Building on her groundbreaking work in "Writing Superheroes, Anne Dyson traces the influence of a wide-ranging set of "textual toys" from children's lives--church and hip-hop songs, rap music, movies, TV, traditional jump-rope rhymes, the words of professional sports announcers and radio deejays--upon school learning and writing. Wonderfully rich portraits of five African American first-graders demonstrate how children's imaginative use of wider cultural symbols enriches their school learning."
Seven years ago Manfred Pienemann proposed a novel psycholinguistic theory of language development, Processability Theory (PT). This volume examines the typological plausibility of PT. Focusing on the acquisition of Arabic, Chinese and Japanese the authors demonstrate the capacity of PT to make detailed and verifiable predictions about the developmental schedule for each language.
This comprehensive collection of current research in the development of speech perception and perceptual learning documents the striking changes that take place both in early childhood and throughout life and speculates about the mechanisms responsible for those changes. The findings reported from this rich and active field address the role of growing linguistic knowledge and experience and demonstrate that speech perception develops in a bidirectional interplay with several levels of linguistic structure and cognitive processes.
From Socrates to Charles I, Danton to Lincoln – here are some of history’s most significant figures with their most important speeches. Fighting for justice, for freedom of speech, and sometimes even for their own lives, these orators demonstrate the finest resources of language in the service of the most dramatic issues of their day.
