The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think has evoked perennial fascination and intense controversy. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the American linguists who propounded it, languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world, and the structure of one's language influences how one understands the world. Thus speakers of different languages perceive the world differently. Although the last two decades have been marked by extreme skepticism concerning the possible effects of language on thought, recent theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive science have given the question new life. Research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology has revealed striking differences in cross-linguistic semantic patterns, and cognitive psychology has developed subtle techniques for studying how people represent and remember experience. It is now possible to test predictions about how a given language influences the thinking of its speakers. Language in Mind includes contributions from both skeptics and believers and from a range of fields. It contains work in cognitive psychology, cognitive development, linguistics, anthropology, and animal cognition. The topics discussed include space, number, motion, gender, theory of mind, thematic roles, and the ontological distinction between objects and substances. Contributors Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Giyoo Hatano, Stan Kuczaj, Barbara Landau, Stephen Levinson, John Lucy, Barbara Malt, Dan Slobin, Steven Sloman, Elizabeth Spelke, and Michael Tomasello

Oral language manual for parents and teachers of kindergarten and primary children.

Originally published in 1875, this book discusses thinking and language and traces the development of different pscyological approaches, assessing their theoretical significance and the experimental evidence behind them. It ends by drawing together the various lines of argument to arrive at some general conclusions about language and thought, since it clearly emerges that the two are inextricably linked.

In this collection of Chomsky's lectures, the first three essays describe linguistic contributions to the study of the mind and the last three discuss the relationship among linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.

Our ability to attribute mental states to others ("to mentalize") has been the subject of philosophical and psychological studies for a very long time, yet the role of language acquisition in the development of our mentalizing abilities has been largely understudied. This book addresses this gap in the philosophical literature. The book presents an account of how false belief reasoning is impacted by language acquisition, and it does so by placing it in the larger context of the issue, how language impacts cognition in general. The work provides the reader with detailed and critical literature reviews, and draws on them to argue that language acquisition helps false belief reasoning by boosting the ability to create schemata that facilitate processing of information in some social contexts. According to this framework, it is a combination of syntactic clues and cultural narratives that helps the child to solve the classic false belief task. The book provides a novel, original account of how language helps false belief reasoning, while also giving the reader a broad, precise and well-documented picture of the debate around some of the most fundamental issues in social cognition.

Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who speak more than one language? And if they do not, how can we explain the difficulties second language learners experience in mapping new words and structures onto real-world referents? The contributors to this volume put forth a novel approach to second language learning, presenting it as a process that involves conceptual development and restructuring, and not simply the mapping of new forms onto pre-existing meanings.

This photocopiable resource provides a clear structure to assist teachers, SENCOs, learning support assistants and speech language therapists in developing children's language from the concrete to the abstract. It is based on fifty picture and verbal scenarios that can be used flexibly with a wide range of ages and abilities. Quick, practical and easy to use in the classroom, this programme can be used with individual children, in small groups or can form the basis of a literacy lesson or speech language therapy session. Features: question sheets are carefully structured to promote children's development of inference, verbal reasoning and thinking skills; the three parallel assessments of spoken and written language can be used to assess each child's starting level and then to monitor progress; score forms and worksheets for each lesson are included. The book is particularly useful for children who are recognised as having delayed language skills, specific language impairment, Autism Spectrum Disorder (including Asperger's Syndrome), pragmatic language impairment or moderate learning difficulties. The 2nd Edition is now in full colour throughout and has been updated with a simplified introduction. All illustrations and worksheets will now be available online. Features: full colour throughout; new and revised illustrations; simplified introduction; online resources; illustrations and worksheets.

First published in 1981. Using his fourteen years of interaction with the Chinese language and its speakers the author has noted certain important differences between the Chinese mode of speaking and thinking and that of speakers of English. This study looks at the impact of these differences looking at how they increase the sensitivity to what Chinese speakers mean; how they heighten awareness of the biases implicit in the way English speakers speak and think; and how they challenge the assumption, currently lurking within the field of psychology, that languages have little impact on the shaping of cognitive life.

Thinking, Language, and Experience was first published in 1989.Hector-Neri Castañeda's intricate and provocative essays have been widely influential, especially his work in epistemology and ethics, and his theory on the relation of thought to action. The fourteen essays in Thinking, Language, and Experience -- half of them written expressly for this volume -- demonstrate the breadth and richness of his recent work on the unitary structure of human experience.A comprehensive, unified study of phenomena at the intersection between experience, thinking, language, and reality, this book focuses on singular reference -- that is, reference to individuals insofar as they are thought of as individuals: indicators, quasi-indicators, proper names, singular descriptions. Castañeda establishes a large number of new facts -- linguistic, semantic, psychological, and sociological -- about the workings of language in human experience, and from them develops a network of new theories, all grounded in his comprehensive Guise Theory.These theories offer a systematic account for: the structure of human experience and the world at large; the mental powers required to think of the world and to undergo experiences; self-consciousness; the language for thinking of other minds; perception and the interaction between indexical reference and perceptual fields; and the role of subjectivity in perception and intentional action.