This groundbreaking volume explores the languages of South and Southeast Asia, which differ significantly from Indo-European languages in their grammar, lexicon and spoken forms. This book raises new questions in psycholinguistics and enables readers to re-evaluate previous models in light of new research.

Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the general applicability of Preferred Argument Structure has been demonstrated in studies of language after language. In this collection, the authors move beyond verifying Preferred Argument Structure as a property of a given language. They use the methodology to reveal more subtle aspects of the patterns, for example, to look across languages, diachronically or synchronically, to examine particular grammatical relations, and to examine special populations or particular genres. This volume will appeal to linguists interested in the relationship of pragmatics and grammar generally, in the typology of grammatical relations, and in explanations derived from data- and corpus-based approaches to analysis.

This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of attentional and visual processes involved in language comprehension. Key concerns include how linguistic and non-linguistic processes jointly determine language comprehension and production and how the linguistic system interfaces with perceptual systems and attention. Language scientists have traditionally considered language in isolation from other cognitive and perceptual systems such as attention, vision and memory. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear that language comprehension must be studied within interaction contexts. The study of multimodal interactions and attentional processes during language processing has thus become an important theoretical focus that guides many research programs in psycholinguistics and related fields.

The Routledge International Handbook of Visual-motor skills, Handwriting, and Spelling explores the potentially controversial field of early literacy education. It aims to offer scholars and practitioners an analysis of how and why handwriting skills benefit early literacy learning, especially spelling acquisition, and how this can enrich experiences for children and educators. Offering global perspectives from the field, the volume integrates current theories with up-to-date research and practice, revealing how we can best support children’s early literacy learning with handwriting and visual-motor skills interventions. Key topics covered include: The fundamentals of handwriting skills and literacy acquisition; Global literacy and spelling; Dysgraphia, handwriting difficulties, and dyslexia; Spelling and writing in the digital age; Home learning environment and spelling; Instruction and interventions for spelling and writing. This comprehensive survey will be essential reading for scholars and students of developmental psychology, education, and literacy research.

This volume examines the unique characteristics of akshara orthography and how they may affect literacy development and problems along with the implications for assessment and instruction. Even though akshara orthography is used by more than a billion people, there is an urgent need for a systematic attempt to bring the features, research findings, and future directions of akshara together in a coherent volume. We hope that this volume will bridge that gap. Akshara is used in several Indic languages, each calling it by a slightly different name, for example 'aksharamu', in Telugu, 'akshara' in Kannada, and 'akshar' in Hindi. It is the Bhrami-derived orthography used across much of the Indian subcontinent. There is a growing body of research on the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning to read akshara, and the emerging perspective is that akshara, even though classified as alphasyllabaries, abugida, and semi-syllabic writing systems, is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Rather, akshara orthography is unique and deserves to be a separate classification and needs further investigation relating to literacy acquisition in akshara. The chapters in this volume, written by leading authors in the field, will inform the reader of the current research on akshara in a coherent and systematic way.

Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book provides the first truly systematic, multidisciplinary and multi-language view of factors that affect global variation in literacy development. It is essential reading for researchers and advanced students in child literacy development and literacy teaching and learning.

Southeast Asia ranks among the most significant regions in the world for tracing the prehistory of human endeavor over a period in excess of two million years. It lies in the direct path of successive migrations from the African homeland that saw settlement by hominin populations such as Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. The first Anatomically Modern Humans, following a coastal route, reached the region at least 60,000 years ago to establish a hunter gatherer tradition that survives to this day in remote forests. From about 2000 BC, human settlement of Southeast Asia was deeply affected by successive innovations that took place to the north and west, such as rice and millet farming. A millennium later, knowledge of bronze casting penetrated along the same pathways. Copper mines were identified and exploited, and metals were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers. In the Mekong Delta and elsewhere, these developments led to early states of the region, which benefitted from an agricultural revolution involving permanent ploughed rice fields. These developments illuminate how the great early kingdoms of Angkor, Champa, and Funan came to be, a vital stage in understanding the roots of the present nation states of Southeast Asia. Assembling the most current research across a variety of disciplines--from anthropology and archaeology to history, art history, and linguistics--The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia will present an invaluable resource to experienced researchers and those approaching the topic for the first time.

Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective elevates historical morpho-syntax to a research priority in the field of Southeast Asian language history, transcending the traditional focus on phonology and lexicon. The volume contains eleven chapters covering a wide range of aspects of diachronic Austroasiatic syntax, most of which contain new hypotheses, and several address topics that have never been dealt with before in print, such as clause structure and word order in the proto-language, and reconstruction of Munda morphology successfully integrating it into Austroasiatic language history. Also included is a list of proto-AA grammatical words with evaluative and contextualizing comments.

The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology is a broad survey of linguistic anthropology, featuring contributions from prominent scholars in the field. Each chapter presents a brief historical summary of research in the field and discusses topics and issues of current concern to people doing research in linguistic anthropology. The handbook is organized into four parts – Language and Cultural Productions; Language Ideologies and Practices of Learning; Language and the Communication of Identities; and Language and Local/Global Power – and covers current topics of interest at the intersection of the two fields, while also contextualizing them within discussions of fieldwork practice. Featuring 30 contributions from leading scholars in the field, The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology is an essential overview for students and researchers interested in understanding core concepts and key issues in linguistic anthropology.