Input is the name of a topic – the way that language 'out there' impacts the development of interlanguage, within the individual. It is perhaps the most important aspect of second language learning. This Element offers an overview of the key concepts related to input and the major lines of research exploring its nature and its role in second language learning. It then puts things together into a coherent, if controversial, picture of input and its role in development, emphasizing the place...

The book explores two fundamental aspects of the human mind and their relation to one another. The first is the way that information is put to use in the mind. When we are doing a mental arithmetic problem, for example, how do we bring the relevant bits of information to mind and hold them there while carrying out the series of calculations? This is working memory, the subject of an enormous research literature in psychology, neuroscience, and a great many other disciplines. Chara...

This book explores the place of consciousness in second language learning. It offers extensive background information on theories of consciousness and provides a detailed consideration of both the nature of consciousness and the cognitive context in which it appears. It presents the established Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL) framework and explains the place of consciousness within this framework to enable a cognitively conceptualised understanding of consciousness in sec...

Language lies at the heart of the way we think, communicate and view the world. Most people on this planet are in some sense multilingual. The Multilingual Mind explores, within a processing perspective, how languages share space and interact in our minds. The mental architecture proposed in this volume permits research across many domains in cognitive science to be integrated and explored within one explanatory framework, recasting compatible insights and findings in terms of a common set...

This extremely up-to-date book, Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition, is the first volume in the exciting new series, Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition. This new volume provides a thorough overview of the field and proposes a new integrative model of how L2 speech is produced.The study of speech production is its own subfield within cognitive science. One of the aims of this new book, as is true of the series, is to make cognitive science theor...

First published in 1984. This book is an expansion of three lectures on schema theory given at the University of Alberta in the fall of 1983 as part of the MacEachran Memorial Lecture Series.

Can you learn without knowing it? This controversial and much debated question forms the basis of this collection of essays as the authors discuss whether the measurable changes in behaviour that result from learning can ever remain entirely unconscious. Three issues central to the topic of implicit learning are raised. Firstly, the extent to which learning can be unconscious, and therefore implicit, is considered. Secondly, theories are developed regarding the nature of knowledge acquired...

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences.Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: mo...

The way that we assess and overcome problems is an essential part of everyday life. Problem Solving provides a clear introduction to the underlying mental processes involved in solving problems. Drawing on research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, it examines the methods and techniques used by both novices and experts in familiar and unfamiliar situations.This edition has been comprehensively updated throughout, and now features cutting-edge content on creative ...

This important new book synthesizes relevant research on the learning of mathematics from birth into the primary grades from the full range of these complementary perspectives. At the core of early math experts Julie Sarama and Douglas Clements's theoretical and empirical frameworks are learning trajectories—detailed descriptions of children’s thinking as they learn to achieve specific goals in a mathematical domain, alongside a related set of instructional tasks designed to engender those...

This book is written in order to help undergraduate students and trainee teachers to reflect on certain topics and key issues related to second language acquisition. Despite the proliferation of books and introductory courses in second language acquisition, most of these books very often provide a very complex account of theoretical views in second language acquisition and sometimes fail to emphasise the crucial interplay between how people learn languages and what is the most effective wa...

How do people search evidence for a hypothesis? A well documented answer in cognitive psychology is that they search for confirming evidence. However, the rational strategy is to try to falsify the hypothesis. This book critically evaluates this contradiction. Experimental research is discussed against the background of philosophical and formal theories of hypothesis testing with striking results: Falsificationism and verificationism - the two main rival philosophies of testing - come down...