Linguistic Morphology is a unique collection of cutting-edge research in the psycholinguistics of morphology, offering a comprehensive overview of this interdisciplinary field. This book brings together world-leading experts from linguisics, experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to examine morphology research from different disciplines. It provides an overview of how the brain deals with complex words; examining how they are easier to read, how they affect our brain dynamics and eye movements, how they mould the acquisition of language and literacy, and how they inform computational models of the linguistic brain. Chapters discuss topics ranging from subconscious visual identification to the high-level processing of sentences, how children make their first steps with complex words through to how proficient adults make lexical identification in less than 40 milliseconds. As a state-of-the-art resource in morphology research, this book will be highly relevant reading for students and researchers of linguistics, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It will also act as a one-stop shop for experts in the field.

Linguistic Morphology is a unique collection of cutting-edge research in the psycholinguistics of morphology, offering a comprehensive overview of this interdisciplinary field. This book brings together world-leading experts from linguisics, experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to examine morphology research from different disciplines. It provides an overview of how the brain deals with complex words; examining how they are easier to read, how they affect our brain dynamics and eye movements, how they mould the acquisition of language and literacy, and how they inform computational models of the linguistic brain. Chapters discuss topics ranging from subconscious visual identification to the high-level processing of sentences, how children make their first steps with complex words through to how proficient adults make lexical identification in less than 40 milliseconds. As a state-of-the-art resource in morphology research, this book will be highly relevant reading for students and researchers of linguistics, psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It will also act as a one-stop shop for experts in the field.

A comprehensive account of the neurobiological basis of language, arguing that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language. Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us, although we seldom think about it. Language is also an extremely complex entity with subcomponents responsible for its phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects. In this landmark work, Angela Friederici offers a comprehensive account of these subcomponents and how they are integrated. Tracing the neurobiological basis of language across brain regions in humans and other primate species, she argues that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language. Friederici shows which brain regions support the different language processes and, more important, how these brain regions are connected structurally and functionally to make language processes that take place in milliseconds possible. She finds that one particular brain structure (a white matter dorsal tract), connecting syntax-relevant brain regions, is present only in the mature human brain and only weakly present in other primate brains. Is this the “missing link” that explains humans' capacity for language? Friederici describes the basic language functions and their brain basis; the language networks connecting different language-related brain regions; the brain basis of language acquisition during early childhood and when learning a second language, proposing a neurocognitive model of the ontogeny of language; and the evolution of language and underlying neural constraints. She finds that it is the information exchange between the relevant brain regions, supported by the white matter tract, that is the crucial factor in both language development and evolution.

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. This opens up vivid new perspectives on every major aspect of language and communication, including grammar, vocabulary, learning, the origins of human language, and how language relates to the real world. Foundations of Language makes important connections with other disciplines which have been isolated from linguistics for many years. It sets a new agenda for close cooperation between the study of language, mind, the brain, behaviour, and evolution.

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context. This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics.

The book presents a survey of the studies of metonymy in various aspects of language from the cognitive linguistic perspective. It discusses the role of metonymy not only in the traditional domain of semantics but also in morphology, linguistic pragmatics and formal dimensions of language, including syntax. The most influential modern theories of metonymy are thoroughly and critically discussed and the author also proposes his own original solutions to the problems which arise, taking into account his Polish perspective. Since the picture that emerges shows metonymy as a universal conceptual phenomenon, the last chapter is devoted to the discussion of the possible biological, neural and evolutionary reasons why metonymy is so rampant. Thus, another important aim of this study is to consider the problem of the embodiment of metonymy from the point of view of modern neuroscience.

For most native speakers of English, the meanings of ordinary words like "blue," "cup," "stumble," and "carve" seem quite natural and self-evident. It turns out, however, that they are far from universal, as shown by recent research in the discipline known as semantic typology. To be sure, the roughly 6,500 languages around the world do have many similarities in the sorts of concepts they encode. But they also vary greatly in numerous ways, such as how they partition particular conceptual domains, how they map those domains onto syntactic categories, which distinctions they force speakers to habitually attend to, and how deeply they weave certain notions into the fabric of their grammar. Although these insights from semantic typology have had a major impact on the field of psycholinguistics, they have been mostly neglected by the branch of cognitive neuroscience that studies how concepts are represented, organized, and processed in our brains. In Concepts in the Brain, David Kemmerer exposes this oversight and demonstrates its significance. He argues that as research on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge moves forward, it should, to the extent possible, expand its purview to embrace the broad spectrum of cross-linguistic variation in the lexical and grammatical representation of meaning. Otherwise, it will never be able to achieve a truly comprehensive, pan-human account of the cortical underpinnings of concepts. Richly illustrated and written in an accessible interdisciplinary style, the book begins by elaborating the different perspectives on concepts that currently exist in the parallel fields of semantic typology and cognitive neuroscience. It then shows how a synthesis of these approaches can lead to a more unified and inclusive understanding of several domains of concrete meaning--specifically, objects, actions, and spatial relations. Finally, it explores a number of intriguing and controversial issues involving the interplay between language, cognition, and consciousness.

An argument for a Copernican revolution in our consideration of mental features—a shift in which the world-brain problem supersedes the mind-body problem. Philosophers have long debated the mind-body problem—whether to attribute such mental features as consciousness to mind or to body. Meanwhile, neuroscientists search for empirical answers, seeking neural correlates for consciousness, self, and free will. In this book, Georg Northoff does not propose new solutions to the mind-body problem; instead, he questions the problem itself, arguing that it is an empirically, ontologically, and conceptually implausible way to address the existence and reality of mental features. We are better off, he contends, by addressing consciousness and other mental features in terms of the relationship between world and brain; philosophers should consider the world-brain problem rather than the mind-body problem. This calls for a Copernican shift in vantage point—from within the mind or brain to beyond the brain—in our consideration of mental features. Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, explains that empirical evidence suggests that the brain's spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure are central to aligning and integrating the brain within the world. This spatiotemporal structure allows the brain to extend beyond itself into body and world, creating the “world-brain relation” that is central to mental features. Northoff makes his argument in empirical, ontological, and epistemic-methodological terms. He discusses current models of the brain and applies these models to recent data on neuronal features underlying consciousness and proposes the world-brain relation as the ontological predisposition for consciousness.

Where is language? Centuries of efforts to 'incorporate' language lie behind current concepts of extended mind and embodied cognition. This book examines this question.