Time To Speak - Cognitive And Neural Prerequisitesof Time In Language

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. All languages have developed rich means to express various facets of time, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, or their duration. This volume explores what we know about the neural and cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on in language.

• Considers the role time plays as an essential element of human cognition and action, providing important insights to inform and extend current studies of time in language and in language acquisition
• Examines the main devices used to encode time in natural language, such as lexical elements, tense, and aspect, and draws on the latest psychological and neurobiological findings
• Addresses a range of issues, including: the relationship between temporal language, culture, and thought; the relationship between verb aspect and mental simulations of events; the development of temporal concepts; time perception; the storage and retrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory; and neural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning

Peter Indefrey is Principal Investigator at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen and a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He has a M.D. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. His research is on first and second language processing and its neural correlates with a particular focus on syntactic and morphological processing, word production, reading, and the development of language processing in L2 learners.

Marianne Gullberg is a staff member at Radboud University Nijmegen and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on the earliest stages of adult second language acquisition and on the advanced or bilingual stage, lexical semantics, cross-linguistic (bi-directional) influences, code-switching, and the production and comprehension of gestures.

Foreword.

1. Time in language, language in time (Wolfgang Klein).

2. Time in language, situation models, and mental simulations (Rolf A. Zwaan).

3. Simulation semantics and the linguistics of time. Commentary on Zwaan (Vyvyan Evans).

4. Processing temporal constraints: An ERP study (Giosuè Baggio).

5. Processing temporal constraints and some implications for the investigation of second language sentence processing and acquisition. Commentary on Baggio (Leah Roberts).

6. Who's afraid of the big bad Whorf? Cross-linguistic differences in temporal language and thought (Daniel Casasanto).

7. Nominal tense. Time for further Whorfian adventures? Commentary on Casasanto (Pieter Muysken).

8. Temporal decentering and the development of temporal concepts (Teresa McCormack & Christoph Hoerl).

9. Temporal cognition and temporal language the first and second times around. Commentary on McCormack and Hoerl (Nick C. Ellis).

10. Time, language and autobiographical memory (Christopher D. B. Burt)

11. How semantic and episodic memory contribute to autobiographical memory. Commentary on Burt (Indira Tendolkar).

12. The Perception of time: Basic research and some potential links to the study of language (John Wearden).

13. Time in agrammatic aphasia. Commentary on Wearden (Herman Kolk).

14. Neural bases of sequence processing in action and language (Francesca Carota & Angela Sirigu).

15. Sequential event processing: Domain specificity or task specificity? Commentary on Carota & Sirigu (Ivan Toni)

16. Cognitive and neural prerequisites for time in language. Any answers?, (Marianne Gullberg & Peter Indefrey).

Author index.

Subject index.