Ten Lectures on Language, Cognition, and Language Acquisition

26 September 2018
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Melissa Bowerman presented these ten lectures in 2010. Her sudden death in 2011 prevented her from turning them into a book-size publication, as was her intention. Her close colleagues and dear friends Eve Clark and Dan Slobin then took it upon them to edit these lectures for publication - a challenging and delicate exercise. The resulting book is not only a lasting tribute to professor Bowerman as the leading developmental psycholinguist she was, but also the best, up-to-date introduction to the full breadth of her research.

In her Beijing lectures, Melissa Bowerman presents a lucid introduction and account of her research on a range of topics: how children acquire the semantics of spatial terms, how they construct categories and acquire the semantics of nouns, and how they master the semantics of verbs in early language acquisition. Bowerman also covers the learning of argument structure and expressions of end-state, with special attention to the adult speech that guides children, and hence also the role of typology in acquisition; how cross-linguistic variation affects, for example, how speakers represent ‘cutting’ and ‘breaking’ in different languages, and the relation of the Whorfian Hypothesis to cross-linguistic variations in the semantics of languages. Bowerman’s over-riding concern throughout is with how children come to master the first language being spoken to them by their parents and caregivers.

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