Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

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The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

tical perspective. For instance, there are only three passing references to kuru in a book of 650 pages. This edition reflects the renewed interest in the immunological theories of multiple sclerosis. More than half the text is devoted to Professor Lumsden's analysis of the pathoIogy and, in particular, the chemical pathology of the immune response. There is a great deal of original work devoted to the chemistry and behaviour of the immunoglobulins. Much of this appears in specialist journals and one must be grateful for the critical summary provided here. Professor Lumsden unequivocally sees the key to the problem of multiple sclerosis in the study of its immunochemistry, relegating infection by a virus or a slow virus to a quite subsidiary role. The clinical studies drawing on wide practical experience help to get one's prejudices about the illness onto a more reasoned footing. The section on treatment is still sadly limited. Dr. McAlpine found little to add to the regime which he described in 1955. McAlpine, Lumsden, and Acheson's reappraisal is an essential reference for the practising neurologist and the new edition makes important modification of and changes in emphasis from the edition of 1965.

https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/jnnp/36/5/894.3.full.pdf

The assessment of aphasia and related disorders

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. David McNeill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 416 pp.

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought

Acknowledgements Introduction PART ONE - BACKGROUND Introduction 1. Second language acquisition research: an overview PART TWO - THE DESCRIPTION OF LEARNER LANGUAGE Introduction 2. Learner errors and error analysis 3. Developmental patterns: order and sequence in second language acquisition 4. Variability in learner language 5. Pragmatic aspects of learner language PART THREE - EXPLAINING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: EXTERNAL FACTORS Introduction 6. Social factors and second language acquisition 7. Input and interaction and second language acquisition PART FOUR - EXPLAINING SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: INTERNAL FACTORS Introduction 8. Language transfer 9. Cognitive accounts of second language acquisition 10. Linguistic universals and second language acquisition PART FIVE - EXPLAINING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Introduction 11. Individual learner differences 12. Learning strategies PART SIX - CLASSROOM SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Introduction 13. Classroom interaction and second language acquisition 14. Formal instruction and second language acquisition PART SEVEN - CONCLUSION Introduction 15. Data, theory, and applications in second language acquisition research Glossary Bibliography Author index Subject index

第二语言习得研究 = The study of second language acquisition

Language demonstrates structure while also showing considerable variation at all levels: languages differ from one another while still being shaped by the same principles; utterances within a language differ from one another while exhibiting the same structural patterns; languages change over time, but in fairly regular ways. This book focuses on the dynamic processes that create languages and give them their structure and variance. It outlines a theory of language that addresses the nature of grammar, taking into account its variance and gradience, and seeks explanation in terms of the recurrent processes that operate in language use. The evidence is based on the study of large corpora of spoken and written language, what we know about how languages change, as well as the results of experiments with language users. The result is an integrated theory of language use and language change which has implications for cognitive processing and language evolution.

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Language, Usage and Cognition

Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development

Children vary widely in how quickly their vocabularies grow. Can looking at early gesture use in children and parents help us predict this variability? We videotaped 53 English-speaking parent-child dyads in their homes during their daily activities for 90-minutes every four months between child age 14 and 34 months. At 42 months, children were given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). We found that child gesture use at 14 months was a significant predictor of vocabulary size at 42 months, above and beyond the effects of parent and child word use at 14 months. Parent gesture use at 14 months was not directly related to vocabulary development, but did relate to child gesture use at 14 months which, in turn, predicted child vocabulary. These relations hold even when background factors such as socio-economic status are controlled. The findings underscore the importance of examining early gesture when predicting child vocabulary development.

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/13041208/Rowe_etal_FL_2008.pdf?sequence=1

Learning words by hand: Gesture's role in predicting vocabulary development

At the one-word stage children use gesture to supplement their speech (‘eat’+point at cookie), and the onset of such supplementary gesture-speech combinations predicts the onset of two-word speech (‘eat cookie’). Gesture thus signals a child's readiness to produce two-word constructions. The question we ask here is what happens when the child begins to flesh out these early skeletal two-word constructions with additional arguments. One possibility is that gesture continues to be a forerunner of linguistic change as children flesh out their skeletal constructions by adding arguments. Alternatively, after serving as an opening wedge into language, gesture could cease its role as a forerunner of linguistic change. Our analysis of 40 children – from 14 to 34 months – showed that children relied on gesture to produce the first instance of a variety of constructions. However, once each construction was established in their repertoire, the children did not use gesture to flesh out the construction. Gesture thus ...

/pdf/when-gesture-speech-combinations-do-and-do-not-index-1a1kmuqjwl.pdf

When gesture-speech combinations do and do not index linguistic change

Children differ in how quickly they reach linguistic milestones. Boys typically produce their first multi-word sentences later than girls do. We ask here whether there are sex differences in children's gestures that precede, and presage, these sex differences in speech. To explore this question, we observed 22 girls and 18 boys every 4 months as they progressed from one-word speech to multi-word speech. We found that boys not only produced speech + speech (S+S) combinations ('drink juice') 3 months later than girls, but they also produced gesture + speech (G+S) combinations expressing the same types of semantic relations ('eat' + point at cookie) 3 months later than girls. Because G+S combinations are produced earlier than S+S combinations, children's gestures provide the first sign that boys are likely to lag behind girls in the onset of sentence constructions.

/pdf/sex-differences-in-language-first-appear-in-gesture-3o8uc0gqju.pdf

Sex differences in language first appear in gesture

J. Guo, E. Lieven, Introduction. Section 1. Language Learning in Crosslinguistic Perspective. N. Budwig, S. Ervin-Tripp, Introduction. J.B. Gleason, B. Phillips, R. Ely, E. Zaretsky, Alligators All Around: The Acquisition of Animal Terms in English and Russian. S. Goldin-Meadow, A. Ozyurek, B. Sancar, C. Mylander, Making Language Around the Globe: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Homesign in the United States, China, and Turkey. A. Kyratzis, "He take one my tools!" vs. "I'm building": Transitivity and the Grammar of Accusing, Commanding, and Perspective-Sharing in Toddler's Peer Disputes. H. Behrens, Direction and Perspective in German Child Language. R.M. Weist, One-to-One Mapping of Temporal and Spatial Relations. A.C. Kuntay, D. Kocbas, Effects of Lexical Items and Construction Types in English and Turkish Character Introductions in Elicited Narrative. K. Demuth, D. Ellis, Revisiting the Acquisition of Sesotho Noun Class Prefixes. P.M. Clancy, Dialogic Priming and the Acquisition of Argument Marking in Korean. Section 2. Narratives and Their Development: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Pragmatic Perspectives. R.A. Berman, Introduction. M. Bamberg, Sequencing Events in Time or Sequencing Events in Storytelling? From Cognition to Discourse-With Frogs Paving the Way. E.L. Bavin, Plot and Evaluation: Warlpiri Children's Frog Stories. R.A. Berman, B. Nir-Sagiv, Clause Packaging in Narratives: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. R. Berthele, The Many Ways to Search for a Frog Story: On Fieldworker's Troubles Collecting Spatial Language Data. L. de Leon, Between Frogs and Black Winged-Monkeys: Orality, Evidentials, and Authorship in Tzotzil (Mayan) Children's Narratives. J. Guo, L. Chen, Learning to Express Motion in Narratives by Mandarin-Speaking Children. M. Hickmann, H. Hendriks, C. Champaud, Typological Constraints on Motion in French and English Child Language. K. Nakamura, Language and Affect: Japanese Children's Use of Evaluative Expressions in Narratives. A. Nicolopoulou, Rethinking Character Representation and Its Development in Children's Narratives. K. Oh, Motion Events in English and Korean Fictional Writings and Translations. S. Ozcaliskan, Learning to Talk about Spatial Motion in Language-Specific Ways. E. Veneziano, L. Albert, S. Martin, Learning to Tell a Story of False Belief: A Study of French-Speaking Children. Section 3. Theoretical Perspectives on Language Development, Language Change and Typology. E. Lieven, Introduction. T. Givon, S. Savage Rumbaugh, Can Apes Learn Grammar? A Short Detour into Language Evolution. R.D. Van Valin, Jr., Some Remarks on Universal Grammar. T.G. Bever, The Canonical Form Constraint: Language Acquisition via a General Theory of Learning. W. Klein, Finiteness, Universal Grammar and the Language Faculty. J. Bybee, Grammaticization: Implications for a Theory of Language. E. Sweetser, What Does It Mean to Compare Language and Gesture? Modalities and Contrasts. M. Rispoli, On Paradigms, Principles and Predictions. L. Menn, Child Language, Aphasia, and General Psycholinguistics. L. Talmy, Main Verb Properties and Equipollent Framing. I.I. Antunano, Path Salience in Motion Events. A. Kopecka, Continuity and Change in the Representation of Motion Events in French. W. Sampaio, C. Sinha, V. da Silva Sinha, Mixing and Mapping: Motion, Path and Manner in Amondawa. Section 4. Language and Cognition: Universals and Typological Comparisons. M. Bowerman, Introduction. P. Brown, S.C. Levinson, Language as Mind Tools: Learning How to Think Through Speaking. D. Gentner, M. Bowerman, Why Some Spatial Semantic Categories Are Harder to Learn than Others: The Typological Prevalence Hypothesis. L. Verhoeven, A. Vermeer, Cognitive Predictors of Children's First and Second Language Proficiency. S. Pourcel, Relativistic Application of Thinking for Speaking. S. Stromqvist, K. Holmqvist, R. Andersson, Thinking for Speaking and Channeling of Attention-A Case for Eye-Tracking Research. D. McNeill, Imagery for Speaking. A. Aksu-Koc, Evidentials: An Interface between Linguistic and Conceptual Development. S. Stoll, B. Bickel, How Deep Are Differences in Referential Density? Appendix A. D.I. Slobin, Dan Slobin's Mentors, Models, Influences and Connections: A Self-Portrait (PowerPoint Slides Presented by Dan Slobin at the Special Symposium in His Honor at the 10th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Berlin, July 2005). Appendix B. Bibliography of Publications by Dan Isaac Slobin.

Şeyda Özçalışkan

Papers

Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development

Learning words by hand: Gesture's role in predicting vocabulary development

When gesture-speech combinations do and do not index linguistic change

Sex differences in language first appear in gesture

Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language: Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin