Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development

• Preface; Introduction; Part I. Foundational Issues: 1. The mosaic evolution of cognitive and linguistic ontogeny Jonas Langer; 2. Theories, language, and culture: Whorf without wincing Alison Gopnik; 3. Initial knowledge and conceptual change: space and number Elizabeth S. Spelke and Sanna Tsivkin; Part II. Constraints on Word Learning?: 4. How domain-general processes may create domain-specific biases Linda B. Smith; 5. Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life Michael Tomasello; 6. Roots of word learning Paul Bloom; Part III. Entities, Individuation, and Quantification: 7. Whorf versus continuity theorists: bringing data to bear on the debate Susan Carey; 8. Individuation, relativity, and early word learning Dedre Gentner and Lera Boroditsky; 9. Grammatical categories and the development of classification preferences: a comparative approach John A. Lucy and Suzanne Gaskins; 10. Person in the language of singletons, siblings, and twins Werner Deutsch, Angela Wagner, Renate Buchardt, Nina Schultz and Jörg Nakath; 11. Early representation for all, each, and their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese Patricia J. Brooks, Martin D. S. Braine, Gisele Jia and Maria da Graca Dias; 12. Children's weak interpretations of universally quantified questions Kenneth F. Drozd; Part IV. Relational Concepts in Form-Function Mapping: 13. Emergent categories in first language acquisition Eve V. Clark; 14. Form-function relations: how do children find out what they are? Dan J. Slobin; 15. Cognitive-conceptual development and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: the development of time concepts and verb tense Heike Behrens; 16. Shaping meanings for language: universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories Melissa Bowerman and Soonja Choi; 17. Learning to talk about motion UP and DOWN in Tzeltal: is there a language-specific bias for verb learning? Penelope Brown; 18. Finding the richest path: language and cognition in the acquisition of verticality in Tzotzil (Mayan) Lourdes de León; 19. Covariation between spatial language and cognition, and its implications for language learning Stephen C. Levinson; Indexes.

'This thought-provoking book will challenge many existing preconceptions about the relationship between language and thought.' The Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute