Bøger i Language Learning Cognitive Neuroscience Series serien

The articles in this volume, written by leading researchers in linguistics, psychology, and complex systems, summarize this new approach to language and illustrate its application across a variety of subfields, including languages usage, language evolution, language structure, and first and second language acquisition.

The contributions to this special issue were selected from a wealth of studies presented at the first Workshop on Infant Language Development held in Europe (Donostia, Spain) including keynote talks by such prominent infant researchers as Jenny Saffran, Marilyn Vihman, Krista Byers-Heinlin, and Dick Aslin. One of the many goals of this meeting was to bring together researchers who work on the acquisition of various languages. For this reason, research reported in this special issue includes experimental data from German, Japanese, Basque, Spanish, Italian, French, British, English, and American English infants. By investigating various abilities of infants from all these linguistic backgrounds, the articles published within this volume cover the research fields of speech perception development, cognitive development, and the development of word comprehension and production.

Every teacher knows that learners are notoriously variable in how successful they are at acquiring a new language. This interdisciplinary volume questions what it is that makes each of us good or bad at learning a second language.

To understand the nature of language learning, the factors that influence it, and the mechanisms that govern it, it is crucial to study the very earliest stages of language learning. This volume provides a state-of-the art overview of what we know about the cognitive and neurobiological aspects of the adult capacity for language learning.

This volume explores the cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition from the perspectives of critical/sensitive periods, maturational effects, individual differences, neural regions involved, and processing characteristics.

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. All languages have developed rich means to express various facets of time, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, or their duration. This volume explores what we know about the neural and cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on in language.