Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development

by Edited by Melissa Bowerman , Stephen Levinson

• ISBN13: 9780521596596
• ISBN10: 0521596599
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-01-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Introduction	1	(18)
Part 1 Foundational issues
The mosaic evolution of cognitive and linguistic ontogeny	19	(26)
Jonas Langer
Theories, language, and culture: Whorf without wincing	45	(25)
Alison Gopnik
Initial knowledge and conceptual change: space and number	70	(31)
Elizabeth S. Spelke
Sanna Tsivkin
Part 2 Constraints on word learning?
How domain-general processes may create domain-specific biases	101	(31)
Linda B. Smith
Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life	132	(27)
Michael Tomasello
Roots of word learning	159	(26)
Paul Bloom
Part 3 Entities, individuation, and quantification
Whorf versus continuity theorists: bringing data to bear on the debate	185	(30)
Susan Carey
Individuation, relativity, and early word learning	215	(42)
Dedre Gentner
Lera Boroditsky
Grammatical categories and the development of classification preferences: a comparative approach	257	(27)
John A. Lucy
Suzanne Gaskins
Person in the language of singletons, siblings, and twins	284	(32)
Werner Deutsch
Angela Wagner
Renate Burchardt
Nina Schulz
Jorg Nakath
Early representations for all, each, and their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese	316	(24)
Patricia J. Brooks
Martin D. S. Braine
Gisela Jia
Maria da Graca Dias
Children's weak interpretations of universally quantified questions	340	(39)
Kenneth F. Drozd
Part 4 Relational concepts in form-function mapping
Emergent categories in first language acquisition	379	(27)
Eve V. Clark
Form-function relations: how do children find out what they are?	406	(44)
Dan I. Slobin
Cognitive-conceptual development and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: the development of time concepts and verb tense	450	(25)
Heike Behrens
Shaping meanings for language: universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories	475	(37)
Melissa Bowerman
Soonja Choi
Learning to talk about motion Up and Down in Tzeltal: is there a language-specific bias for verb learning?	512	(32)
Penelope Brown
Finding the richest path: language and cognition in the acquisition of verticality in Tzotzil (Mayan)	544	(22)
Lourdes de Leon
Covariation between spatial language and cognition, and its implications for language learning	566	(23)
Stephen C. Levinson
Author index	589	(8)
Subject index	597