Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language Learning: How We Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge. Language and the Human Lifespan Series

In recent years, linguists have increasingly turned to the cognitive sciences to broaden their investigation into the roots and development of language. With the advent of cognitive-linguistic, usage-based and complex-adaptive models of language, linguists today are utilizing approaches and insights from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, social psychology and other related fields. A key result of this interdisciplinary approach is the concept of entrenchment--the ongoing reorganization and adaptation of communicative knowledge. Entrenchment posits that our linguistic knowledge is continuously refreshed and reorganized under the influence of social interactions. It is part of a larger, ongoing process of lifelong cognitive reorganization whose course and quality are conditioned by exposure to and use of language and by the application of cognitive abilities and processes to language. This volume enlists more than two dozen experts in the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurology, and cognitive psychology in providing a realistic picture of the psychological and linguistic foundations of language. Contributors examine the psychological foundations of linguistic entrenchment processes, and the role of entrenchment in first-language acquisition, second-language learning, and language attrition. Critical views of entrenchment and some of its premises and implications are discussed from the perspectives of dynamic complexity theory and radical embodied cognitive science. Following an introduction by the editor, chapters include: (1) A Framework for Understanding Linguistic Entrenchment and Its Psychological Foundations (Hans-Jörg Schmid); (2) Entrenchment in Cognitive Grammar (Ronald W. Langacker); (3) Entrenchment in Construction Grammar (Martin Hilpert and Holger Diessel); (4) Entrenchment Effects in Language Change (Hendrik De Smet); (5) The Corpus-Based Perspective on Entrenchment (Anatol Stefanowitsch and Susanne Flach); (6) Entrenchment From a Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Perspective (Alice Blumenthal-Dramé); (7) Entrenchment as Onomasiological Salience (Dirk Geeraerts); (8) Memory Consolidation (Atsuko Takashima and Iske Bakker); (9) On the Automaticity of Language Processing (Robert J. Hartsuiker and Agnes Moors); (10) Statistical Learning as a Domain-General Mechanism of Entrenchment (Ethan Jost and Morten H. Christiansen); (11) Entrenchment, Gestalt Formation, and Chunking (Fernand Gobet); (12) The Roles of Analogy, Categorization, and Generalization in Entrenchment (Anne-Kristin Cordes); (13) Salience, Attention, and Perception (Franziska Günther, Hermann J. Müller, and Thomas Geyer); (14) Entrenchment in First Language Learning (Anna L. Theakston); (15) Entrenchment in Second-Language Learning (Brian MacWhinney); (16) Entrenchment and Language Attrition (Rasmus Steinkrauss and Monika S. Schmid); (17) Entrenchment, Embeddedness, and Entanglement: A Dynamic Complexity View (Philip Herdina); (18) Entrenchment: A View From Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Stephen J. Cowley); and (19) Linguistic Entrenchment and Its Psychological Foundations (Hans-Jörg Schmid). An index is included.