Significant new developments in brain activity research have revived the debate on the universality of language and its neural basis. Within this debate, the question of language diversity and its implications for cognition remains central and controversial. It is here investigated in an original multimodal approach, covering various aspects of cross-linguistic variation, differences between spoken, signed and drum languages, between normal speech and pathological speech, and also between language and music, as revealed in electric brain activity associated with language processing. The various contributions (linguistic, anthropological, psychological and neurophysical) on the nature and status of variation and invariants in language provides evidence for complex interactions between language-specific processes and general cognitive faculties. This overview of some recent trends in cognitive linguistics opens up a promising new research area in the humanities as well as in the cognitive sciences.

This volume contains the invited lectures, invited symposia, symposia, papers and posters presented at the 2nd European Cognitive Science Conference held in Greece in May 2007. The papers presented in this volume range from empirical psychological studies and computational models to philosophical arguments, meta-analyses and even to neuroscientific experimentation. The quality of the work shows that the Cognitive Science Society in Europe is an exciting and vibrant one. There are 210 contributions by cognitive scientists from 27 different countries, including USA, France, UK, Germany, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, and Australia. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with current research in Cognitive Science.

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.

This volume represents the first time that researchers on signed language and gesture have come together with a coherent focus under the framework of cognitive linguistics. The pioneering work of Sherman Wilcox is highlighted throughout, scaffolding much of the research of these contributors. The five sections of the volume reflect critical areas of Dr. Wilcoxs own research in cognitive linguistics: Guiding research principles in signed language, gesture, and cognitive linguistics, iconicity across signed and spoken linguistics, multimodality, blending, depiction and metaphor in signed languages, and specific grammatical constructions as form-meaning pairings. The authors of this volume exemplify and continue Dr. Wilcoxs work of bridging signed and spoken language disciplines by contributing chapters that represent a multiplicity of perspectives on signed, spoken, and gesture data. This volume presents a unified collection of cognitive linguistics research by leading authors that will be of interest to readers in the fields of signed and spoken language linguistics, gesture studies, and general linguistics.

The chapters of this volume are all based on papers presented at the International workshop on text representation: Linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects, held at Utrecht University. The theme of this title is text representation, or more specifically the linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects thereof. Text representation is a cognitive entity: a mental construct that plays a crucial role in both text production and text understanding. In text production it is the basis for lexical retrieval and for producing and combining the discourse units. In text understanding it is the result of the decoding of the linguistic information in a discourse. This book characterizes a field of study in which the two disciplines, linguistics and psycholinguistics, are growing together.

From the refinement of general methodology, to new insights of synchronic and diachronic universals, to studies of specific phenomena, this collection demonstrates the crucial role that language data play in the evolution of useful, accurate linguistic theories. Issues addressed include the determination of meaning in typological studies; a refined understanding of diachronic processes by including intentional, social, statistical, and level-determined phenomena; the reconsideration of categories such as sentence, evidential or adposition, and structures such as compounds or polysynthesis; the tension between formal simplicity and functional clarity; the inclusion of unusual systems in theoretical debates; and fresh approaches to Chinese classifiers, possession in Oceanic languages, and English aspect. This is a careful selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories in Boulder, Colorado. The purpose of the Symposium was to confront fundamental issues in language structure and change with the rich variation of forms and functions observed across languages.

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.