tailieunhanh - The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 125

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 125. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 1210 RENE DIRVEN HANS-GEORG WOLF AND FRANK POLZENHAGEN Correct Discrimination Figure . Discrimination performance of various age and language groups for the Hindi dental-retroflex contrast in Werker and Tees 1984 . mother tongue. The sensitive period for discriminating consonant sounds in foreign languages ends even before the end of the first year of life. As can be seen from figure English babies of ten months old can discriminate Hindi sounds but at eleven months this ability begins to disappear. Later in adult life discrimination performance remains very weak. Evidence has also become available now that the decline in perceptual abilities is not sensory in nature but rather due to reorganization of attention. This means that the child s mind which is initially open to all possible human speech sounds and language phenomena narrows down its attention to the one or two perhaps three languages in his or her social and ecological environment. This also means as is now clear from a fairly large number of studies that the initial abilities are not lost due to some kind of attrition but can be reaccessed in adults. Furthermore Johnson and Newport 1989 have shown that the critical period for the kinds of abilities tested by them especially the ability to give correct judgments about the grammaticality of sentences ends at the age of seven long before puberty. Thus apart from refuting Lenneberg s theory of a biological foundation of language and supporting the experientialist basis of language acquisition the above facts simultaneously confirm Zlatev s 1997 critique of Lakoff and Johnson s understanding of embodiment. In his view Lakoff and Johnson see the human body and bodily experiences as divorced from the social context and the environment in which they operate. Zlatev s correction is the notion of situated embodiment the human body and our bodily as well as other experiences are by necessity situated in an environment including a physical and a social or