This collection of papers introduces a new dimension in the understanding of reading by focussing on the relation between spoken and written language processing. It introduces new perspectives on speech and reading by highlighting aspects of the two that have received little attention in the past. The comparative approach to speech and reading concerns new approaches to the development of speech and reading, the existence of unconventional input modalities like Braille reading and lipreading, the study of populations with specific disorders in the abilities implicated in normal speaking and reading.
This text contains a series of studies of phonological acquisition and development of children in specific contexts: linguistic context - Putonghua or Modern Standard Chinese; and developmental contexts - normally developing children, children with speech disorders, children with hearing impairment, and twins. This is a study of phonological development and impairment in Chinese-speaking children. It provides the normative data on this population, which should be of value to speech and language therapists and other professionals. It also advances the notion of "phonological saliency" which explains the cross-linguistic similarities and differences in children's phonological development.
The focus of this book is on structural representations, in particular their hierarchicalness and their branching direction, and structure sensitivity is argued to be highly variable both within and across languages and consequently an unlikely candidate for a defining property of human language.
One of the most important discoveries of modern linguistic theory is that abstract structural properties of utterances place subtle restrictions on how we can use a given form or description. For the past thirty years, these restrictions have been explored for possible clues to the exact nature of the structural properties in question. In The Syntax of (In)Dependence Ken Safir explores these structural properties and develops a theory of dependent identity interpretations that also leads to new empirical generalizations.
This book is the first book-length study on the Swedish present perfect. It provides an in-depth exploration of the present perfect in English, German and Swedish. It is claimed that only a discourse-based ExtendedNow-approach fully accounts for the present perfect. The main claim is that the length of the ExtendedNow-interval varies cross-linguistically.
