental psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, the book provides the reader with the information they need in order make up their own mind about this much debated issue.

Theoretical and empirical reasons suggest that children build their language not only out of individual words but also out of multiunit strings. These are the basis for the development of schemas containing slots. The slots are putative categories that build in abstraction while the schemas eventually connect to other schemas in terms of both meaning and form. Evidence comes from the nature of the input, the ways in which children construct novel utterances, the systematic errors that children make, (...) and the computational modeling of children's grammars. However, much of this research is on English, which is unusual in its rigid word order and impoverished inflectional morphology. We summarize these results and explore their implications for languages with more flexible word order and/or much richer inflectional morphology. (shrink)

ABSTRACT At the centre of Plato’s Euthydemus lie a series of arguments in which Socrates’ interlocutors, the sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus propose a radical account of truth (‘chopped logos’) according to which there is no such thing as falsehood, and no such thing as disagreement (here ‘counter-saying’). This account of truth is not directly refutable; but in response Socrates offers a revised account of ‘saying’ focussed on the different aspects of the verb (perfect and imperfect) to give a rich account (...) of saying, of truth and of knowledge. I argue that Socrates’ response has much to offer, notably in its amplification of the process of saying and cognition, and the development of virtue. (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental systems theory stresses that selection pressures operate on entire developmental systems rather than just genes. This study extends this approach to language evolution, arguing that selection pressure may operate on two quasi-independent timescales. First, children clearly must acquire language successfully and evolution must equip them with the tools to do so. Second, while this is developing, they must also communicate with others in the moment using partially developed knowledge. These pressures may require different solutions, and (...) their combination may underlie the evolution of complex mechanisms for language development and processing. I present two case studies to illustrate how the demands of both real-time communication and language acquisition may be subtly different. The first case study examines infant-directed speech. A recent view is that IDS underwent cultural to statistical learning mechanisms that infants use to acquire the speech categories of their language. However, recent data suggest is it may not have evolved to enhance development, but rather to serve a more real-time communicative function. The second case study examines the argument for seemingly specialized mechanisms for learning word meanings. Both behavioral and computational work suggest that learning may be much slower and served by general-purpose mechanisms like associative learning. Fast-mapping, then, may be a real-time process meant to serve immediate communication, not learning, by augmenting incomplete vocabulary knowledge with constraints from the current context. Together, these studies suggest that evolutionary accounts consider selection pressure arising from both real-time communicative demands and from the need for accurate language development. (shrink)

Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child–caregiver interactions, and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants' language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate the role (...) of eye gaze in infants' language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically developing human infants in the domain of language development, we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: vocabulary development, word–object mapping, object processing, and speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word–object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks, such as word–object mapping or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants' learning by enhancing their arousal, memory, and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest that there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first 2 years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board. (shrink)

In this article, Arnon explores the link between implicit learning, statistical learning and language development. She focuses on two central themes, namely the issue of age invariance and the question of variation in learning outcomes. Arnon suggests that the two literatures are studying a fundamentally similar phenomenon and argues in favor of a closer alignment. However, she also raises important methodological concerns.

This paper is about the first (L1) and second language (L2) skills of Turkish-German dual language learners (DLLs), the interrelatedness of the L1 and L2 skills, and their relation to other selected child and family variables. The first aim of the study was to examine L1 and L2 performance and the relation between the languages. Second, the study sought to explore the conditions in which functioning dual language development can be achieved, while trying to (...) predict the extent to which child and environmental factors are related to the DLLs’ language competencies. L1 and L2 language skills of N = 69 bilingually developing 3- to 5-year-old Turkish-German children were assessed via standardized tests. In addition, information on the children’s sociodemographic variables and home language environments was obtained by means of parental questionnaires. Correlational analyses were used to examine the interrelations between L1 and L2 skills and multiple regression analyses were conducted in order to predict the children’s language competencies. The children showed age-appropriate language skills in L1 (Turkish) and lower language skills in L2 (German). Whereas their phonological memory abilities were positively correlated with L1 and L2 skills, their expressive vocabulary in L1 was negatively correlated with L2 skills. Our findings also indicated that phonological memory was a strong predictor of language abilities. Concerning family variables, both early daycare entry and stimulating home language environment were significant predictors of better L2 skills. Lastly, balanced use of both languages at home had no negative consequences on language competencies. Although more research is needed, this study shows the benefits of using a combined language measure including both L1 and L2 skills to predict DLLs’ language competencies without disregarding either of their languages. (shrink)

The present research study focuses on how the language of instruction has an impact on the mathematical thinking development as a consequence of using a language of instruction different from the students’ mother tongue. In CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) academic content and a foreign language are leant at the same time, a methodology that is widely used in the schools in the present times. It is, therefore, our main aim to study if the (...) language of instruction in second language immersion programs influences the development of the first formal mathematical concepts. More specifically, if the learning of mathematical concepts in the early ages develops in a similar way if it is taught in the students’ mother tongue and is not influenced by the language used for teaching. Or else, if it can influence the development of the first skills only in the students’ general performance or in certain areas. The results of both the analysis of variance and multiple regression confirm how influencing the language of instruction is when mathematical thinking is developed teaching formal contents in a non-coincidence language. The second language is affecting the resolution of daily life problems, being more competent those students in 1st grades whose language of instruction matched with their mother tongue. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

I develop an account of how mathematized theories in physics represent physical systems, in response to the frequent claim that any such account must presuppose a non-mathematized, and usually linguistic, description of the system represented. The account I develop contains a circularity, in that representation is a mathematical relation between the models of a theory and the system as represented by some other model --- but I argue that this circularity is not vicious, in any case refers in linguistic accounts (...) of meaning and representation, and is simply a consequence of the fact that we have no unmediated, representation-independent access to the world. (shrink)

What role does language play in the process of building worldviews? To address this question, in the first section of this paper we will clarify what we mean by worldviews and how they differ, in our perspective, from cosmovisions. In a nutshell, we define worldviews as the biological interpretations agents create of the world around them and cosmovision the more general cultural-based reflections on it. After presenting our definition for worldview, we will also present the multi-shaped viewpoint that (...) frames our analysis, adopting three concepts that can help us explain how agents construct and develop their worldviews: saliences, pregnances, and abduction. While the notions of saliences and pregnances will explain how agents recognize anomalies in their worldview, the concept of abduction will help us discuss how they can learn to approach, explain, and use these anomalies to get new skills and abilities. This other point will lead us to discuss the role of language in this process, which will be describe as an artifact that permits the agent to use abduction to “normalize” and exploit anomalies, being now the ultimate artifact to build, develop, and update their worldviews. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldt's classic study of human language was first published in 1836, as a general introduction to his three-volume treatise on the Kawi language of Java. It is the final statement of his lifelong study of the nature of language, exploring its universal structures and its relation to mind and culture. Empirically wide-ranging - Humboldt goes far beyond the Indo-European family of languages - it remains one of the most interesting and important attempts to draw (...) philosophical conclusions from comparative linguistics. This volume presents a translation by Peter Heath, together with an introduction by Michael Losonsky that places Humboldt's work in its historical context and discusses its relevance to contemporary work in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. (shrink)

In this study, we conducted a pseudosign repetition task with 22 children acquiring American Sign Language as a first language from deaf parents. Thirty-nine pseudosigns with varying complexity were developed and organized into eight categories depending on number of hands, number of simultaneous movement types, and number of movement sequences. Pseudosigns also varied in handshape complexity. The children’s performance on the ASL pseudosign task improved with age, displaying relatively accurate production of location and orientation, but much less (...) accurate handshape and movement, a finding in line with real sign productions for both L1 and L2 signers. Handshapes with higher complexity were correlated with lower accuracy in the handshape parameter. We found main effects of sequential and simultaneous movement combinations on overall performance. Items with no movement sequence were produced with higher overall accuracy than those with a movement sequence. Items with two simultaneous movement types or a single movement type were produced with higher overall accuracy than those with three simultaneous movement types. Finally, number of hands did not affect the overall accuracy. Remarkably, movement sequences impose processing constraints on signing children whereas complex hands and two simultaneous movement types do not significantly lower accuracy, indicating a capacity for processing multiple simultaneous components in signs. Spoken languages, in contrast, manifest greater complexity in temporal length. Hearing children’s pseudoword repetition still displays high levels of accuracy on disyllabic words, with complexity effects affecting only longer multisyllabic words. We conclude that the pseudosign repetition task is an informative tool for studies of signing children’s phonological development and that sheds light on potential modality effects for phonological development. (shrink)

The study examined the development of Chinese as a second language learners’ formulaic knowledge through comparing the processing of Chinese idioms versus non-idiomatic formulaic sequences by advanced-level learners, super-advanced learners, and native speakers. Using two phrase acceptability judgment tasks with and without think-aloud protocols, we collected data on participants’ processing accuracy, processing speed, and processing strategies of reading the two types of FSs. Four processing patterns emerged from the analyses of the datasets. First, learners’ processing accuracy and (...) speed increased along with their proficiency. Second, learners’ idiom processing ability was generally lower than that of non-idiom processing ability, but they demonstrated an improving trend as their proficiency level increased. Third, learners’ use of processing strategies did not change much as proficiency rose and demonstrated a categorical difference from NSs. Fourth, all three groups exhibited poorer productive idiom knowledge than productive non-idiom knowledge. The overall findings denote that second language learners’ formulaic knowledge can evolve beyond the lexical plateau as learners move from the advanced to a higher proficiency level, but the productive idiom knowledge can be a long-term problem. The findings provide implications for measuring and teaching Chinese formulaic knowledge at the higher-than-advanced stage. (shrink)

The relationship between first and second language literacy was examined by identifying the skills and processes developed in the first language that were transferred to the second language. The performance of 40 university students from The People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Australia were compared on a series of tasks that assessed phonological awareness and reading and spelling skills in English. The results indicated that the Hong Kong students (with non-alphabetic first (...) class='Hi'>language literacy) had limited phonological awareness compared to those students with alphabetic first language literacy. The reading and spelling tasks showed no differences between the groups on real word processing. However, the students from Hong Kong had difficulty processing nonwords because of their poor phonological awareness. The results supported the hypothesis that people learning English as a second language (ESL) transfer their literacy processing skills from their first language to English. When the phonological awareness required in English had not been developed in the first language, ESL students were limited to a whole-word, visual strategy. The findings indicate that students from non-alphabetic written language backgrounds might have difficulties with new, or unfamiliar words when attending universities where English is the medium of instruction. (shrink)

The present study analyzes the English diaries written by a young Chinese English as a foreign language learner over a 1-year period in an attempt to determine the developmental process of Chinese EFL young learners’ written language in terms of syntactic complexity. This study aimed to use a wide range of metrics to explore densely collected data based on Dynamic Systems Theory. The longitudinal study data were analyzed through eight large-grained measures related to sentential, clausal, and phrasal features (...) by using L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, as well as fine-grained measures related to seven modifiers, an adjective placed before a noun, ordinal numerals are indicated, cardinal numeral, predicative adjective, adverbial adjective, adverbs, prepositional phrases, subordinate, and relative clause, through manual annotations. The results show that, first, the developmental process was not linear but spiral in terms of large-grained measures. The sentential level varied, and the development process of the young learner is different from Chinese English learners studying in colleges. Second, the dynamic features of fine-grained measures are also prominent in the seven indicators. ADJA, PREP, and REL showed a steady increase, ADJP showed an obvious decline, while ADV and SUB first increased and then declined. Third, the correlation analysis revealed a competitive interaction within fine-grained measures and between large-grained and fine-grained measures. (shrink)

Teacher beliefs are a pivotal psychological quality for sustainable teacher development. Previous studies have mainly focused on the beliefs of English-as-a-second/foreign-language teachers, while little attention has been paid to those of Chinese-as-an-additional-language teachers. Particularly, there is a paucity of effort made to develop and validate instrument for measuring pre-service CAL teacher beliefs. Therefore, to further quantify the beliefs of CAL teachers is increasingly called for as an essential means to help teachers sensitize their beliefs system and promote (...) teacher development as a sustainable goal. To be specific, the present study aims to construct a scale for gauging beliefs of pre-service CAL teachers. It firstly conceptualizes the dimensions of pre-service CAL teacher beliefs by means of semantic analysis with ROST CM6, and then cross-validates the reliability and validity of the scale with psychometric methods. Two independent samples composed of 221 and 222 pre-service CAL teachers participated in a questionnaire survey. The two samples were utilized for later Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis, respectively. The two data sets have satisfactory psychometric results, all confirming that the scale subsumes three factors: Beliefs about Chinese Language Teaching, Beliefs about Chinese Language, and Beliefs about Chinese Language Learners. The scale validated in the present study contributes to research on pre-service CAL teacher beliefs, and provides implications for sustainable pre-service CAL teacher training. (shrink)

The movement repertoire that develops in the first year of life is a language in itself and conveys desires, intentions, and emotions. This early life in motion serves as the roots of ongoing nonverbal interaction and later verbal expression – in short, this language remains a key element in communication throughout life. In their path-breaking book, gestalt therapist Ruella Frank and psychoanalyst Frances La Barre give readers the tools to see and understand the logic of this nonverbal (...) realm. They demonstrate how observations of fundamental movement interactions between babies and parents cue us to coconstructed experiences that underlie psychological development. Numerous clinical vignettes and detailed case studies show how movement observation opens the door to understanding problems that develop in infancy and also those that appear in the continuing nonverbal dimension of adult communication. Their user-friendly nonverbal lexicon – foundational movement analysis – enhances perception of emerging interactive patterns of parents and their babies, couples, and individual adults within psychotherapy. Clinicians in any setting will find this book to be a masterful application of infant research and movement theory that significantly augments clinical acumen and promotes greater understanding of the nonverbal basis of all relationships. (shrink)

Tomasello et al. give a good account of how shared intentionality develops in children, but a much weaker one of how it might have evolved. They are unduly hasty in dismissing the emergence of language as a triggering factor. An alternative account is suggested in which language provided the spark, but thereafter language and shared intentionality coevolved.

The origin of languages was a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century. This paper reconstructs a distinctively Kantian account according to which the origination, progression, and diversification of languages is at bottom reason’s self-development under certain a priori constraints and external environments. The reconstruction builds on three sets of materials. The first is Herder’s famous prize essay on the origin of languages. The second includes Kant’s explicit remarks about language – especially his notion of “transcendental grammar,” (...) his argument that language cannot be innate, his contrast of “Oriental” symbolic (intuitive) and “Occidental” discursive languages, and his treatment of the latter as a sine qua non of humanity’s cultural and moral progress. The third includes the concepts that we need to make sense of those remarks, such as Kant’s epigenetic theory of biological formation and his account of categories as originally acquired. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive achievement that enables us to report our propositional attitudes, to attribute such attitudes to others, and to use such postulated or observed mental states in the prediction and explanation of behavior. Most normally developing children acquire ToM between the ages of 3 and 5 years, but serious delays beyond this chronological and mental age have been observed in children with autism, as well as in those with severe sensory impairments. We examine data from (...) studies of ToM in normally developing children and those with deafness, blindness, autism and Williams syndrome, as well as data from lower primates, in a search for answers to key theoretical questions concerning the origins, nature and representation of knowledge about the mind. In answer to these, we offer a framework according to which ToM is jointly dependent upon language and social experience, and is produced by a conjunction of language acquisition with children's growing social understanding, acquired through conversation and interaction with others. We argue that adequate language and adequate social skills are jointly causally sufficient, and individually causally necessary, for producing ToM. Thus our account supports a social developmental theory of the genesis of human cognition, inspired by the work of Sellars and Vygotsky. How are we to decide whether to take reason to be an essentially private thing that can, however, turn on a public display when it chooses to do so, or, like conversing, to be an essentially social skill, which can, however, be retained a while through periods of solitary confinement? (Annette Baier, The Commons of the Mind, p. 5). The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well (Wittgenstein, On Certainty§ 287). The problem of thought and language thus extends beyond the limits of natural science and becomes the focal problem of historical human psychology, i.e. of social psychology. Consequently, it must be posed in a different way (Vygotsky, Thought and Language, p. 51). From the very first days of the child's development his activities acquire a meaning of their own in a system of social behaviour and, being directed towards a definite purpose, are refracted through the prism of the child's environment. The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person. This complex human structure is the product of a developmental process deeply rooted in the links between individual and social history (Vygotsky, Mind in Society, p. 30). (shrink)

In our commentary we elaborate on Barresi & Moore's use of language as a tool. In particular, we highlight the importance of cognitive linguistic research with its emphasis on the relation between morpnosyntax and intentional schemes. We also speculate about how language itself might play a role in children's integration of first and third person knowledge.

What it is to have a first person perspective? How do we come to understand our own perspective in the world? How do we take into account other people's perspectives in our social and linguistic interactions? This dissertation is an exploration of these issues. But instead of approaching them in the abstract, it aims to shed light on these difficult questions through a series of case studies. First, I examine the role of the first person perspective in (...) our agency, and explain the sense in which it is essential for action. Next, drawing on recent work in psychology, I propose an model of the development of temporal self-understanding in young children. Lastly, I develop a two-level pragmatic theory of epistemic modals. (shrink)

This paper explores the benefits that might arise from an appropriate fusion of the version of Activity Theory being developed by Yrjo Engestrom and the sociology of the late Basil Bernstein. It explores the common roots of the two traditions and on the basis of empirical work carried out in British special schools formulates an approach to the development of a language of description which would extend the analytical power of Activity Theory.

It is well documented that the language skills of preschool children differ substantially and that these differences are highly predictive of their later academic success and achievements. Especially in the early phases of children’s lives, the importance of different structural and process characteristics of the home learning environment has been emphasized and research results have documented that process characteristics such as the quality of parental interaction behavior and the frequency of joint activities vary according to the socio-economic status of (...) the family. Further, both structural and process characteristics are associated with children’s language development. As most of the studies focus on single indicators or didn’t take the dynamics of parenting behavior across age into account, the present paper aims to investigate the associations of different characteristics of the home learning environment as well as their potentially changing impact on the language skills of 2-year-old children. Using data of 2.272 families of the infant cohort study of the German National Educational Panel Study, longitudinally assessed process characteristics and structural characteristics were considered. Language skills of the children at the age of two were measured by a standardized and validated parent report instrument. Results showed that all three process characteristics of the home learning environment are associated with the family’s SES; across three assessment waves nearly all process characteristics predicted children’s vocabulary and grammar skills with some process-specific changes across waves; despite separate direct effects of nearly all HLE-process characteristics in each wave, the amount of explained variance in a joint model including the HLE facets from each wave is hardly higher than in the separate models; and socioeconomic background predicted both language facets of the children in each model even when controlling for the assessed process characteristics of the home learning environment. (shrink)

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that technological advances of the twenty-first century will usher in a significant shift in how humans make important life decisions. Instead of turning to the Bible or the Quran, to the heart or to our therapists, parents, and mentors, people will turn to Big Data recommendation algorithms to make these choices for them. Much as we rely on Spotify to recommend music to us, we will soon rely on algorithms to decide our (...) careers, spouses, and commitments. Harari also predicts that next, the state will take away individuals’ rights to make their own choices about their lives. If Google knows where your children would flourish best in school, why should the state allow a fallible human parent to decide? Liberalism—which, as Harari uses this term, refers to a state of society in which human freedom to choose is respected and championed—will collapse. In this paper, I argue that Harari’s conception of the future implications of recommendation algorithms is deeply flawed, for two reasons. First, users will not rely on algorithms to make decisions for them because they have no reason to trust algorithms, which are developed by companies with their own incentives, such as profit. Second, for most of our life decisions, algorithms will not be able to be developed, because the factors relevant to the decisions we face are unique to our situation. I present an alternative depiction of the future: instead of relying on algorithms to make decisions for us, humans will use algorithms to enhance our decision-making by helping us consider the most relevant choices first and notice information we might not otherwise. Finally, I will also argue that even if computers could make many of our decisions for us, liberalism as a political system would emerge unscathed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT McCabe is right on one thing and wrong on another. She is right to draw our attention to the different aspects that a verb might have—and not only because attention to aspect helps us understand what is going on in Plato’s Euthydemus. Getting straight on aspect promises benefits for our philosophy of action, and for our metaphysics more generally, comparable to those of getting straight about modality and about excuses. The same is true of getting straight on the active, (...) middle, and passive voices. She is wrong to suggest that we need a properly developed theory of inference before we can be confident in detecting fallacy. Such a suggestion is like saying that we may not dismiss a conjuror’s tricks unless we can say how they are done. (shrink)

The subject of this book is the first person in thought and language. The main question concerns what we mean when we say 'J'. Related to it are questions about what kinds of self-consciousness and self-knowledge are needed in order for us to have the capacity to talk about ourselves. The emphasis is on theories of meaning and reference for 'J', but a fair amount of space is devoted to 'I' -thoughts and the role of the concept of (...) the self in cognition. The purpose is to give a picture of how we think and talk about ourselves in a wide range of circumstances. The topic has been discussed in numerous articles during the last decades, but rarely in the form of a monograph. I felt the need for a book of this kind while working on my dissertation. The manuscript is the result of many years of reflection on the self and indexicals. Some of the theories that I advance have developed as a result of my teaching an undergraduate course in the philosophy of language the last couple of years. (shrink)

This paper systematises the works of György Márkus into two or possibly three periods. These emphasise the underlying consistency of purpose and interpreting theoretical interests throughout the oeuvre. despite the changing and socio-political forms and language games, all three share common features. These stages move from this initial critique of Orthodox Marxism employing the intellectual rigor of analytical and a philosophical anthropology to an investigation of the internal contradictions in Marx’s mature economic writings. to a final post-marxist phase after (...) he left Hungary dominated by continual philosophical themes and a social democratic political perspective. (shrink)

We present Property Theory with Curry Typing (PTCT), an intensional first-order logic for natural language semantics. PTCT permits fine-grained specifications of meaning. It also supports polymorphic types and separation types. We develop an intensional number theory within PTCT in order to represent proportional generalized quantifiers like “most.” We use the type system and our treatment of generalized quantifiers in natural language to construct a type-theoretic approach to pronominal anaphora that avoids some of the difficulties that undermine previous (...) type-theoretic analyses of this phenomenon. (shrink)

The author studies the Magyar and Slovak ideas of common good that concerned the inhabitants of Hungary in the first half of the 19th century. The Magyar model was based on the rights of an individual, their civic duties, and virtues. Its realisation, however, lay in preferring the interests of the Magyar nation and required the adoption of full Magyar national identity, i.e. assimilation and ethnocide of the non-Magyar inhabitants of Hungary. The author characterises this model as exclusive, chauvinist, (...) and nationalist-Messianic, masquerading as liberal values. On the other hand, the Slovak model of common good was based on the presumption of equal rights and duties for all citizens of Hungary while preserving the possibility of the growth, development, and cultivation of each individual, including the opportunity to gain education in one’s own mother tongue. The author perceives the Slovak model as inclusive, pluralist, and humanist; he considers it as a better alternative for the future of Hungary, which, however, could not be pursued. That means there were two incompatible approaches to the common good of the inhabitants of Hungary, which resulted in the downfall of Hungary. (shrink)

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For most of the 1980s, Jon Barwise focused much of his research in the area of natural language semantics. This article surveys his research publications in that area.Most, but not all, of those publications were in the area of situation semantics, a new approach to natural language semantics Barwise developed jointly with his colleague John Perry in the first half of the 1980s. That work was both blessed, and cursed, by becoming closely identified in academic circles with (...) the award of a $23 million gift to Stanford from the System Development Foundation for the establishment in 1983 of its Center for the Study of Language and Information. The development of situation semantics, and in due course its underlying mathematical foundation Situation Theory, carried out for the most part within the framework of CSLI's STASS research group, was actually a relatively small part of the overall research program at CSLI. But because Barwise and Perry were leading figures at CSLI, were centrally involved in securing the SDF gift, and were respectively the first and second directors of CSLI, a general impression sprung up that the two of them had been awarded millions of dollars to develop situation semantics.A major consequence of this false impression was that from the theory's early days, a great deal of interest was shown in the project. With so many accomplished scholars pouring over the work while the ink was still wet on the manuscript pages, Barwise and Perry were able to take advantage of a broad range of helpful criticism. This meant that they were able to develop the new theory much more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case. (shrink)

This study linked background TV and socioeconomic status to minority children’s Persian vocabulary development. To this end, 80 Iranian preschool children from two minority groups of Arabs and Turks were selected using stratified random sampling. They were simultaneous bilinguals, i.e., their mother tongue was either Arabic or Azari and their first language was Persian. Language sample analysis was used to measure vocabulary development through a 15-min interview by language experts. The LSA measures included total (...) number of utterances, total number of words, total number of new words, and mean length of utterance. A series of independent-samples t test, paired-samples t test, and repeated measures MANOVA tests were ran to examine data. Results showed significant improvements in children’s vocabulary scores from pretest to posttest for all children. In addition, high-SES children scored higher on the vocabulary measures in pretest and posttest. Moreover, background TV was associated with higher means in the TNW and the NDW in groups. The researchers concluded that background TV may be related to higher vocabulary scores in low-SES families as it may compensate for some linguistics gaps in these families including lower amount of child-parent interaction, play, and parents’ level of literacy. (shrink)

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Publication date: 22 December 2020 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 89 Author: Oleg Tarnopolsky, Marina Kabanova The article analyzes using Content and Language Integrated Learning for teaching one of the optional humanities disciplines to Ukrainian university students of different majors. The discipline discussed in the article as an example of using CLIL methodology is “The Fundamentals of Psychology and Pedagogy” and it is in the list of optional humanities subjects for the first-year students of (...) Alfred Nobel University in Dnipro, Ukraine. However, unlike the other optional humanities disciplines, the methodology underlying this course is based on teaching the subject in English, instead of Ukrainian, following the CLIL approach widely used in the European education but still little known in Ukraine. The purpose of the paper is to expose and analyze the original methodology developed that conditioned the specific structure of the relevant course, and the specific learning activities used in it. The essence of the developed CLIL theory-based methodology and its practical application are manifested through learning activities that include students’ mini-lectures/workshop-type presentations, brainstorming, case-studies, discussions, and a learning project with its results summarized in students’ essays, abstracts, and summaries written in English. The students collect the information required for completing their tasks not only from the teacher’s lectures and the recommended literature but also by way of doing extensive Internet-search on psychological and pedagogical sites in English. All this makes CLIL in the case under discussion experiential-interactive, blended, autonomous, and cooperative. As the result, students mostly self-construct their knowledge of the discipline by way of using the target language as the tool for such self-construction. This makes the elaborated course a clear-cut case of constructivism in CLIL pedagogy. Subject Classification Numbers: PACS 01.40.-d. (shrink)

Theory of Mind is the cognitive achievement that enables us to report our propositional attitudes, to attribute such attitudes to others, and to use such postulated or observed mental states in the prediction and explanation of behavior. Most normally developing children acquire ToM between the ages of 3 and 5 years, but serious delays beyond this chronological and mental age have been observed in children with autism, as well as in those with severe sensory impairments. We examine data from studies (...) of ToM in normally developing children and those with deafness, blindness, autism and Williams syndrome, as well as data from lower primates, in a search for answers to key theoretical questions concerning the origins, nature and representation of knowledge about the mind. In answer to these, we offer a framework according to which ToM is jointly dependent upon language and social experience, and is produced by a conjunction of language acquisition with children's growing social understanding, acquired through conversation and interaction with others. We argue that adequate language and adequate social skills are jointly causally sufficient, and individually causally necessary, for producing ToM. Thus our account supports a social developmental theory of the genesis of human cognition, inspired by the work of Sellars and Vygotsky.How are we to decide whether to take reason to be an essentially private thing that can, however, turn on a public display when it chooses to do so, or, like conversing, to be an essentially social skill, which can, however, be retained a while through periods of solitary confinement? .The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well .The problem of thought and language thus extends beyond the limits of natural science and becomes the focal problem of historical human psychology, i.e. of social psychology. Consequently, it must be posed in a different way .From the very first days of the child's development his activities acquire a meaning of their own in a system of social behaviour and, being directed towards a definite purpose, are refracted through the prism of the child's environment. The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person. This complex human structure is the product of a developmental process deeply rooted in the links between individual and social history. (shrink)

During the first two years of human life a common neural substrate underlies the hierarchical organization of elements in the development of speech as well as the capacity to combine objects manually, including tool use. Subsequent cortical differentiation, beginning at age two, creates distinct, relatively modularized capacities for linguistic grammar and more complex combination of objects. An evolutionary homologue of the neural substrate for language production and manual action is hypothesized to have provided a foundation for the (...) evolution of language before the divergence of the hominids and the great apes. Support comes from the discovery of a Broca's area homologue and related neural circuits in contemporary primates. In addition, chimpanzees have an identical constraint on hierarchical complexity in both tool use and symbol combination. Their performance matches that of the two-year-old child who has not yet developed the neural circuits for complex grammar and complex manual combination of objects. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a series of arguments in order to show that it is preferable for analytic philosophy to be practiced in different languages. In the first section, I show that the analytic tradition includes people developing their philosophical work in different natural languages. In the second section, I will address the question of the role of language in thought, and more specifically in philosophical thought, concluding that it is preferable to allow for the use of (...) different languages as a vehicle for philosophical ideas. Finally, I make some suggestions regarding changes that could be made in academic practices to better allow a plurality of languages and voices within the analytic tradition. (shrink)

Heidegger characterises the relationship between language and being as "language is the house of being", negating the idea that language is merely a tool ready to be used at hand. Drawing on this idea, as well as ideas from anthropology, pragmatics, and folklore studies, the author argues that "language is man's last homestead", meaning that man lives within language, has to live within language, and is governed by formulaic speech events. The author takes western (...) classic works on the philosophy of language and his own insights of language use rooted in traditional Chinese culture, in order to develop his own localized theory. In this title, the author explores the philosophical aspect of man's survival by presenting day-to-day exchange routines such as weddings and fortune telling dialogues in the Chinese context. Awarded the first prize for Academic Excellence in Philosophy and Social Sciences in Guangdong Province, and second prize in the second Xu Guozhang Award for Foreign Language Studies, this is a must-read for researchers interested in language philosophy and pragmatics. (shrink)

Focusing on Crispin Wright, I try in Chapter One to show that semantic antirealism cannot stably be combined with either communitarianism or constructivism about meaning. I also argue that the rational tenability of communitarianism is threatened by a powerful argument of Wright's own devising in "What Could Anti-Realism About Ordinary Psychology Possibly Be?" In Chapters Two and Three, I defend the individualist idea that the meaning of an expression in an agent's idiolect is correlative with her understanding of its use. (...) I try to show that individualism, so conceived, is fully compatible with natural-kind externalism and that none of the familiar and widely accepted arguments for social externalism are cogent. I also argue that there is no incompatibility between externalism and self-knowledge in matters of meaning. In Chapters Four and Five, I criticize a transcendental argument developed by Donald Davidson and recently defended by Robert Brandom that a creature cannot properly be credited with language or thought unless it is in communication with at least one other creature. Neither philosopher, I argue, provides a cogent case for the argument's crucial premise that the concept of objectivity is unavailable to a creature outside of a social, linguistic setting. The thesis that meaning is normative has widespread currency in the philosophy of language and does much to motivate the social, deontological approach to meaning taken in Making it Explicit. However, I argue in Chapter Six that central arguments for the thesis rest on confusions about the relation between the concepts of meaning, truth, use and intention. In Chapter Seven, I conclude, by connecting Davidson and Brandom's social account of the concept of objectivity with a certain "non-individualist" theory of perception. Following John McDowell, I argue that the theory renders the empirical contentfulness language and thought unintelligible. (shrink)

A BSTRACT. We present Property Theory with Curry Typing, an intensional first-order logic for natural language semantics. PTCT permits fine-grained specifications of meaning. It also supports polymorphic types and separation types.1 We develop an intensional number theory within PTCT in order to represent proportional generalized quantifiers like most. We use the type system and our treatment of generalized quantifiers in natural language to construct a typetheoretic approach to pronominal anaphora that avoids some of the difficulties that undermine (...) previous type-theoretic analyses of this phenomenon. (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the (...) dynamical approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)