Infants and very young children develop almost miraculously the ability of speech, without apparent effort, without even being taught - as opposed to the teenager or the adult struggling without, it seems, ever being able to reach the same level of proficiency as five year olds in their first language. This useful textbook serves as a guide to different types of language acquisition: monolingual and bilingual first language development and child and adult second language acquisition. Unlik...

How does human language work? How do we put ideas into words that others can understand? Can linguistics shed light on the way the brain operates? Foundations of Language puts linguistics back at the centre of the search to understand human consciousness. Ray Jackendoff begins by surveying the developments in linguistics over the years since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. He goes on to propose a radical re-conception of how the brain processes language. T...

This book applies linguistic analysis to the poetry of Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo, a Singaporean poet and leading figure in Commonwealth literature. The work explores how the poet combines grammar and metaphor to create meaning, making the reader aware of the linguistic resources developed by Thumboo as the basis for his unique technique.The author approaches the poems from a functional linguistic perspective, investigating the multiple layers of meaning and metaphor that go ...

This book investigates the language of Polish-English bilingual children raised in the United Kingdom and their Polish monolingual counterparts. It exemplifies the lexico-grammatical knowledge of both groups and uses corpus-based grammatical inference in order to establish the source of the impediment of the minority language of the bilingual group. The author applies the methodology of corpus linguistics and narrative analysis to study the language of young bilinguals. He presupposes the ...

The book collects contributions from well-established researchers at the interface between language and cognition. It provides an overview of the latest insights into this interdisciplinary field from the perspectives of natural language processing, computer science, psycholinguistics and cognitive science.One of the pioneers in cognitive natural language processing is Michael Zock, to whom this volume is dedicated. The structure of the book reflects his main research interests: le...

In this handbook, renowned scholars from a range of backgrounds provide a state of the art review of key developmental findings in language acquisition. The book places language acquisition phenomena in a richly linguistic and comparative context, highlighting the link between linguistic theory, language development, and theories of learning. The book is divided into six parts. Parts I and II examine the acquisition of phonology and morphology respectively, with chapters covering topics su...

This volume showcases original, agenda-setting studies in the field of learner corpus research of both spoken and written production. The studies have important applications for classroom pedagogy.The volume brings readers up-to-date with new written and spoken learner corpora, often looking at previously under-examined variables in learner corpus investigations. It also demonstrates innovative applications of learner corpus findings, addressing issues such as the effect of task, t...

QUALICO has been held for the first time as an international conference to demonstrate the state of the art in quantitative linguistics. This domain of language study and research is gaining considerable interest due to recent advances in linguistic modelling, particularly in computational linguistics, cognitive science, and developments in mathematics like modern systems theory. Progress in hardware and software technology, together with ease of access to data and numerical processing, ha...

Questions related to language acquisition have been of interest for many centuries, as children seem to acquire a sophisticated capacity for processing language with apparent ease, in the face of ambiguity, noise and uncertainty. However, with recent advances in technology and cognitive-related research it is now possible to conduct large-scale computational investigations of these issuesThe book discusses some of the latest theoretical and practical developments in the areas invol...

The topic addressed in this volume lies within the study of sentence processing, which is one of the major divisions of psycholinguistics. The goal has been to understand the structure and functioning of the mental mechanisms involved in sentence comprehension. Most of the experimental and theoretical work during the last twenty or thirty years has focused on 'first-pass parsing', the process of assigning structure to a sentence as its words are encountered, one at a time, 'from left to ri...