What working memory is for

Glenberg focuses on conceptualizations that change from moment to moment, yet he dismisses the concept of working memory (sect. 4.3), which offers an account of temporary storage and on-line cognition. This commentary questions whether Glenberg's account adequately caters for observations of consistent data patterns in temporary storage of verbal and visuospatial information in healthy adults and in brain-damaged patients with deficits in temporary retention.</jats:p

Discourse metaphors: the link between figurative language and habitual analogies

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Expectations eclipsed in foreign language education: learners and educators on an ongoing journey / edited by Hülya Görür-Atabaş, Sharon Turner.

Between June 2-4, 2011 Sabancı University School of Languages welcomed colleagues from 21 different countries to a collaborative exploration of the challenging and inspiring journey of learners and educators in the field of language education.\ud \ud The conference provided an opportunity for all stakeholders to share their views on language education. Colleagues met with world-renowned experts and authors in the fields of education and psychology, faculty and administrators from various universities and institutions, teachers from secondary educational backgrounds and higher education, as well as learners whose voices are often not directly shared but usually reported.\ud \ud The conference name, Eclipsing Expectations, was inspired by two natural phenomena, a solar eclipse directly before the conference, and a lunar eclipse, immediately after. Learners and educators were hereby invited to join a journey to observe, learn and exchange ideas in orde

Communication difficulties following right hemisphere stroke : applying evidence to clinical management

Following reports in the 1960s that language may be affected by right hemisphere (RH) lesions, many limitations to effective communication in the right hemisphere damaged (RHD) population have been described and evidenced. However, stereotypical portrayals and descriptions of carefully selected cases may be misleading as to the extent of communication deficits. In many of the parameters in which RHD patients are presented as typically impaired, e.g. discourse skills, a less severe picture may emerge where data from the non-brain damaged (NBD) population are considered, with age and education variables controlled. Subsequent to RHD, some people show deficit on some communication measures, but many of these communication behaviours are also present in some NBD adults. Thus diagnosis of deficit must be made with reference both to the healthy peer population and the individual's pre-lesion behaviour. The authors' right RH stroke research programme includes studies of incidence of communication deficit, comparisons of RHD and NBD groups in various spoken discourse and comprehension tasks, comparison of RHD groups of different ages, detailed analysis of topic within discourse in RHD and NBD groups, family members' views of communication behaviour following RHD, and the natural course of communication change during the first year after RH stroke. The findings from several studies are summarised and used as the basis for management recommendations, which may guide future outcome research. There is an urgent need for the evaluation of communication management programmes, to determine whether therapists may with confidence offer an effective intervention service to those people whose communication skills are affected by RHD

Microgenesis, immediate experience and visual processes in reading

The concept of microgenesis refers to the development on a brief present-time scale of a percept, a thought, an object of imagination, or an expression. It defines the occurrence of immediate experience as dynamic unfolding and differentiation in which the ‘germ’ of the final experience is already embodied in the early stages of its development. Immediate experience typically concerns the focal experience of an object that is thematized as a ‘figure’ in the global field of consciousness; this can involve a percept, thought, object of imagination, or expression (verbal and/or gestural). Yet, whatever its modality or content, focal experience is postulated to develop and stabilize through dynamic differentiation and unfolding. Such a microgenetic description of immediate experience substantiates a phenomenological and genetic theory of cognition where any process of perception, thought, expression or imagination is primarily a process of genetic differentiation and development, rather than one of detection (of a stimulus array or information), transformation, and integration (of multiple primitive components) as theories of cognitivist kind have contended. My purpose in this essay is to provide an overview of the main constructs of microgenetic theory, to outline its potential avenues of future development in the field of cognitive science, and to illustrate an application of the theory to research, using visual processes in reading as an example

Language as a disruptive technology: Abstract concepts, embodiment and the flexible mind

A growing body of evidence suggests that cognition is embodied and grounded. Abstract concepts, though, remain a significant theoretical chal- lenge. A number of researchers have proposed that language makes an important contribution to our capacity to acquire and employ concepts, particularly abstract ones. In this essay, I critically examine this suggestion and ultimately defend a version of it. I argue that a successful account of how language augments cognition should emphasize its symbolic properties and incorporate a view of embodiment that recognizes the flexible, multi- modal and task-related nature of action, emotion and perception systems. On this view, language is an ontogenetically disruptive cognitive technology that expands our conceptual reach

Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy

A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, focuses on the specific skills and literacy support needed for reading in academic subject areas in higher grades. Outlines strategies for teaching content knowledge and reading strategies together

Mind: meet network. Emergence of features in conceptual metaphor.

As a human product, language reflects the psychological experience of man (Radden and Dirven, 2007). One model of language and human cognition in general is connectionism, by many linguists is regarded as mathematical and, therefore, too reductive. This opinion trend seems to be reversing, however, due to the fact that many cognitive researchers begin to appreciate one attribute of network models: feature emergence. In the course of a network simulation properties emerge that were neither inbuilt nor intended by its creators (Elman, 1998), in other words, the whole becomes more than just the sum of its parts. Insight is not only drawn from the network's output, but also the means that the network utilizes to arrive at the output.\ud It may seem obvious that the events of life should be meaningful for human beings, yet there is no widely accepted theory as to how do we derive that meaning. The most promising hypothesis regarding the question how the world is meaningful to us is that of embodied cognition (cf. Turner 2009), which postulates that the functions of the brain evolved so as to ‘understand’ the body, thus grounding the mind in an experiential foundation. Yet, the relationship between the body and the mind is far from perspicuous, as research insight is still intertwined with metaphors specific for the researcher’s methodology (Eliasmith 2003). It is the aim of this paper to investigate the conceptual metaphor in a manner that will provide some insight with regard to the role that objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), plays in human cognition and identify one possible consequence of embodied cognition.\ud If the mechanism for concept formation, or categorization of the world, resembles a network, it is reasonable to assume that evidence for this is to be sought in language. Let us then postulate the existence of a network mechanism for categorization and concept formation present in the human mind and initially developed to cope with the world directly accessible to the early human (i.e. tangible). Such a network would convert external inputs to form an internal, multi modal representation of a perceived object in the brain. The sheer amount of available information and the computational restrictions of the brain would force some sort of data compression, or a computational funnel. It has been shown that a visual perception network of this kind can learn to accurately label patterns (Elman, 1998). What is more, the compression of data facilitated the recognition of prototypes of a given pattern category rather than its peripheral representations, an emergent property that supports the prototype theory of the mental lexicon (cf. Radden and Dirven, 2007).\ud The present project proposes that, in the domain of cognition, the process of objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), would be an emergent property of such a system, or that if an abstract notion is computed by a neural network designed to cope with tangible concepts the data compression mechanism would require the notion to be conceptualized as an object to permit further processing. The notion of emergence of meaning from the operation of complex systems is recognised as an important process in a number of studies on metaphor comprehension. Feature emergence is said to occur when a non-salient feature of the target and the vehicle becomes highly salient in the metaphor (Utsumi 2005). Therefore, for example, should objectification emerge as a feature in the metaphor KNOWLEDGE IS A TREASURE, the metaphor would be characterised as having more\ud features of an object than either the target or vehicle alone. This paper focuses on providing a theoretical connectionist network based on the Elman-type network (Elman, 1998) as a model of concept formation where objectification would be an emergent feature. This is followed by a psychological experiment whereby the validity of this assumption is tested through a questionnaire where two groups of participants are asked to evaluate either metaphors or their components. The model proposes an underlying relation between the mechanism for concept formation and the omnipresence of conceptual metaphors, which are interpreted as resulting from the properties of the proposed network system.\ud Thus, an evolutionary neural mechanism is proposed for categorization of the world, that is able to cope with both concrete and abstract notions and the by-product of which are the abstract language-related phenomena, i.e. metaphors. The model presented in this paper aims at providing a unified account of how the various types of phenomena, objects, feelings etc. are categorized in the human mind, drawing on evidence from language.\ud References:\ud Szwedek, Aleksander. 2002. Objectification: From Object Perception To Metaphor Creation. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and K. Turewicz (eds). Cognitive Linguistics To-day, 159-175. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.\ud Radden, Günter and Dirven, René. 2007. Cognitive English Grammar. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company\ud Eliasmith, Chris. 2003. Moving beyond metaphors: understanding the mind for what it is. Journal of Philosophy. C(10):493- 520.\ud Elman, J. L. et al. 1998. Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press\ud Turner, Mark. 2009. Categorization of Time and Space Through Language. (Paper presented at the FOCUS2009 conference "Categorization of the world through language". Serock, 25-28 February 2009).\ud Utsumi, Akira. 2005. The role of feature emergence in metaphor appreciation, Metaphor and Symbol, 20(3), 151-172

A Mind for Language: How Language Shapes Our Reality

To write of language is an unusual activity, for it is to describe something by, through, and with itself. This thesis not only defends the view advanced by Sapir and Whorf of linguistic relativism, but extends their thesis with an application of Heidegger, and conflates the terms of language and self. Ultimately, I believe this endeavor is one which is not successful, but which also yields significant implications for further thought on the philosophical relevance of linguistic relativism. Section two presents some initial thoughts on language and self; the third section describes the terms of language, whereas the fourth one describes those of the self. A fifth section then deals with the general interactions and observations of the interrelatedness between these terms, with a conclusion which highlights the main insights of the inquiry. (A brief appendix with some remarks on poetry follows this thesis.