Language, Cognition and Space

Language, Cognition and Space
Author: Vyvyan Evans
Publisher: Equinox
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781845532529

Spatial perception and cognition is fundamental to human abilities to navigate through space, identify and locate objects, and track entities in motion. Moreover, research findings in the last couple of decades reveal that many of the mechanisms humans employ to achieve this are largely innate, providing abilities to store cognitive maps for locating themselves and others, locations, directions and routes. In this, humans are like many other species. However, unlike other species, humans can employ language in order to represent space. The human linguistic ability combined with the human ability for spatial representation apparently results in rich, creative and sometimes surprising extensions of representations for three-dimensional physical space. The present volume brings together over 20 articles from leading scholars who investigate the relationship between spatial cognition and spatial language. The volume is fully representative of the state of the art in terms of language and space research, and points to new directions in terms of findings, theory, and practice.

Language and Space

Language and Space
Author: Paul Bloom
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 620
Release: 1999
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780262522663

The 15 essays in this volume bring together research and theoretical viewpoints in the areas of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience, presenting a synthesis across these diverse domains. Throughout, authors address and debate each others arguments and theories.

Space in Language and Cognition

Space in Language and Cognition
Author: Stephen C. Levinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2003-03-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521011969

Languages differ in how they describe space, and such differences between languages can be used to explore the relation between language and thought. This 2003 book shows that even in a core cognitive domain like spatial thinking, language influences how people think, memorize and reason about spatial relations and directions. After outlining a typology of spatial coordinate systems in language and cognition, it is shown that not all languages use all types, and that non-linguistic cognition mirrors the systems available in the local language. The book reports on collaborative, interdisciplinary research, involving anthropologists, linguists and psychologists, conducted in many languages and cultures around the world, which establishes this robust correlation. The overall results suggest that thinking in the cognitive sciences underestimates the transformative power of language on thinking. The book will be of interest to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers, and especially to students of spatial cognition.

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition
Author: Michel Aurnague
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789027223746

Despite a growing interest for space in language, most research has focused on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among entities (verbs, prepositions, postpositions, case markings ). Little attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities, their status in linguistic descriptions, and their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of this book, that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems, formal accounts of linguistic data, and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies, all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities, while also throwing a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning space and/or the relation between language and cognition.

Space in Languages

Space in Languages
Author: Maya Hickmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2006-05-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027293554

Space is presently the focus of much research and debate across disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. One strong feature of this collection is to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions from these varied scientific traditions, with the collective aim of addressing fundamental questions at the forefront of the current literature: the nature of space in language, the linguistic relativity of space, the relation between spatial language and cognition. Linguistic analyses highlight the multidimensional and heterogeneous nature of space, while also showing the existence of a set of types, parameters, and principles organizing the considerable diversity of linguistic systems and accounting for mechanisms of diachronic change. Findings concerning spatial perception and cognition suggest the existence of two distinct systems governing linguistic and non-linguistic representations, that only partially overlap in some pathologies, but they also show the strong impact of language-specific factors on the course of language acquisition and cognitive development.

Space in Language and Linguistics

Space in Language and Linguistics
Author: Peter Auer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 708
Release: 2013-11-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110312026

This book brings together three perspectives on language and space that are quite well-researched within themselves, but which so far are lacking productive interconnections. Specifically, the book aims to interconnect the following research areas: Language, space, and geography Grammar, space, and cognition Language and interactional spaces The contributions in this book cover geographical language variation within and across languages, language use in stationary and mobile interactional spaces, computer-mediated communication, and spatial reasoning across languages. This range of issues showcases the thematic and methodological breadth of research on language and space. In order to identify interconnections, the respective contributions are accompanied by commentaries that highlight common threads.

Language and Spatial Cognition

Language and Spatial Cognition
Author: Annette Herskovits
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-02-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521109185

This book provides a precise and thorough description of the meaning and use of spatial expressions, using both a linguistics and an artificial intelligence perspective, and also an enlightening discussion of computer models of comprehension and production in the spatial domain. The author proposes a theoretical framework that explains many previously overlooked or misunderstood irregularities. The use of prepositions reveals underlying schematisations and idealisations of the spatial world, which, for the most part, echo representational structures necessary for human action (movement and manipulation). Because spatial cognition seems to provide a key to understanding much of the cognitive system, including language, the book addresses one of the most basic questions confronting cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and brings fresh and original insights to it.

Handbook of Spatial Cognition

Handbook of Spatial Cognition
Author: David Waller
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781433812040

This book, which provides a detailed interdisciplinary overview of spatial cognition from neurological to sociocultural levels, is an accessible resource for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as researchers at all levels who seek to understand our perceptions of the world around us.

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures
Author: Luna Filipovi?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027223904

This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, Culture, and Cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

Language, Cognition, and the Brain

Language, Cognition, and the Brain
Author: Karen Emmorey
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2001-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1135664811

Intro to Amer Sign Lang w/ focus on psychological processes involvd in its acquistion & use, as well as the brain bases of ASL. An upper- level txt w/ readership among researchers in cognitve psych & cognitve neuroscience, language & linguistics, speech,