Subject collection: Psychology (246 titles, 1978–2015)

This volume addresses the role of communicative interaction in driving various dimensions of second language development from the perspective of Vygotskian sociocultural psychology. Emphasizing the dialectical relationship between the external-social world and individual mental functioning, the chapters delve into a wide range of topics illustrating how the social and the individual are united in interaction. Themes include psychological and human mediation, joint action, negotiation for meaning, the role of first language use, embodied and nonverbal behaviors, and interactional competencies. Theoretical discussions and key concepts are reinforced and illustrated with detailed qualitative analyses of interaction in a variety of second language contexts. Each chapter also includes pedagogical recommendations. Supplemental materials or ‘data sessions’ that engage the readers with the themes presented in the book through sample analytic exercises are included, while videos have been made available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lllt.44.video.

This edited volume is devoted to expanding the theoretical basis of Processability Theory, a theory of second language development that combines insights in the way speakers generate language and store their language knowledge to predict, describe and explain developmental sequences (Pienemann 1998, 2005). The aim of the book is to provide a forum for new perspectives focusing on three intersections: (1) the interface between morpho-syntax and discourse/pragmatics/semantics, (2) constraints on processing and receptive processing and (3) developments in instructed second language learning. Each part also includes a response paper, in which the new perspectives, in terms of the theoretical challenges and/or the empirical results of the preceding chapters are discussed. This collection of articles and response papers will be very relevant to students and researchers interested in theoretical aspects of second language acquisition, and more specifically Processability Theory, and clearly indicates that the field is lively and open.

This volume addresses translation as an act and an event, having as its main focus the cognitive and mental processes of the translating or interpreting individual in the act of translating, while opening up wider perspectives by including the social situation in explorations of the translation process. First published as a special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies (issue 8:2, 2013), the chapters in this volume deal with various aspects of translators’ and interpreters’ observable and non-observable processes, thus encouraging further research at the interface of cognitive and sociological approaches in this area. In terms of those distinctions, the chapters can be characterized as studies of the actual cognitive translation acts, of other processes related to the translation acts, or of processes that are related to the sociological translation event.

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity.

This volume, dedicated to language transfer, starts out with state-of-the-art psycholinguistic approaches to language transfer involving studies on psycho-typological transfer, lexical interference and foreign accent. The next chapter on Transfer in Language Learning, Contact, and Change presents new empirical data from several languages (English, German, Russian, French, Italian) on various transfer phenomena ranging from second language acquisition and contact-induced change in word order to cross-linguistic influences in word formation and the lexicon. Transfer in Applied Linguistics scrutinizes, on the one hand, the external sources of language transfer by investigating bilingual resources and the school context, but also by pointing out the differences in academic language in multilingual adolescents. On the other hand, internal sources of language transfer in multilingual classrooms are illuminated. A final chapter directs its focus on methodological issues that arise when more than one language is studied systematically and it offers a solution on causal effects for the investigation of heritage language proficiencies. The chapter also includes studies that exploit more innovative methodologies on L1 identification and clitic acquisition.

The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese, Korean, and Japanese- originated, developed, and are used today. Uniquely, this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other, and (2) discusses how these scripts are, and historically have been, used in literacy and how they are learned, written, read, and processed by the eyes, the brain, and the mind.

In this second edition, the authors have included recent research findings on the uses of the scripts, added several new sections, and rewritten several other sections. They have also added a new Part IV to deal with issues that similarly involve all the four languages/scripts of their interest.

The book is intended both for the general public and for interested scholars. Technical terms (listed in a glossary) are used only when absolutely necessary.

Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.

True Emotions discusses several key problems in emotion research. The question about the true nature of emotions focuses on the role of cognition in human emotions at different levels of analysis: functional role, types of processes and representations, and neural implementation. Truth to the self, or authenticity, has two meanings, psychological and normative, where the latter is analyzed as coherence between the evaluative content of an emotion and the subject’s internally justified beliefs and values. Truth to the world is argued to be a matter of correct evaluative representation of the emotional object on the one hand, and the existence of the object, or the actuality or accurate probability of the represented situation on the other hand. Finally, authenticity and truth are applied to analyses of the authenticity of occupational emotions and the constitution of sentimental values, respectively. Recommended reading for philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and gender researchers.

The major purpose of newspaper headlines is to trigger the reader’s interest. A popular way to achieve this goal is the use of phraseological modifications. Based on previous findings from various linguistic disciplines, this book provides an interdisciplinary approach to shed light on the reception of substitutions like More than Meats the Eye. It develops an empirical methodology for investigating the complex cognitive processes involved, using a large sample of authentic examples for illustration. Along these lines, this volume not only shows what associations readers make when they encounter a lexical substitution and what factors facilitate the recognition of the canonical form. It also addresses the question of how meaning is constructed in terms of Conceptual Integration Theory and establishes an experimentally supported model of interpretation. This multifaceted perspective renders Phraseological Substitutions in Newspaper Headlines: "More than Meats the Eye" relevant to scholars and advanced students from a wide range of linguistic areas, such as phraseology, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and humour research, but also to interested journalists.

Creative Confluence is a highly original work, building bridges between physics, biology, technology, economy, organizations, neuropsychology, literature, arts, and cultural history. It is an attempt to explain the process of creativity as a universal principle of nature, cutting through the composition of atoms as well as human design of novel combinations. Creative Confluence is yet another impressive book and a sequel to Epistemics of the Virtual, indicating that perception and imagination operate in close contact. In a clear and light tone, the work holds that rational problem-solving strategies are most relevant in deterministic problem spaces whereas creativity is pertinent in more probabilistic situations. Theories of creativity and innovation are explored by means of computer simulations. Conditionals that favor creativity such as diversity, tolerance, and openness are discussed, forwarding a compelling vision of creative leadership.