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Infants have astonishingly sophisticated abilities to process speech and music. It is, as if many of the higher-order capabilities, such as regularity detection, auditory stream segregation, statistical learning, and rhythm processing are already present at birth or develop quite early during infancy, while some “simple” abilities, such as feature discrimination show a much longer developmental trajectory. These higher-order abilities also provide the basis of further cognitive, emotional, and social development, as they form the basis for communicating and thus learning from caretakers and peers. Therefore, understanding the underlying processes is a prime goal of developmental psychology and neuroscience, and it is also essential for creating early interventions for atypically developing infants, such as designing training protocols for infants at risk of auditory developmental deficits.
This highly interdisciplinary project presents new results and the state of the art of knowledge in the psychology and neurophysiology of language, reading and dyslexia. It concentrates on basic cognitive functions of understanding and producing language and disorders within its spoken and written execution. The book grew out of the Basic Mechanisms of Language and Language Disorders conference (Leipzig, Sept. 1999).
Prosody as a system of suprasegmental linguistic information such as rhythm and intonation is a prime candidate for looking at the relation between language and music in a principled way. This claim is based on several aspects: First, prosody is concerned with acoustic correlates of language and music that are directly comparable with each other by their physical properties such as duration and pitch. Second, prosodic accounts suggest a hierarchical organization of prosodic units that not only resembles a syntactic hierarchy, but is viewed as (part of) an interface to syntax. Third, prosody provides a very promising ground for evolutionary accounts of language and music. Fourth, bilateral tr...
A comprehensive account of the neurobiological basis of language, arguing that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the human capacity for language. Language makes us human. It is an intrinsic part of us, although we seldom think about it. Language is also an extremely complex entity with subcomponents responsible for its phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects. In this landmark work, Angela Friederici offers a comprehensive account of these subcomponents and how they are integrated. Tracing the neurobiological basis of language across brain regions in humans and other primate species, she argues that species-specific brain differences may be at the root of the huma...
What do we mean by "behavioral neuroscience?" This volume aims at providing an overview of behavioral neuroscience and deepening neuronal mechanisms and brain circuits that regulate the fundamental aspects of human behavior, such as cognitive and emotional functions. It is intended to give the reader the most up-to-date vision of how the interaction between biological mechanisms and neurocognitive processes leads to complex and highly organized behaviors.In recent years the strong impulse given to research on behavioral neuroscience has produced a large literature that documents the high level of complexity of the issue, for which it is necessary to provide a reasoned multidimensional analysis able to integrate the expertise of different disciplines.The book offers an excellent synopsis of perspectives, methods, empirical evidences, and international references. Therefore, it represents an extraordinary opportunity to target neuroscientific hot topics and to outline new horizons in the study of the relationship between brain and behavior.
In the last decade, important discoveries have been made in cognitive neuroscience regarding brain plasticity and learning such as the mirror neurons system and the anatomo-functional organization of perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities.... Time has come to consider the societal impact of these findings. The aim of this Research Topic of Frontiers in Psychology is to concentrate on two domains: neuro-education and neuro-rehabilitation. At the interface between neuroscience, psychology and education, neuro-education is a new inter-disciplinary emerging field that aims at developing new education programs based on results from cognitive neuroscience and psychology. For instance, brain-bas...
The term ‘Maya’, in Indian traditions, refers to our sensory perception of the world and, as such, to a superficial reality (or ‘un–reality’) that we must look beyond to find the inner reality of things. Applied to the study of language, we perceive sounds, a superficial reality, and then we seek structures, the underlying reality in what we call phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume starts with an introduction by the editors, which shows how the various papers contained in the volume reflect the spectrum of research interests of Andrea Calabrese, as well as his influence on the work of colleagues and his students. Contributors, united in their search for the abstract stru...
The mismatch negativity (MMN) is the electrophysiological change-detection response of the brain. MMN is stimulated when there is any discernible change to a repetitive sequence of sound, occurring even in the absence of attention. MMN is an automatic response and causes an involuntary attentional shift, representing a function which is of vital significance. A parallel response can also be detected in the other sensory modalities- visual, somatosensory, and olfactory. MMN occurs in different species, and across the different developmental stages, from infancy to old age. Importantly, the MMN response is affected in different cognitive brain disorders, providing an index to the severity of t...
Cognitive mechanisms underlying linguistic communication do not only rely upon retrieval and processing of linguistic information; they also involve constant updating and organizing of this linguistic information in relation with other, more general, cognitive mechanisms. Some existing theoretical models assume such a tight interactive link between domain-general and domain-specific sources of information in the cognitive organization of the linguistic faculty and during language use. Domain-specific constraints may include, for example, grammatical as well as lexical and pragmatic knowledge. Domain-general constraints comprise processing limitations imposed by the cognitive mechanisms of me...