Marianne Gullberg

studiehandledning

Vår ekonomi

Kees de Bot

Gestures are prevalent in communication and tightly linked to language and speech. As such they can shed important light on issues of language development across the lifespan. This volume, originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture Volume 8:2 (2008), brings together studies from different disciplines that examine language development in children and adults from varying perspectives. It provides a review of common theoretical and empirical themes, and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically and atypically developing children and in second language learners, what gestures reveal about discourse, and how all languages that adult second language speakers know can influence each other. The papers exemplify a vibrant new field of study with relevance for multiple disciplines.

Gestures in Language Development

Carol Padden

Wendy Sandler

Traditionally, research on human language has taken speech and written language as the only domains of investigation. However, there is now a wealth of empirical studies documenting visual aspects of language, ranging from rich studies of sign languages, which are self-contained visual language systems, to the field of gesture studies, which examines speech-associated gestures, facial expressions, and other bodily movements related to communicative expressions. But despite this large body of work, sign language and gestures are rarely treated together in theoretical discussions. This volume aims to remedy that by considering both types of visual language jointly in order to transcend (artificial) theoretical divides, and to arrive at a comprehensive account of the human language faculty. This collection seeks to pave the way for an inherently multimodal view of language, in which visible actions of the body play a crucial role. The 19 papers in this volume address four broad and overlapping topics: (1) the multimodal nature of language; (2) multimodal representation of meaning; (3) multimodal and multichannel prosody; and (4) acquisition and development of visual language in children and adults.

Visual language

Peter Indefrey

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. Alllanguages have developed rich means to express various facets oftime, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, ortheir duration. This volume explores what we know about the neuraland cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on inlanguage. Considers the role time plays as an essential element of humancognition and action, providing important insights to inform andextend current studies of time in language and in languageacquisition Examines the main devices used to encode time in naturallanguage, such as lexical elements, tense, and aspect, and draws onthe latest psychological and neurobiological findings Addresses a range of issues, including: the relationshipbetween temporal language, culture, and thought; the relationshipbetween verb aspect and mental simulations of events; thedevelopment of temporal concepts; time perception; the storage andretrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory; andneural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning

Marianne Gullberg

About

Books

Join the club