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This book offers an introduction to the multidisciplinary subject of evolutionary linguistics, which seeks to explain the biological origins of language and its subsequent development in humans. Roughly six million years ago, a branch of hominids from the forests of East Africa started to thrive in the drier environment created by the East African Rift System. A host of physical developments culminated in the brains of early humans increasing dramatically in size and cognitive power. Influenced by a unique and complex social organisation, communication signals became much more diverse and dependent on memory and learning mechanisms. But language is not only used to interact with our fellow beings. It is also closely connected to our thoughts. This makes language a biological, social, cultural and cognitive phenomenon all at once. What precise role did each of these aspects play in the emergence of language and how were they all coordinated to produce the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom? The book aims to answer these questions and open up the fascinating world of evolutionary linguistics. It is not only aimed at scholars of linguistics, but also students from other disciplines (e.g., psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and cognitive science) who have an academic interest in language but may be approaching linguistics for the first time. In addition, the book should appeal to anyone with an interest in the workings of language in general, as well as advanced learners of English.

This research collection showcases how kinesic intelligence is fundamental to human communication and our ability to produce complex meaning, exploring its manifestations across a range of humanities disciplines, and connecting our past with our social and cultural future.The book defines kinesic intelligence as a higher-order intellectual competence that allows human beings to interact and grow cognitively and intersubjectively through sensorimotricity and interpersonal movement. Understood in this way, kinesic intelligence can offer insights into the development of humans'meaning-making abilities and, in turn, society and culture more broadly. Recognizing the power of the humanities in furthering sociocultural development, the collection features perspectives from scholars across a range of topics, including the multimodality of language acquisition in children; young adults in clinical psychology and medical humanities; nonverbal communication in history; legal language and reasoning; literature and cognitive studies; the internet and multispecies anthropology; and sensoriality in history and art.Foregrounding the impact of the humanities in promoting new understandings of human intelligence, this volume will be of interest to scholars in cognitive legal and literary studies, multimodality, anthropology, history, medical humanities, and those with an interest in the real-world impact of the humanities.

The Routledge Handbook of Interpreting and Cognition provides an overview of the interrelated nature of interpreting and cognition. The Handbook presents in-depth discussions of cognitive aspects of the task of interpreting and how researchers and practitioners alike have applied these findings to the practice of interpreting. With contributions from scholars working within multiple theoretical and methodological paradigms across various disciplines, this Handbook allows readers to engage with current thinking on cognitive processes, behaviors, and activities in a single space. The volume traces the historical progression of cognitive inquiry into interpreting on various topics, highlighting methodological advances and possibilities that can further our understanding of this cross-language activity.With an editor's introduction and 25 chapters by global authorities, the Handbook offers broad coverage of cognitive aspects of interpreting while identifying new avenues for future research. This is an essential reference for students and researchers of interpreting in translation and interpreting studies as well as those interested in cognitive aspects of interpreting in bilingualism, second-language acquisition, cognitive psychology, and beyond.

Providing an up-to-date, multi-perspective and cross-linguistic account of the centrality of the expressive function in communication, this book explores the conceptualization of emotions in language and the high emotional'temperature'of a variety of contemporary discourses.Adopting a number of methodological angles, both qualitative and quantitative, the chapters present insights from cognitive linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as those resulting from the combination of these approaches. Using a wide variety of data types, from song lyrics and TV series to Twitter posts and political speeches, and through the analysis of a range of languages, including Arabic, English, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and Turkish, the book offers a panoramic view of the multi-faceted interaction between language, expressivity and cognition.

Across languages, time tends to be understood in terms of space. For instance, we might think of time as an unstoppable train heading towards us when we hear'holidays are coming', or we might imagine time as a landscape that we move across as we'approach the moment of truth'. In this pioneering book, Duffy and Feist bring together research from across disciplines to provide a more nuanced understanding of what metaphor is and how it underpins our conceptualizations of time. Illustrated with a wide range of authentic examples from natural language, the book offers a holistic understanding of metaphors for time, encompassing the varied ways in which people draw on spatial experiences, as well as the broader variety of'human experience'on an individual level. In doing so, it highlights the importance of variation across cultures, across contexts, and across individuals for metaphoric conceptualization.

This book presents comprehensive, thorough and updated analyses of key cognitive individual difference factors (e.g., age, intelligence, language aptitude, working memory, metacognition, learning strategies, and anxiety) as they relate to the acquisition, processing, assessment, and pedagogy of second or foreign languages. Critical reviews and in-depth research syntheses of these pivotal cognitive learner factors are put into historical and broader contexts, drawing upon the multiple authors'extensive research experience, penetrating insights and unique perspectives spanning applied linguistics, teacher training, educational psychology, and cognitive science. The carefully crafted chapters provide essential course readings and valuable references for seasoned researchers and aspiring postgraduate students in the broad fields of instructed second language acquisition, foreign language training, teacher education, language pedagogy, educational psychology, and cognitive development.

This book examines a century of research on the relationship between bilingualism and intelligence and relates it to more recent research on bilingualism and executive functioning. In doing so, it highlights how bilingualism research has been understood and used by wider society and its impact on current debates in cognitive science as well as language policy and education. The book probes the correlation between the fact that while early intelligence research suggested a negative effect of bilingualism on intelligence, the so-called “Bilingual Problem”, later research implied a positive effect, “the Bilingual Advantage.” It questions whether the negative consequences that arose from the Bilingual Problem are influencing researchers'reluctance to let go of the Bilingual Advantage. Findings on both the bilingual ‘advantage'and ‘disadvantage'are shown to have suffered from similar methodological problems, with research into the former finding itself at the centreof the ongoing replication crisis in psychology. This book provides fresh insights that will be of particular interest to students and scholars of cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, bilingualism, applied linguistics, education and the history of science.

Bilingualism is a ubiquitous global phenomenon. Beyond being a language experience, bilingualism also entails a social experience, and it interacts with development and learning, with cognitive and neural consequences across the lifespan. The authors of this volume are world renowned experts across several subdisciplines including linguistics, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. They bring to light bilingualism's cognitive, developmental, and neural consequences in children, young adults, and older adults. This book honors Ellen Bialystok, and highlights her profound impact on the field of bilingualism research as a lifelong experience. The chapters are organized into four sections: The first section explores the complexity of the bilingual experience beyond the common characterization of “speaking multiple languages.” The next section showcases Ellen Bialystok's earlier impact on psychology and education; here the contributors answer the question “how does being bilingual shape children's development?” The third section explores cognitive and neuroscientific theories describing how language experience modulates cognition, behavior, and brain structures and functions. The final section shifts the focus to the impact of bilingualism on healthy and abnormal aging and asks whether being bilingual can stave off the effects of dementia by conferring a “cognitive reserve.”

This Handbook introduces neurosemiotics, a pluralistic framework to reconsider semiosis as an emergent phenomenon at the interface of biology and culture.Across individual and interpersonal settings, meaning is influenced by external and internal processes bridging phenomenological and biological dimensions. Yet, each of these dyads has been segregated into discipline-specific topics, with attempts to chart their intersections proving preliminary at best. Bringing together perspectives from world-leading experts, this volume seeks to overcome these disciplinary divides between the social and the natural sciences at both the empirical and theoretical levels. Its various chapters chart the foundations of neurosemiotics; characterize linguistic and interpersonal dynamics as shaped by neurocognitive, bodily, situational, and societal factors; and examine other daily neurosemiotic occurrences driven by faces, music, tools, and even visceral signals.This comprehensive volume is a state-of the-art resource for students and researchers interested in how humans and other animals construe experience in such fields as cognitive neuroscience, biosemiotics, philosophy of mind, neuropsychology, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary biology.

This concise volume addresses the question of whether or not language, and its structure in literary discourses, determines individuals'mental'vision,'employing an innovative cross-disciplinary approach using readers'drawings of their mental imagery during reading.The book engages in critical dialogue with the perceived wisdom in stylistics rooted in Roger Fowler's seminal work on deixis and point of view to test whether or not this theory can fully account for what readers see in their mind's eye and how they see it. The work draws on findings from a study of English and Dutch across a range of literary texts, in which participants read literary text fragments and were then asked to immediately draw representations of what they had seen envisioned. Building on the work of Fowler and more recent theoretical and empirical language-based studies in the area, Klomberg, Schilhab, and Burke argue that models from embodied cognitive science can help account for anomalies in evidence from readers'drawings, indicating new ways forward for interdisciplinary understandings of individual meaning construction in literary textual interfaces.This book will be of interest to students and scholars in stylistics, cognitive psychology, rhetoric, and philosophy, particularly those working in the field of embodied cognition.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC-) 4.0 license.

Through constant exposure to adult input in interaction, children's language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions containing multiple cross-modal elements subtly used together for communicative functions. Sensorimotor schemas provide the'grounding'of language in experience and lead to children's access to the symbolic function. With the emergence of vocal or signed productions, gestures do not disappear but remain functional and diversify in form and function as children become skilled adult multimodal conversationalists. This volume examines the role of gesture over the human lifespan in its complex interaction with speech and sign. Gesture is explored in the different stages before, during, and after language has fully developed and a special focus is placed on the role of gesture in language learning and cognitive development. Specific chapters are devoted to the use of gesture in atypical populations. CONTENTS Contributors Aliyah Morgenstern and Susan Goldin-Meadow1 Introduction to Gesture in Language Part I: An Emblematic Gesture: Pointing Kensy Cooperrider and Kate Mesh2 Pointing in Gesture and Sign Aliyah Morgenstern3 Early Pointing Gestures Part II: Gesture Before Speech Meredith L. Rowe, Ran Wei, and Virginia C. Salo4 Early Gesture Predicts Later Language Development Olga Capirci, Maria Cristina Caselli, and Virginia Volterra5 Interaction Among Modalities and Within Development Part III: Gesture With Speech During Language Learning Eve V. Clark and Barbara F. Kelly6 Constructing a System of Communication With Gestures and Words Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel7 Embodying Language Complexity: Co-Speech Gestures Between Age 3 and 4 Casey Hall, Elizabeth Wakefield, and Susan Goldin-Meadow8 Gesture Can Facilitate Children's Learning and Generalization of Verbs Part IV: Gesture After Speech Is Mastered Jean-Marc Colletta9 On the Codevelopment of Gesture and Monologic Discourse in Children Susan Wagner Cook10 Understanding How Gestures Are Produced and Perceived Tilbe Göksun, Demet Özer, and Seda AkbIyık11 Gesture in the Aging Brain Part V: Gesture With More Than One Language Elena Nicoladis and Lisa Smithson12 Gesture in Bilingual Language Acquisition Marianne Gullberg13 Bimodal Convergence: How Languages Interact in Multicompetent Language Users'Speech and Gestures Gale Stam and Marion Tellier14 Gesture Helps Second and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching Aliyah Morgenstern and Susan Goldin-MeadowAfterword: Gesture as Part of Language or Partner to Language Across the Lifespan IndexAbout the Editors

This book presents a holistic picture of the practice of an experienced literary translator working in situ, highlighting the value of in-depth process studies for the discipline and offering a model for future similar studies.Bringing together Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS) and literary translation, Borg interrogates existing assumptions in CTS and sheds light on the value of a combined look at both cognitive and social processes in literary translation. The volume extends the scope of existing CTS studies with its comprehensive examination of the work of one translator and exploration of the wide range of materials from draft to finished translation. This unique model allows for a greater understanding of the actions, decisions, motivations and work practices of individual translators as well as of their interactions with other participants in the practice of a literary translation.Making the case for in-depth process research in illuminating the dynamics of translation production and working practices, this innovative book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation and interpreting studies, especially those interested in literary translation and cognitive approaches.

This book presents a journey into how language is put together for speaking and understanding and how it can come apart when there is injury to the brain. The goal is to provide a window into language and the brain through the lens of aphasia, a speech and language disorder resulting from brain injury in adults. This book answers the question of how the brain analyzes the pieces of language, its sounds, words, meaning, and ultimately puts them together into a unitary whole. While its major focus is on clinical, experimental, and theoretical approaches to language deficits in aphasia, it integrates this work with recent technological advances in neuroimaging to provide a state-of-the-art portrayal of language and brain function. It also shows how current computational models that share properties with those of neurons allow for a common framework to explain how the brain processes language and its parts and how it breaks down according to these principles. Consideration will also be given to whether language can recover after brain injury or when areas of the brain recruited for speaking, understanding, or reading are deprived of input, as seen with people who are deaf or blind. No prior knowledge of linguistics, psychology, computer science, or neuroscience is assumed. The informal style of this book makes it accessible to anyone with an interest in the complexity and beauty of language and who wants to understand how it is put together, how it comes apart, and how language maps on to the brain.

This book presents a fresh approach to the communicability of narratives, revealing the cognitive underpinnings of Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatistic model. It demonstrates how abductive processes modify habits of belief and action in what Peirce refers to as double consciousness. Abductions generated during double consciousness paradigms have increased efficacy compared to instinctual abductions. Novel inferences from working memory become consciously integrated with existing long-term memory units which permits fuller consideration of the plausibility of propositions. Special attention is given to children's prelinguistic means to represent propositional or assertory conflicts, and to resolve these conflicts via listening and re-telling narrators'accounts. Overall, this book serves both a theoretical and applied purpose. It is intended to support innovative therapeutic interventions to facilitate the (re)construction of narratives by adults and children.Its practical applications and theoretical grounding will appeal to graduate students and scholars alike, who wish to examine narrative as an interdisciplinary enterprise—an ontological and cultural phenomenon (narration by way of action/image sequences), not just a literary/linguistic paradigm. Ultimately, this account presents narrative as a modal forum to resolve logical and practical conflicts, compelling the interpreter to become an involved partner in the narrated event itself.

This innovative volume builds on Michael S. Gazzaniga's Interpreter Theory toward radically expanding the theoretical and methodological scope of translational priming research.Gazzaniga's Interpreter Theory, based on empirical studies carried out with split-brain patients, argues for the Left-Brain Interpreter (LBI), a module in the brain's left hemisphere that seeks to make sense of their world based on available evidence—and, where no evidence is available, primed by past memories, confabulates coherence. The volume unpacks this idea in translation research to test whether translators are primed to confabulate by the LBI in their own work. Robinson investigates existing empirical research to test hypotheses on the translational links between the LBI and cognitive priming, the Right-Brain Interpreter and affective priming, and the Collective Full-Brain Interpreter and social priming. Taken together, the book seeks to open translational priming studies up to the full range of cognitive, affective, and social primes and to prime cognitive translation researchers to implement this broader dynamic in future research.This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, especially those working in cognitive translation and interpreting studies.

A fascinating examination of how we are both played by language and made by language: the science underlying the bugs and features of humankind's greatest invention.Language is said to be humankind's greatest accomplishment. But what is language actually good for? It performs poorly at representing reality. It is a constant source of distraction, misdirection, and overshadowing. In fact, N. J. Enfield notes, language is far better at persuasion than it is at objectively capturing the facts of experience. Language cannot create or change physical reality, but it can do the next best thing: reframe and invert our view of the world. In Language vs. Reality, Enfield explains why language is bad for scientists (who are bound by reality) but good for lawyers (who want to win their cases), why it can be dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands, and why it deserves our deepest respect. Enfield offers a lively exploration of the science underlying the bugs and features of language. He examines the tenuous relationship between language and reality; details the array of effects language has on our memory, attention, and reasoning; and describes how these varied effects power narratives and storytelling as well as political spin and conspiracy theories. Why should we care what language is good for? Enfield, who has spent twenty years at the cutting edge of language research, argues that understanding how language works is crucial to tackling our most pressing challenges, including human cognitive bias, media spin, the “post-truth” problem, persuasion, the role of words in our thinking, and much more.

In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses, on the assumption that by interrogating creativity, new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity, which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume, endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema, music, graphic novels, etc.), but also its more ‘mundane', everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use, political discourse, or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal, pictorial, auditory, and gestural), the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.

The way the brain, body, and mind interact with social structure to shape communication has so far not received the attention it deserves. This book addresses this gap by providing a novel account of communication as a social, biological and neurological force. Combining theories from communication studies and psycholinguistics, and drawing on biological and evolutionary perspectives, it shows how communication is inherently both biological and social, and that language and the neural systems that support it have evolved in response to a complex social environment. It introduces a clear set of terms based on current research, and illustrates key concepts using real-life examples from everyday conversation - speaking to a number of current debates around the evolutionary and biological basis of language, and the relationship between language, cognition, and environment. Thought provoking and engaging, it will change the way we think about the relationship between communication and cognition.